'A thing with feathers'

 

 “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.” – Emily Dickinson  

Born on Dec. 10, 1830 in Amherst, MA, Dickinson was not famous in her own short lifetime (she died at age 56).  It was only after her death that her sister discovered nearly 1,800 poems written by this reclusive writer.

 

While Dickinson was a prolific writer, fewer than a dozen of her poems were published while she was alive, and that work was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time.   Written in short lines, Dickinson's poems often lack formal titles, contain unconventional capitalization and punctuation, and often use slant rhyme (a type of rhyme formed by words with similar but not identical sounds, also called approximate rhyme).   All unique for her era.

 

The first collection of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death.  A complete collection The Poems of Emily Dickinson was not published until 1955.

 

Dickinson studied at Amherst Academy for 7 years, spent a short time at Mount Holyoke’s “Female Seminary” and then returned to the family home where she spent most of her life.  Just before she died, it is believed she penned the famous lines, often seen and used both in and out of the writing world:  

“Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; the carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality.”