Her Poetry All of the verses that appear in each episode are Dickinson’s actual writings. The premiere episode is inspired by her famous work “Because I could not stop for Death,” and subsequent episodes are inspired by her poems “A Still — Volcano — Life” and “Wild Nights.”

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term.

The show isn’t entirely accurate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not truthful. Most people won’t care about the way Dickinson tinkers with facts. Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, did have a decades-long, sometimes tumultuous relationship that was most likely romantic.

Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems are written in short stanzas, mostly quatrains, with short lines, usually rhyming only on the second and fourth lines. These stanza forms and, to a lesser extent, her poetic rhymes took their chief source from the standard Protestant hymns of her day, largely from those of Isaac Watts.

A Dickinson poem is often not the expression of any single idea but the movement between ideas or images. It offers that rare privilege of watching a mind at work. The question of how we know anything comes alive as we read Dickinson.

The obsession that Dickinson had about death was motivated by the need to understand its nature. Instead, she holds the belief that death is the beginning of new life in eternity. In the poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz when I Died,” Dickinson describes a state of existence after her physical death.