Emily Dickinson's poems(3 whole series) [applying for prestige]

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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
American lyrical poet, a recluse, nicknamed the \"nun of Amherst\" - only seven of Dickinson's some 1800 poems were published during her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican. Dickinson never married. She withdrew from social contact and devoted herself in secret into writing.

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind -
As if my Brain had split -
I tried to match it - Seam by Seam -
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before -
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls - upon a Floor.
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of the local college. He also served in Congress. Dickinson's mother, whose name was also Emily, was a cold, religious, hard-working housewife, who suffered from depression. Her relationship with her daughter was distant. Later Dickinson wrote in a letter, that she never had a mother.

Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy (1834-47) and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847-48). Around 1850 she started to compose poems - \"Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, / Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!\" she said in her earliest known poem, dated March 4, 1850. It was published in Springfield Daily Republican in 1852.

The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the metre of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language. From c.1858 Dickinson assembled many of her poems in packets of 'fascicles', which she bound herself with needle and thread. A selection of these poems appeared in 1890.

In 1862 Dickinson started her life long correspondence and friendship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a writer and reformer, who commanded during the Civil War the first troop of African-American soldiers. Higginson later published Army Life in a Black Regiment in 1870. On of the four poems he received from Dickinson was the famous 'Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.'

Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.
Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence -
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.
Although Higginson was astounded by Dickinson's originality and encouraged her literary aspirations, he advised her not to publish. He called Emily \"my partially cracked poetess at Amherst\". Dickinson's decision to follow the advise was influenced by her ambivalent attitude toward her role as a woman writer and desire to protect her privacy, to live in her self-impised exile.

After the Civil War Dickinson restricted her contacts outside Amherst to exchange of letters, dressed only in white and saw few of the visitors who came to meet her. In fact, most of her time she spent in her room. Meanwhile, outside, the battle between her brother Austin, who lived next door to her house, and rest of the family continued. Austin Dickinson (1829-1895) was a lawyer, married to a cultivated woman, Susan Gilbert, by whom he had three children. In his early 50s he started an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, who was married. The affair continued until his death, and was a permanent source of gossips for the community. Later Mabel edited with T.W. Higgins the first collection of Dickinson's poems, which appeared in 1890.

Although Dickinson lived secluded life, her letters reveal knowledge of the writings of John Keats, John Ruskin, and Sir Thomas Browne. Most important writers for her were Shakespeare, Elizabeth Browning, Charlotte and Emily Bront