Biography Essay

To be a poet was the sole ambition of Emily Dickinson. She achieved what she called her immortality by total commitment to the task, allowing nothing to deter her or intervene. Contrary to the myth that she would not deign to publish her verse, she made herculean efforts to reach out to a world that was not ready for the poems she offered; her manner and form were fifty years ahead of her time. The lines from James Russell Lowell's poem "The First Snowfall" are typical of popular taste in Dickinson's time; compare them with ones immediately following by Dickinson on the same subject (poem 311):

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged...