American poet whose nearly 1,800 short poems, almost none published in her lifetime, constitute one of the two great poetic inventions of 19th-century America (with Whitman) and one of the strangest, most compressed bodies of lyric in any language. Dickinson lived almost her entire life in her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, retreated progressively from society, and dressed in white; the biographical legend has tended to overwhelm the work, which is perfectly capable of holding its own against it.
The poems — written mostly in ballad meter (hymn stanza, the meter of "Amazing Grace"), punctuated with her characteristic dashes, rhymed slant, syntactically telescoped to the point of near-opacity — take as their subjects death, faith and its lack, pain, ecstasy, the self's relation to its own interior, nature, love (some of which appears to have been directed at her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson). Their metaphysical pressure is extreme: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"; "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me"; "I heard a Fly buzz — when I died"; "My life had stood — a Loaded Gun".
The 1890 first edition, heavily edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, made her famous in a softened form. Not until Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 variorum did readers have the poems as Dickinson actually wrote them — dashes, capitals, and all. Every significant American poet since has had to reckon with her.