Emily Dickinson has eluded us with her poetry for years. During her life, she composed a great deal of poetry, yet it is difficult to find "clear linkages between [these] hundreds upon hundreds of compacted poems" (Porter, 183). Her poetry is intensely personal, intellectual, and introspective, offering a meditation of life, death and poetic creation. Her poetry is influenced by her close observation of nature, as well as her consideration of religious and philosophical issues. There is a common thread of death that strings her poems loosely together. Emily Dickinson's poetry reflects the isolation and alienation that she herself felt as she composed her prose.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, and would live there all her life. She attended the Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. During the 1850s Emily took a tip to Philadelphia, where she fell in love with and married Reverend Charles...