Amherst Academy served as Emily's source of education from 1840 to 1847, at which time she enrolled in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) only a few miles from Amherst. Mount Holyoke offered Emily the closest thing to a college education provided to women at that time for the few semesters that she remained enrolled. She withdrew from Mount Holyoke to return to the "Homestead" where she became immersed in domestic duties. With the exception of a few trips to Washington, D.C., and Boston, Emily remained in Amherst in the "Homestead" for the rest of her life. Although her earlier years presented Emily as quite the social young lady as she hosted parties and entertained guests at her home, her later life saw her unmarried and reclusive on the grounds of the "Homestead", never venturing out for the last seventeen years of her life. This reclusiveness eventually led to Emily's death due to Bright's Disease on May 15, 1886 after she refused medical attention for some fainting spells she had been experiencing.

Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,500 poems in her lifetime (based on the manuscripts that are available) while only seven of them were published before her death. She wrote no essays and composed many of her poems on scrap pieces of paper she found laying around, such as backs of grocery lists, bills, programs, flyers and used envelopes. These scraps were then put aside to be revised and bound into Emily's own personal binding system. Mostly she self-published her work by composing poems for specific purposes, mainly in order to express ideas she could not express in prose, and enclosing them in her personal letters to her friends and family. Her poems were compiled after her death due to efforts of friends and family members who gathered together the letters and poems Emily had sent to them, revising and editing them in order to send them to the publishers.

¹ "Because I could not stop for Death" suffered changes during these editing frenzies. In the original manuscript the ninth and tenth lines read

“We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess--in the Ring”

“We passed the school, where children played
Their lessons scarcely done.”

preserving the rhyme for the stanza but eliminating "the paradox that leisure involves effort" as stated by Janet Gray in her studies of Dickinson's poetry. Todd and Higginson also altered the sixteenth line of the poem to read

“The cornice but a mound;”

instead of

“The cornice in ground;”

in order to eliminate the repetition of the word “ground”. The final and most drastic change that Todd and Higginson made was to remove a complete stanza from the manuscript version of the poem. Originally there was a stanza placed between the third and fourth stanza's of the version on this web page that read

“Or rather--He passed us--
The Dews drew quivering and chill--
For only Gossamer, my Gown--
My Tippet--only Tulle--”

These changes that Todd and Higginson made, I feel, were made with the best intentions. They wanted to see Emily's work in print, and her poetry, being fifty years ahead of its time, simply wouldn't make it over the publisher's desk in its original version. Although these efforts to publish Emily's work in the beginning caused much of her original work to be modified to fit the styles of the time period, they at least put her name in the minds of American poetry readers. Eventually, Emily's work was published in its original form taken straight from her manuscripts and these are the scholarly versions that students see in text books today.

Only seven of Emily's poems were published during her life time because she presented raw image poetry to a world that was not ready to accept it. Emily's style sharply contrasted to the popular style of the time, and it wouldn't be until Imagism established itself some years later, paving the way for modern American poetry, that Emily's work would be appreciated in its original form. Today scholars see Emily Dickinson as one of America's greatest poets and her reflections on love, death, God, and nature have become sources of universal symoblism.

Other Pages Dedicated to Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson by Paul E. Black
Emily Dickinson by Dr. Donna M. Campbell of Gonzaga University
Dickinson Electronic Archives

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