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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second of three children of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. Her father was a lawyer who served for many years as treasurer of Amherst College and, for one term in the 1850s, in the U.S. House of Representatives; her grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson had been one of the college’s founders. Her older brother, Austin, and her younger sister, Lavinia, remained at the center of her life. She studied at Amherst Academy and in 1847–1848 spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley before returning home.
Dickinson lived almost her whole life in Amherst, most of it in the family house on Main Street known as the Homestead, where she was born and to which the family returned in 1855. After Austin married Susan Huntington Gilbert in 1856, the couple settled next door at the Evergreens, and Susan became one of the poet’s closest friends and readers. Over the years Dickinson withdrew more and more from village society and in later life seldom left home, but she kept up a wide correspondence, often sending poems inside letters or with flowers. Among her correspondents were Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, and the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom she wrote in April 1862, after reading his advice to young writers in the Atlantic Monthly, to ask whether her verse was “alive.”
She wrote close to 1,800 poems, many of them in the early and middle 1860s, and copied hundreds into small hand-sewn booklets. Only about ten appeared in print during her lifetime, nearly all anonymously and often altered by editors. Her poems are short and intensely compressed: most use the common meter of Protestant hymns, bend rhyme into slant rhyme, and break their lines with dashes and capitalized nouns. Death and immortality, nature and the seasons, faith and doubt, love, pain, and the workings of the mind are her great subjects, handled with wit as often as with gravity.
Emily Dickinson died in Amherst on 15 May 1886. After her death Lavinia found the manuscripts and pressed for their publication. Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson edited Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890) and a Second Series (1891), and Todd edited a Third Series (1896), all published in Boston by Roberts Brothers. These editors gave many poems titles and regularized much of their punctuation, capitalization, and wording. Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi later published The Single Hound (1914), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924), and, with Alfred Leete Hampson, Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929), all with Little, Brown in Boston.
Later scholarly editions went back to Dickinson’s manuscripts. The texts on Poetry Catalog instead follow these early printed editions, which are in the public domain, so titles, punctuation, and line breaks may differ from versions you find elsewhere. For the linked list of her poems on this site, visit Emily Dickinson Poems.