Emily Dickinson, a poet most famously known for her poem “Hope is a thing with feathers”. She is known as one of the best American poets and authors. “Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune--without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm.”

On December 10th of 1830, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, a lawyer and her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, a stay at home wife. She had two siblings, William Austin Dickinson and Lavinia Norcross Dickinson. As a young child, her time mostly consisted of baking, gardening, school, church activities, reading books, playing piano, singing, writing letters, and going on walks. She attended Amherst Academy and later went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year.

As a child, her family home was not too far from the town cemetery and this made her constantly think about afterlife and death and this is shown in her writings.

“Absence disembodies—so does Death
Hiding individuals from the Earth
Superposition helps, as well as love—
Tenderness decreases as we prove—“

(that was an intercept of her poem “Absense Disembodies- so Does Death”) In her early 20s, writing poems started getting more important to her the older she got. By the time she was 35, she made 1100 lyrics that represented the feeling of power, pain, grief, joy, art, nature, and love. During the duration of her career, she sent in poems to the newspapers and published them anonymously. Only ten of her poems were known to the general public in her time. For the most part, most of her beautifully written poems were in self made books that she kept to herself and never shared.

After her death, she wrote letters known as “The Master Letters” from 1858 to 1861, These are known as intense romantic letters that had an ongoing theme of fighting for the relationship intensely. These letters were sent anonymously and many do not know who exactly these letters were for or from. These letters were the fuel of her creativity “I had a terror- since September- I could tell to none”.

Due to an eye disease, she mostly stayed home or in Cambridge receiving treatment. After a short romance with Otis Philips Lord, a friend of her fathers, she was tainted with illness and death surrounding her. Her father died in 1874. Gib, her nephew died at the age of 8 in 1883, and Otis Lord died in 1884. She ended up dying at the age of 55 on May 15th of 1886. She was buried in the town cemetery where her ideas of death and afterlife sprouted.