Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. She was the second child of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson. Her father Edward was a powerful and influential political figure, who, in addition to serving as the treasurer for Amherst College (which had been founded by Emily's grandfather), held positions on the Massachusetts General Court, the Massachusetts State Senate, and the House of Representatives. Although Emily did not enjoy the public life her family had because of their influence and power, she did benefit from her family's money in that it enabled her to attend Amherst Academy and later Mount Holyoke College. She did well at the College, but problems with her health caused her to return to Amherst after only a year there. It was directly after her return from Mount Holyoke that she began to dress exclusively in white and live in almost total seclusion. She could be fun and easygoing with the few people she counted as close friends, but with strangers she was almost painfully shy. It could be partially because of this shyness that she never married, although she had several very close male friends. Two of these friends, Charles Wadsworth and Thomas Wentworth Higgins, had a great deal of influence on her life and writings, and it its these two that are most often suspected of being her lovers, and the subjects of her many love poems.

Emily Dickinson has written hundreds of poems and letters about love, both romantic and erotic, many of them quite explicit, but as far as anyone knows she never physically consummated a relationship, or in fact had a lover at all. Suspicion is rampant that either or both of the two men mentioned above was her lover at one time or another, and that Wadsworth was the subject of many of her poems, and that he was the "Master" that many of her poems are addressed to.

Considering that she probably had very little actual experience with love in its many forms, Dickinson's love poems are remarkably accurate descriptions of the sensations of