Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet largely unpublished and unknown during her lifetime whose work is now widely regarded as canonical, described by the Poetry Foundation as creating a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was a prolific writer, yet only ten of her nearly 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime; her sister Lavinia discovered the bulk of her work in her desk after her death in 1886. Her poetry, dealing primarily with nature and mortality and marked by short acerbic lines and slant rhyme, was not restored close to her original intention until Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 complete edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson.