Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into one of the town’s leading families; her grandfather helped found Amherst College, and her father was a lawyer and congressman. She went to school at Amherst Academy and spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and then came home, where she lived for the rest of her life.

In her twenties and thirties she wrote poems at an astonishing rate, in one year alone close to three hundred. They are short, often only a few stanzas, in the rhythm of the hymns she grew up with, but they do things no one else’s poems did: they slant rhymes, break lines with dashes, capitalize words for emphasis, and pack enormous ideas about death, faith, nature and the mind into a few lines. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” one begins.

In 1862 she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a writer whose advice to young contributors she had read in The Atlantic Monthly. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” she asked, and enclosed four poems. Higginson was puzzled and fascinated; he advised her not to publish yet. They corresponded for the rest of her life, and he met her only twice.

She copied many of her poems onto sheets of paper and sewed them together with thread into small booklets, which scholars now call fascicles. In later years she rarely left her family’s house, dressed often in white, and spoke to some visitors from behind a door. But she wrote hundreds of letters, and her friendships, carried on by mail, were deep and lively.

When she died in 1886, her sister Lavinia found nearly 1,800 poems in her room. The first collection, edited by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, came out in 1890 and was a surprise success, but its editors smoothed her punctuation and rhymes to make them more conventional. Not until 1955 did readers see the poems as she had written them, dashes and all. She is now considered one of the greatest poets America has produced.