Famous Failure – Emily Dickinson

Born on 10 December 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States, Emily Dickinson is one of the most influential American poets who had magic to weave the words, representing the beauty of the language.

I dwell in possibility.

Her journey to be recognized among the heavyweights was no milk and honey. For most of her life, Emily lived in isolation. She was always reluctant to have face-to-face encounters or relationships and used to depend on the correspondence. Emily remained unmarried and the locals called her reclusive and eccentric for her fiercely-devote introvert behaviour.

During her lifetime, Dickinson wrote around 1800 poems, but merely 10 of them found a publisher until she was alive. Even those poems were published but they had to go through the editorial department and when the narratives were adjusted to fit conventional poet rules. Moreover, her poems lacked titles and had odd capitalization and punctuation.

That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.

Most of her poems were about death and even on immortality which she would discuss with her friends through ‘correspondence’. When Emily was alive, she was considered a failure by many but after her death, her younger sister, Lavinia, found the reassure of her poems and eventually published them for the world to acknowledge the true beauty of the words.

Emily died a slow death. She was ill for two years and the loss of her close friends and nephew took its toll on her physically and mentally. She was a very unknown person in her little hometown and she was considered an odd individual who failed to carry on the legacy of her family’s great reputation.

The brain is wider than the sky.

The world now considers her one of the greatest poets who ever lived and showed humanity the path through her torch. It wouldn’t be wrong to call Emily a gift to the world whose impression would never die out until the sun is present.

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