America’s legendary woman poet, "the recluse of Amherst"
An American poet, ranked with Whitman as one of the two founts of American modern poetry, yet opposite in style. She spent almost her whole life indoors, secluded in a small Massachusetts town, publishing only a handful of poems in her lifetime; after her death people found nearly eighteen hundred manuscripts in her drawers. Her poems are short, leaping, full of dashes, gazing with the sparest words at the largest subjects — death, eternity, the soul — a recluse who fit the whole universe into a small room.
After Dickinson died, her sister found in her drawers bundles of hand-sewn little booklets holding nearly eighteen hundred unknown poems. A woman almost cut off from the world had written alone in silence all her life, never for publication. It was these hidden poems that became, in time, one of the most precious treasures of American literature.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.