Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) lived almost her entire life in quiet seclusion at the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. In her later years, dressing exclusively in white, she rarely left her bedroom, greeting visitors through a half-closed doorway and baking bread while sending cryptic, gem-like poetic notes accompanied by pressed flowers to close friends.

Unbeknownst to the world, Dickinson was waging an incandescent spiritual voyage upon small scraps of paper. Binding her poems into forty hand-sewn manuscript booklets (*fascicles*), she pioneered slant rhyme, unconventional capitalization, and trademark dashes that fractured poetic syntax to capture the breathless lightning of consciousness. Only ten of her nearly 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously. Following her death, her sister Lavinia discovered the treasure trove in her bedroom bureau, revealing to humanity one of its supreme poetic minds.