Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. She has been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born into a prominent family with deep links to the community in Amherst, Massachusetts. She spent her early years studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years, then went to the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a short time before returning to the Amherst home with her family.

Despite being a prolific author, Dickinson only had 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems and one letter published during her lifetime. The poems that were afterward published were typically heavily modified to adhere to accepted literary conventions. Her poems were exceptional for her time; they had little lines, frequently have no titles, with slant rhyme, unusual capitalization, and punctuation. Her poetry frequently addresses the themes of death and immortality—two subjects that frequently come up in her letters to her friends—as well as aesthetics, society, nature, and spirituality. You can check out "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" - a collection of her poems published in 1955.

Although there isn’t a lot of hard evidence that confirms Dickinson’s sexual orientation, those who study her work believe that several surviving letters written to Susan Gilbert Dickinson may suggest that she wasn’t straight. However, one of the most recent pieces of evidence that point to Dickinson’s apparent queerness is a daguerreotype photo that is believed to feature the poet and a woman named Kate Scott Turner. After the two met and spend some time with each other, Turner moved to Europe and lived as openly gay. This is thought to be the start of the rumors about them, and the discovery of the photo merely appears to confirm their relationship.