“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” -Emily Dickinson. [Emily spent her life writing poetry that would make anyone who read her poems feel that way.] Dickinson inspires many people through the stories of her poems. Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830. She was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. However, she missed long periods of the school year due to frequent illness and depression. She left school as a teenager to live on the family homestead. This was the same time that she began writing poetry. Her closest friend and advisor was a woman named Susan Gilbert. Susan was married to Dickinson’s brother, Austin, and she was also a writer. …show more content…
Critic Dana Stevens says, “Whoever the letters’ intended addressee may have been, it’s the poet Emily Dickinson who’s the true Master.” Stevens also states, “Contemporary scholarship on Dickinson (notably Susan Howe’s remarkable book “My Emily Dickinson”) has tended to downplay the hoary biographical debate about the true identity of the Master, focusing instead on the glittering strangeness of the letters themselves.” Steven’s final statement on Dickinson is, “For me, the Master letters’ enduring fascination comes from the site they occupy at the convergence of private document and poetic first draft. They offer a thrilling glimpse into the mind of the writer around age 30, when she was just beginning to harness the force of her own genius.” The majority of Emily’s works were about death or feelings. She wrote I Had No Time to Hate Because which is about no reason to hate because the speaker would die soon and didn’t want to spend her life filled with hatred and bad feelings. Her poem How Far Is It to Heaven? is about how far Death will take the speaker after they die. How Happy I Was If I Could Forget is about having to forget about being sad to actually be able to be