Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest writers of her time. Quiet and modest with a dry sense of humor, her poems reflected her personal life and ideas of religion, love, friendship, death, family, and nature. She came from a close knit family, her father a well-to-do lawyer who encouraged his children's sense of learning, however, only Emily's brother could attend University. She maintained the life of a young lady and was encouraged to entertain and be part of society with her sister Lavinia and brother Austin.
In her mid-twenties, she gave up the life wrapped in society and secluded herself inside the home of her family, refusing visitors but still maintaining strong relations with her family and intimate penned relationships with friends she would keep in correspondence with. Her style of writing was unlike the structured forms of typical poetry of the 19th century. She used her own form of slant writing and capitalized nouns in random form throughout her work and also used dash marks to end her sentences. Dash marks are typically used for changing of a topic or a train of thought. Ms. Dickinson seemed to use dash marks to make a point or provide suspense to the end of her poem. Editors and other authors tried to change her poems into "correct" formats but found they were only ruining and degrading her work. Over the course of her lifetime, she wrote an average of 1,800 pieces, few of which were ever published while she was alive. She was constantly creating new poems, often writing them on any available piece paper, like an old grocery list, and either transferring the contents to a better piece of paper or saving the scraps in her drawers. Upon her death, she asked that all of her poems and letters be burned and if her family had carried out her wishes, we never would have known of the great artist and mind that was Emily Dickinson. Lavinia discovered the writings and immediately knew she had to share her sister's talents with the world. Her poems were first published in 1890 by her friends Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, who edited Emily's work to fit the contemporary writing styles and gave titles to the unnamed poems. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, was published in 1955 and edited by Thomas H. Johnson who reverted all the poems back to their original state, and printed them numerically, removing the titles. The untitled poems are referred to by the first sentence, unless they had been previously named by Emily herself.
She shared a passion for nature with her older brother and spent her secluded years writing, doing housework, and gardening the land of the Homestead. During this time, she came in contact with the animal and insect species in her garden. She observed behaviors and patterns of animal life through the different seasons of the year. Bees, butterflies, and beetles were common subjects for her writing and she created poems about them with different themes of religion, love, sex, beauty, transformation, life, and death. Many of these are reflected in her work, such as: A Fuzzy Fellow Without Feet, Death Is Like The Insect, A Bee His Burnished Carriage, and Some such Butterfly be seen. Her devotion to her writings, mixed her with love of nature, created a relationship with the animals of the garden. She no longer conversed with people outside her family, or those she remained friends through letters, she found company with the simple creatures who were always true in nature and consistent in spirit.