The Mere Fact of Her
From her bedroom on the second floor of her family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson reimagined the form and cadence of poetry in the United States. After her death in 1886, and particularly after the first posthumous edition of her poems appeared in 1890, she became a legend, magnetic in her draw but persistently and speculatively revised by both those who knew her and those lured to her enigma. With hindsight, her trajectory seems inevitable. The oft-withdrawn, colossally—albeit quietly—prolific Dickinson was a riddle to the handful of contemporaries who knew of her or, in rare instances, claimed a closer intimacy. Even then, her reputation as a reticent, well-cultivated wit enkindled feverish mythologies of eccentric spinster genius.