The poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on 10 December 1830. Her family was known for their educational and political activity. She lived in Amherst all her life, where she was obsessively private and secluded and when she was seen, was always dressed in white.
Dickinson started writing poetry in her youth, but it wasn’t until the age of 31 Dickinson sent some of her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a former pastor and an essayist and lecturer in the cause of reforms. 
When she wrote to him she asked him if her poems “breathed”. Higginson advised her against publication, but nonetheless encouraged her to keep writing poetry. Higginson noted her original style and the difficulty in classifying her work.
After her death in 1886, Dickinson’s large collection of poems was discovered by her sister Lavinia, who then sought to have them published. Some of the works were altered by Higginson before publication, and Lavinia co-edited three volumes published between 1891 and 1896. The subsequent appearance of Poems by Emily Dickinson was a literary event, followed by more volumes of her poetry and a collection of her letters. Unchanged or unreconstructed texts of her poems emerged after 1950 when the literary estate was transferred to Harvard University.
Dickinson left a legacy that was to have a significant influence on modern poetry. She experimented in meters, rhyme, capitals, grammar and punctuation. Her innovation with language included her use of the dash (a feature of most of her poetry), off-rhymes, broken metre, and unconventional metaphors. Her work demonstrates the adaptability of language. She deliberately fractured grammar for poetic effect, an example of her ability to produce from language the unexpected.
Her major contribution to poetics, however, is said to be her manipulation of metrical and rhyme patterns. Her meters are derived from hymns, and she used a variety of rhymes, sometimes within the one poem, for example “We play at Paste”.
Dickinson’s poetry is characterised by her love of words. She used brevity to achieve intensity with a careful and deliberate selection of words. Her poems are generally quite short. Her combination of form and meaning further enabled her to convey meaning into a compact poem.
Broadly speaking, her poetry expresses as its main themes: death, faith, immortality, nature, domesticity and pain. Overall, she was concerned with the riddle of existence, for example, “Title divine – is mine”, “Because I could not stop for Death” and “Behind Me – dips Eternity”.