Power
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was little known during her lifetime. Reclusive and eccentric, most of her relationships took the form of correspondences. As a child from a well-to-do New England family, she developed a terrible fear of the ‘deepening menace’ of death as so many figures close to her died, starting from her childhood and continuing into adulthood. She found solace and refuge in poetry, writing in anonymity. Of the 1,800 poems she wrote, only 10 were published in her lifetime and these were heavily altered by editors to fit the literary norms of the day. Dickinson wrote unlike any of her contemporaries – short lines, sparse punctuation, slant rhymes and no titles, she developed a personal language of poetry that has since become the standard. Turning her fear of death into art, she wrote about immortality and the finitude of life, aesthetics and spirituality. In her quiet solitude she captured the intangible truth of existence.