Over the years Dickinson sent nearly one hundred of her poems for his criticism, and he became a sympathetic adviser and confidant, but he never published any of her poems. In that same year, Dickinson initiated a correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the literary editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Her traumatized state of mind is believed to have inspired her to write prolifically: in 1862 alone she is thought to have composed over three hundred poems. Dickinson experienced an emotional crisis of an undetermined nature in the early 1860s. During a trip to Philadelphia in the early 1850s, Dickinson fell in love with a married minister, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth her disappointment in love may have brought about her subsequent withdrawal from society. She began writing verse at an early age, practicing her craft by rewriting poems she found in books, magazines, and newspapers. Following the completion of her education, Dickinson lived in the family home with her parents and younger sister Lavinia, while her elder brother Austin and his wife Susan lived next door. Her education was strongly influenced by Puritan religious beliefs, but Dickinson did not accept the teachings of the Unitarian church attended by her family and remained agnostic throughout her life. Dickinson went to primary school for four years and then attended Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847 before spending a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Her mother Emily Norcross Dickinson was a quiet and frail woman. Her grandfather was the founder of Amherst College, and her father Edward Dickinson was a lawyer who served as the treasurer of the college. Author Biographyĭickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830 and lived there all her life. They pause a moment at her grave, perhaps Death’s house, which “seemed / A Swelling of the Ground,” and then continue their never-ending ride “toward Eternity.” In the end, through a brilliant use of hyperbole, or intentional exaggeration, the woman insists that all the centuries that have since passed have felt “shorter than the Day” that she took that fateful carriage ride which revealed to her for the first time the true meaning of Immortality. Eerily, the woman describes their journey with the casual ease one might use to recount a typical Sunday drive. Thus begins one of the most famous examples of personification and figurative language in American literature.ĭeath takes the woman on a leisurely, late-afternoon ride to the grave and beyond, passing playing children, wheat fields, and the setting sun-all reminders of the cyclical nature of human life-along the way. Incidentally mentioned, the third passenger in the coach is a silent, mysterious stranger named Immortality. In the poem, a woman tells the story of how she is busily going about her day when a polite gentleman by the name of Death arrives in his carriage to take her out for a ride. It has also been printed under the title “The Chariot.” Written around 1863, the poem was published in Dickinson’s first posthumous collection, Poems by Emily Dickinson, in 1890. Perhaps Dickinson’s most famous work, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” is generally considered to be one of the great masterpieces of American poetry.
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