Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published almost nothing while she lived — fewer than a dozen poems, most altered by editors. After her death, nearly 1,800 poems were found in her hand-sewn manuscript books.

Her poems are short, formally strange, and precise about the largest subjects: hope, grief, time, the inner weather of a single mind. She is now regarded, with Whitman, as one of the two founding voices of American poetry.

Because so many lines circulate misquoted, Dickinson is edited with special care here: RiseHush cites her poems by Franklin number and her letters by date, and rejects the many greeting-card lines wrongly attributed to her.