By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century: the critic Martin Seymour-Smith, in his Guide to Modern World Literature, calls her one of only two great nineteenth-century American poets (the other being Walt Whitman).
Dickinson wrote a great deal of poetry. Her Complete Poems includes almost 2,000 poems, most of them short lyrics about everything from death to religion, nature to love. And love, indeed, is a great theme of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.