• POET
• Revered as one of the MOST IMPORTANT American poets of all time
• Her poetic style was extremely unconventional for her time, employing irregular punctuation, capitalization, and rhyme scheme, and served as a direct influence for American modernist poetry
  
• Enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary when she was 17, but only stayed for a year
• Although she lived in near isolation for most of her life, seeing only family, she wrote more than 1,000 letters, corresponding with not only family but also public figures, including Native American rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson
• Her work mostly avoids contemporary politics and events, focusing instead on universal themes like death, religion, love, and nature
• When she died, her family discovered 40 handmade books filled with the nearly 1,800 poems that she had written
• Only a few of her poems were published -- anonymously -- while she was alive, although she did share some with her correspondents
• One friend who read some of them suggested that she would be better off imitating Walt Whitman's style, or just abandoning poetry altogether and writing prose; luckily she didn't listen!
• When her poems were first published posthumously, editors altered them significantly in efforts to bring them more in line with contemporary poetic conventions, "correcting" her punctuation and adding words to "fix" her rhymes; only in the 1950s, when her original writings were revisited, were her poems accurately published
  

Photo by Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bibliography: Burling, Alexis. Women in Literature. North Mankato: Abdo Publishing, 2017. Print.
Caldwell, Stella, Clare Hibbert, Andrea Mills, and Rona Skene. 100 Women Who Made History: Remarkable Women Who Shaped Our World. New York: DK Publishing, 2017. Print.
Faue, Elizabeth. "Dickinson, Emily." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 2008, 54-55.

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Support these organizations dedicated to preserving her story:

Emily Dickinson Museum
The Emily Dickinson International Society

Books by this Awesome Woman

Biographies for Kids and Young Adults

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(picture book)

(board book)

Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson

Research

Historical Fiction

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