Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson spent almost her entire life in the house where she was born, in a quiet New England town, and in her later years rarely left it at all. She kept to her room, her garden, and her letters, dressed often in white, and to the neighbors she was a recluse, an eccentric, a mystery. What none of them knew was that in the stillness of that house she was writing some of the most original poetry the English language has ever produced.

Nearly eighteen hundred poems she made — short, dense, electric things, bristling with dashes and sudden silences, that looked at death and faith and a single slant of winter light with a gaze utterly her own. She published almost nothing in her lifetime; the poems were stitched into little hand-sewn booklets and tucked away in a drawer. Only after she died did her sister open that drawer and find a whole universe waiting.

She asked enormous questions in tiny rooms, and answered them in lines no one had dared to write before. We honor her as the quiet revolutionary of American poetry — proof that a life lived almost entirely indoors can still range farther than most, and that the smallest poem can hold the largest sky.