By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Only Emily Dickinson could open a poem with a line like ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers’, a line which features in our pick of the best Emily Dickinson quotations. Poets before her had compared hope to a bird, but ‘thing with feathers’ was a peculiarly Dickinsonian touch. Here is this great little poem by Dickinson, along with a short analysis of it.