Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, and spent almost her whole life in the house where she was born. From that small world she wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems.

She published only a handful in her lifetime, and those without her name. The rest she stitched into little hand-sewn booklets and kept in a drawer, short poems of startling force about death, hope, the soul and a single slant of afternoon light.

Her sister found the booklets after she died in 1886. The first collection appeared in 1890, and the world she had written to began, at last, to write back.

A tribute, kept by Here After All.

The work they left

Nearly eighteen hundred poems, almost none published in her lifetime, stitched by hand into little booklets and kept in a drawer: Because I could not stop for Death, Hope is the thing with feathers, I heard a Fly buzz, Wild Nights. The dashes, the slant rhymes, the small rooms holding the whole sky were hers alone, and printers flattened them for sixty years until scholars restored her punctuation.

Her letters, nearly as many as the poems survive, are a second body of work: the correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson began with the question, are my verses alive.