The Letters of Emily Dickinson: Volume 2
- ISBN-10
- ISBN-13
- 9798616106018
- Series
- The Letters of Emily Dickinson
- Pages
- 222
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-02-20
- Author
- Emily Dickinson
Description
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886) was an American poet.Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst.Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence.While Dickinson was a prolific poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules. Her poems were unique to her era. They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.To satisfy Dickinson's readers in the 1890s, Mabel Loomis Todd prepared a two-volume edition of Dickinson's correspondence, which she collected with Lavinia Dickinson's assistance from relatives and friends. Although highly selective and heavily edited, Todd's Letters of Emily Dickinson (1894) provided insight into the poet's family life, examples of the poet's epistolary exchanges with prominent men of letters, and illustrated Dickinson's practice of sending warm and engaging notes accompanied by gifts of flowers or baked goods. Missing from the early volumes were letters to key correspondents like Susan Dickinson and Judge Otis Phillips Lord, as well as some of the draft manuscripts now referred to as the "Master" letters.
