Emily Dickinson
Ink and watercolor on 9″ x 12″ watercolor paper
The latest addition to the ‘She Changed the World’ Collection!
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is a striking example of the wonders within all of us that go unshared with the rest of the world. Born in Amherst, MA Emily was an accomplished student but left school before completion, possibly due to her fragile emotional state. She spent the rest of her life as a recluse on the family Homestead, mostly caring for her ailing mother. The nature of her reclusiveness may have stemmed from depression or anxiety or just the nature of needing to care for a family member, but it left her a lot of time alone.
As a teenager, Dickinson found herself fascinated with poetry and began writing her own. Over the course of her life she filled forty handbound volumes with nearly 1,800 poems. Her work went largely unpublished during her life, but her family discovered the writings after her passing and the first collection was released in 1890. Her innovative use of form and syntax had a massive influence on the direction of 20th-century poetry, informing the works of nearly every poet since.
How many people around you have this in them, a voice that can change the course of the world but for whatever reason they keep to themselves? That’s one of the other qualities of Emily Dickinson’s story that makes her such an iconic figure.
BONUS: All of her poems can be sung to the tunes of both ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ and the Gilligan’s Island theme song. Seriously.