Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is one

of America’s greatest and
most original poets of all
time.

Dickinson is now known

as one of the most
important American
poets, and her poetry is
read among people of all
ages.
 Biography

Born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, MA.

Educated at Amherst Academy.
At 17, began college at Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary; she became ill the spring of her first
year and did not return.
She would leave home only for short trips for the
remainder of her life, leading scholars to speculate
she may have been agoraphobic.
 Posthumous Publication

After her death, her poems were heavily

edited and published by Higginson and
friend Mabel Loomis Todd.
Thomas Johnson produced a collection of
Dickinson’s more than 1700 poems in three
volumes in 1955; he restored her original
capitalization and punctuation.
Dickinson’s Publishing Career

Sent poems to Thomas Wentworth

Higginson, a literary critic and family
friend.
He recognized her talent, but tried to
“improve” them, which made Dickinson
lose interest.
At the time of her death, only seven of her
poems had been published.
 Her most famous work

‘Hope is the thing with feathers’.

In this poem, Dickinson likens hope to a

singing bird, a ‘thing with feathers’ which
‘perches in the soul’. Hope, for Dickinson,
sings its wordless tune and never stops
singing it: nothing can faze it. Like ‘I’m
Nobody!’, another oddly affirmative poem.
 Dickinson’s Poetry

Regular meter—hymn meter and ballad

meter, also known as Common meter
– Often 1st and 3rd lines rhyme, 2nd and 4th lines
rhyme in iambic pentameter

The use of dashes

Influenced by nature and spiritual themes
-Stanza: A stanza is the poetic form of some lines.
There are three stanzas in the poem, each having
four lines.

-Rhyme Scheme: The poem is structured

into quatrain and a sequence of three rhyming lines.
Lines five to eight are the quatrain whereas nine to
twelve are three lines. The rhyme scheme is ABCB.

-Quatrain: A quatrain is a four-lined stanza taken

from Persian poetry. Here, each stanza is a quatrain,
as well as each stanza, has four lines.
-Imagery: Imagery is used to make the readers
perceive things through five senses. It helps them to
create a mental picture of the objects described. The
poet has used images for the sense of sight such as,
“bird”, “feathers”, “storm”, “land” and “sea.”

-Symbol: Emily has used many symbols to show the

powerful impact of hope in our lives. “Chilliest Sea”
and “storm” symbolize struggles during trying times
when hope is still there.