View Passage | Disable Passage Scrolling The Life of Emily Dickinson
Sasha Peterson

1American poet Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her family was well known throughout the small community. Along with her parents, her older brother William, and her younger sister Lavinia, Emily lived in a large house called The Homestead. Emily attended classes at the Amherst Academy as a child. She studied English, classical literature, Latin, history, and math. The young girl also took a class in botany, the study of plants.

2Emily studied at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a short time as a teenager. For reasons that remain unclear, the young woman returned home shortly after classes began. Some scholars suspect that Emily was ill, while others believe that she was just homesick. She continued her education at home by reading the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Shakespeare. Emily preferred reading to almost any other activity. She even named her dog after a character in one of Charlotte Brontë’s novels.

3When Emily was eighteen, family friend Benjamin Franklin Newton recognized her budding talent as a poet. He encouraged her to continue writing, and he introduced her to the works of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These authors became two of Emily’s most important influences.

4Emily’s botany studies helped her become a skilled gardener. The Homestead’s gardens were known throughout the community for their beauty. Many of Emily’s poems speak of her love of nature and gardens. Her poetry also reflects her religious upbringing. Her work often examined the nature of life and imagined what might happen after death.

5Of the almost 1,800 poems that Emily wrote, less than a dozen were published during her lifetime. Her published poems were changed quite a bit to fit the poetic rules of the age. Emily’s work puzzled magazine editors. Her poems were usually short, with no title. Emily often capitalized words in the middle of a line and she put periods in unusual places. Her use of slant rhyme was also an issue. In a slant rhyme, the vowel or consonant sounds don’t always match. The editors of the time were more familiar with perfect rhymes, in which the sounds matched up. All of this made it difficult for people to accept Emily’s work.

6As Emily got older, she became less sociable. Though she continued to correspond with her friends through letters, she rarely left her family’s home. Many of her neighbors found this behavior to be very strange. The one thing that didn’t change was Emily’s love of words. She continued to write poetry until her death on May 15, 1886. Before passing away, Emily asked her sister to burn her poems and letters. Lavinia could not allow her sister’s work to be destroyed, so she worked with family friends to put Emily’s poems into a collection. Emily’s first volume of poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death. Though Emily never knew success in her lifetime, she is now admired as one of the best American poets in history.

Read the passage on the left to answer the following questions:

1)
The purpose of this passage is to
A)inform readers about Emily Dickinson’s influences.
Eliminate
B)entertain readers with the story of a shy poet.
C)describe the life of a famous American poet.
D)explain Emily Dickinson’s unusual poetry.