While Dickinson was a prolific writer, her only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, and one letter. The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules….

Although Emily Dickinson’s calling as a poet began in her teen years, she came into her own as an artist during a short but intense period of creativity that resulted in her composing, revising, and saving hundreds of poems.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or “fascicles” as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems.

The late 1850s marked the beginning of Dickinson’s greatest poetic period. By 1865 she had written nearly 1,100 poems. Bounded on one side by Austin and Susan Dickinson’s marriage and on the other by severe difficulty with her eyesight, the years between held an explosion of expression in both poems and letters.

Dickinson uses personification to convey how death is like a person in her poem “Because I could Not Stop for Death.” This is shown when she conveys how death waits for her. Dickinson portrays that death acts like a person waiting for her to join. Another example is when she compares death to its manners.

The only person who can see and hear Em is Nobody. Em, naturally, thinks she’s dead, but a quick visit to her room reveals there’s no corpse there so she’s “just a mystery.” She’s pretty crushed by this turn of events. She’s invisible on the one day she was anticipating being the center of attention.

“I’m Nobody!” is one of Dickinson’s most popular poems, Harold Bloom writes, because it addresses “a universal feeling of being on the outside.” It is a poem about “us against them”; it challenges authority (the somebodies), and “seduces the reader into complicity with its writer.”

1 pron Nobody means not a single person, or not a single member of a particular group or set. 2 n-count If someone says that a person is a nobody, they are saying in an unkind way that the person is not at all important.

Emily Dickinson

six lines

Amherst, Massachusetts, United States

1800 poems