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Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, introspective verses without thought of publication, and it was not until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

“She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends,” writes Higginson, “and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems.” Yet she wrote almost five hundred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister Sue. Slowly the peculiar Blake-like quality of her thought won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed by Poems—Second Series (1892) and Poems—Third Series (1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single Hound (1914)—almost all of the new poems (to which Mrs. Bianchi wrote a preface of great personal value) being a record of Emily Dickinson’s romantic friendship for her sister.

The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her time. “An epigrammatic Walt Whitman,” some one has called her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her art. Technically, Emily Dickinson’s work was strikingly uneven; many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly filled in; even some of her finest lines are marred by the intrusion of merely trivial conceits or forced “thought-rhymes.” But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, sparkling in their brilliancy, cameo-like in their delicate contours, opalescent in their buried fires.

Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at Amherst, May 15, 1886.