Emily Dickinson
نویسنده
چکیده
Biography Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, the elder daughter of lawyer Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. Dickinson was the second of three children, a year younger than her brother, William, and three years older than her sister, Lavinia. She was born in a large house built by her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson; except for absences of about a year for her schooling and seven months in Boston, she lived in it all of her life and died there at precisely 6:00 p.m. on May 15, 1886. It is paradoxical that a woman who led such a circumscribed and apparently uneventful life managed to acquire the rich perceptions that enabled her to write 1,775 poems unlike any others in the English language. Every one is recognizably her own, and many are masterpieces. The circumstances of her life, therefore, hold a special fascination for readers of her verse. Dickinson’s sharp perceptions and brilliant inner life arise primarily from her background. Her paternal grandfather, whom she never knew, remained an unseen presence in her family. A Trinitarian deacon educated at Dartmouth College, he became moderately prosperous through his legal practice, investments, and a number of appointive and elective government positions; he was also a visionary. His religious zeal led him to use his entire fortune to found two Trinitarian educational institutions: Amherst Academy (1814) and Amherst College (1821). It was he who built “the homestead” in 1813, the great brick house that defined the daily life of his poet granddaughter. Having spent thousands of dollars in the cause of education, he had become insolvent by early 1833. On May 22, 1833, he was even forced to sell the homestead. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he did church-related work, then Hudson, Ohio, where he died of pneumonia on April 22, 1838. His son Edward, the poet’s father, succeeded where the elder Dickinson had failed. Edward continued in his father’s position as trustee of the Amherst institutions. By the end of his term in 1873, Amherst College had assets of more than a million dollars. By March, 1855, he had repurchased the house his father had built and lost. Educated at Yale University, he managed to combine religious zeal with practical business ability. His daughter would remember his long absences— as representative to the Massachusetts state legislature, as chief financial officer of Amherst College, as land speculator with holdings in northern New England—but she clearly loved him in a way she never did her mother. Edward was an undemonstrative man; he had struggled through Yale University with only the barest financial support of a father who ironically had directed all of his resources to the support of
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Was it epilepsy?: misdiagnosing Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).
Lyndall Gordon's recent biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (2010), tells with high verve the story of generational infighting over poet Emily Dickinson's posthumous presentation to the world. Equally dramatic is Gordon's hypothesis that Dickinson suffered from epilepsy, which led Gordon to seemingly solve the ineffable mystery of Dickinson's reclusion, a c...
متن کاملThe Tension of the Metaxy in Emily Dickinson's Poetry
Of American poets taught regularly in secondary education, the two most ill-served, it seems to me, are Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.1 [1] Students are typically introduced to these poets through their most-anthologized poems, and the majority of these are chosen in part for their accessibility--not too undaunting conceptually, and technically fluid--but also for a sort of charmingness, alb...
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