Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson

One of the most significant American poets, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and spent almost her entire life there in seclusion. She attended Amherst Academy and briefly studied at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Fewer than a dozen of her poems appeared during her lifetime, but nearly 1,800 were found after her death. Her work uses slant rhyme, dashes, and compressed syntax. Edited versions of her poems appeared beginning in 1890, but they were not printed as she wrote them until Thomas H. Johnson's edition of 1955.