Born on this day in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote with steady passion and clear beauty, catching the small movements of the heart in poems that still feel intimate and new.

She kept close to her family home and beloved garden, which often inspired her writing. The reasons for her quiet life remain a mystery. “I never had to go anywhere to find my paradise,” she once observed.

Year after year she wrote on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes, creating 1,775 “little poems” that she tied with twine into small bundles. In one year she wrote 364 poems, a poem for nearly every day. She wrote first for her own pleasure, not for public attention.

“Publication is the auction of the mind,” she wrote in a letter. Only seven poems were published while she was alive, and even those appeared anonymously, altered by editors.

Dickinson wrote about love, loss, nature, and eternity with a voice that felt both spare and full. “That love is all there is is all we know of love,” she shared, trusting the reader to feelthe rest.

Original in form and sound, she used vivid language to explore the heart and the patterns of the inner life, celebrating nature in lines that could catch miracles in an each day moment. She waited and watched with hope: “Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

More Emily Dickinson quotations