Emily Dickinson
Revolutionary American poet of interiority
Most quoted
"The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune – Because I grow – where Robins do – But, were I Cuckoo born – I’d swear by him – The ode familiar – rules the Noon – The Buttercup’s, my Whim for Bloom – Because, we’re Orchard sprung – But, were I Britain born, I’d Daisies spurn – None but the Nut – October fit – Because, through dropping it, The Seasons flit – I’m taught – Without the Snow’s Tableau Winter, were lie – to me – Because I had not seen it go – But, this – makes not the Robin poor – Nor, of the Nut, deprive the Jay – Because the seasons flit away –"
— from Poem 347, 1862
"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"
— from Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs – The name They dropped upon my face With water, in the country church Is finished using, now, And They can put it with my Dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools, I’ve finished threading – too –"
— from Poem 508, 1862
All quotes by Emily Dickinson (267)
The only way to know a Soul / Is to become it – / Or to love it – / Or to be it –
To die – is different from what any one supposed – and larger.
The Heaven hath a Hell, as Earth a Heaven.
The only God I ever knew was Love –
The Mind lives on the Heart – / Like a Bee – on a flower – / It drinks the Nectar – / And then – flies away –
Renunciation – is a piercing Virtue – The letting go A Presence – for an Expectation –
The abdication of Belief / Makes the Behavior small – / Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all –
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me –
This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me –
I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
A Bird came down the Walk – He did not know I saw –
Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed.
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery.
I taste a liquor never brewed –
Contemporaries of Emily Dickinson
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886).