Emily Dickinson: America's Most Well-Known Poet

Born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was soon to be one of America’s many well known poets. She was the daughter of a United States congressman whose name was Edward Dickinson and his wife Emily Norcross Dickinson. She studied at Amherst Academy for seven years and then at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year ( Crumbley). Dickinson was never willing to profess any faith in Christ publicly. She had a “no hope” kind of salvation which is evident in many of her poems. By the time she was thirty years old, she had become a stranger to the church because she had believed herself to be in rebellion against Christ. At the age of twenty-four Dickinson moved to Washington, D.C and then to Philadelphia with her father. This trip seems to have been the turning point in her life (Drury, 4). She fell in love with a married lawyer who died of tuberculous later that year. She had also fallen in love with another married man, this one a pastor of a church in Philadelphia. His name was Charles Wadsworth. In 1862, Wadsworth

This poem is a fantastic example of how Dickinson used nature to describe her time in seclusion. She could not find privacy from the guards of nature even while hiding inside of her “cave” or house. What she means when saying “the walls began to tell; creation seemed a mighty crack” is that creation exposed her for who she really was as trying to ostracize herself from everyone in the world. She saw herself in the reflections of nature. One source stated, “Dickinson’s keen observation and close association with nature provided her the chance to present the neglected and grotesque aspects of nature” (Emily Dickinson as a Poet of Love an nature). This follows along with the other example of how Dickinson felt a resemblance in nature of herself. Emily Dickinson felt as though nature was a part of her being and all of her nature-symbolizing poems reflect this aspect of her