Eccentric People Surely Made History

Believe it or not, but Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, also known as Belle of Amherst, is one example. She was born in 1830 in Massachusetts, and she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a short while before returning back to her house in Amherst, and excluded herself from the community. At home, she rarely left her room, talked to visitors through the door rather than face-to-face, but she still wrote letters for her close friends. She was also noted for always dressing in white throughout her adulthood.  

(One of her few pictures)

                                                                    

When she was a teenager until she was in her twenties, she chose a more childish name, "Emilie," which expressed her wish to remain in childhood. It is probably because Dickinson had observed numerous burials daily, from when she was young through her bedroom window that she was heavily influenced by the themes of death and immortality, which occurred in many of her poems. They are also more unique than those of other poets during her time, since they contain short lines, and often use slant rhyme as well as irregular capitalization or punctuation. None of her poems had a title; each was identified by the first line. She frequently applied the ballad stanza, a form of dividing poems into four quatrains while writing. Her usage of idiosyncrasy vocabulary and imagery to write poetry created a unique image of her writing style, and was able to engage people’s interest. Her best-known poems are “Because I could not stop for Death,” and “I cannot live with You.”

(A younger image of her)

            She did not only like to read and write, but also to garden as well. She loved nature, and she often took “horticultural” as reference in her work. She even created her own herbarium with more than 400 samples!

            She could be considered a spinster, and most people said that it’s because she wanted to have independent time for writing. However, there were stories about her engagement with a student at Amherst College, and an affair she had with a married minister.

            After her death in 1886, her sister found more than 1,000 poems in Dickinson’s box, and published all of them from 1955. Soon after, Emily Dickinson became one of the greatest American poets who had ever lived.

            Here are some of her quotes I found interesting.

-       “Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.”

-       “Beauty is not caused. It is.”

-       “A wounded deer leaps the highest.”

-       “Forever is composed of nows.”

-       “Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.”

-       “I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name."

            -       "The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul - BOOKS." - Sem librarians will probably like this quote since they decorated the library with so many posters about reading!