Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was an American poet who lived much of her life in near-seclusion in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published almost nothing while alive. After her death her sister found some 1,800 poems, many stitched into hand-sewn booklets called fascicles. Her compressed lines, slant rhyme and idiosyncratic dashes — on display in this poem — made her, posthumously, one of the central figures of American poetry.