Emily Dickinson

Emily almost never left. She had her garden, her father's house in Amherst, the white dress she wore every day near the end. Visitors came; she sometimes spoke to them from the other side of a door. What she was doing, all those years of careful solitude, was writing. She wrote 1,800 poems in her lifetime, and almost none of them were published while she breathed. She handed them to her sister. She folded them into packets she called fascicles. She sent a few, carefully, to a man who didn't quite understand them. After she died, her family found them. The world has been catching up ever since. She wrote about death the way someone writes about an old neighbor, and about infinity the way someone describes the view from their window. There is nobody in American letters who sounds like her. Nobody ever will.