Emily Dickinson Research Paper

Throughout the course of American literature, there have been many brilliant poets, one of them being Emily Dickinson, who wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime. Most of her works dealt with her fascination with death; however, this came with a fair share of criticism. One of the interesting facts about her is that although she wrote hundreds of poems, they only began to be published after her death.

Emily Dickinson, born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, was the middle child in a prominent family. The male members of her family helped to established and ran the town and its institutions. She attended Mount Holyoke, a female seminary school in South Hadley, for a year. When returning home she would be expected to demonstrate

To make these she would begin by writing a draft of a poem on any a piece of paper she could find lying around, rather it is a shopping sack, a receipt, or an envelope. Afterward, she would rewrite and edit the poem and make a fair copy on a folded piece of stationery and she would usually destroy the draft once she was done with the final copies she would take four or five sheets and stack them. She would bind them together by stitching a cotton string along the left margin with a darning needle, then tie the ends in a bow.(American Writers 3) It almost seems as if she anticipated what would come of her books "yet in the ways she organized and stored her poems, and in their preoccupations with the vocation of the poet, Dickinson seems to have known what would become of them after her death: they would be taken from their hiding place, published, read, loved, and immortalized."(American Writers 3) It was in 1862 that she began to leave some poems unbound and then stopped binding them altogether. In 1864,: having created forty fascicles containing over eight hundred

Emily Dickinson died on may 15, 1886 at the age of fifty-five from kidney disease.(BIO5) After her death, Dickinson's family discovered nearly40 volumes of1,800 handbound poems.(BIO1)the first volume of her works was published after her death in 189, but a complete volume did not appear until 1955.(Smith 2)very little of Dickinson's work was published at the time of her death and what was published was altered to fit the standards of the time period she lived in .her original poems were not resorted until 1981, when ralph w. franklin used the physical paper to restore her intended order. (BIO1) It wasn’t until the twentieth century when modern readers ranked her as a major new voice " whose literary innovations were unmatched by any other 19th-century poet in the united states" that Dickinson was recognized as a major