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Emily Dickinson, regarded as one of America’s greatest poets, is also well known

for her unusual life of self imposed social seclusion. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts in

1830, Emily’s family was well known for their educational and political activity. She

attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley for one year, but returned

home after suffering from severe homesickness. Even though her town was dominated by

religion and their college, Dickinson was not religious and refused to accept her family

views of Calvinism. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were

scarce. By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside

world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely (parenthetical doc

1). Because Emily Dickinson lived in solitude her whole life, her poetry reflects the

loneliness she endured which therefore depicts the speakers in her poems to live in a state

of want thus making her poems unique and to suggest the possibility of happiness that

moved the audience into feeling the emotion Dickinson desired.