One of the founders of modern American poetry, who wrote almost entirely in private. Dickinson spent her adult life in one Amherst house, withdrew from society in her thirties, and left nearly eighteen hundred poems kept in a drawer and shown to almost no one. They use the plain meter of Protestant hymns, then fracture it with dashes, irregular capitals, and slant rhyme, compressing death, the mind, and doubt into a few charged lines. Her first editors smoothed this out; Thomas Johnson’s 1955 edition restored it, revealing how strange the work was. She is ranked with Walt Whitman as a founder of American poetry.
She let almost no one read them. Fewer than a dozen of her poems appeared in print while she lived, mostly without her name and altered by editors who tidied her strange punctuation. The rest she wrote on scraps and the backs of envelopes, copied them out in a careful hand, and sewed them into small packets with needle and thread, which she kept in a drawer. There were nearly eighteen hundred of them. Emily Dickinson spent almost her whole life in one house in a small Massachusetts town, rarely going out, eventually dressing in white, and writing some of the most original poems in the English language without any public at all. When her sister opened that drawer after Emily died in 1886, she found a body of work that would help invent modern American poetry. The seclusion that looked to her neighbors like a sad retreat was the very condition she built her art inside.