Tina Koepell, age 16, of Meridian, Miss., for her question:
HOW MANY POEMS DID EMILY DICKINSON WRITE?
Literary scholars rate American writer Emily Dickinson as one of the worlds major poets. Using such universal subjects as love, death and immortality, Dickinson wrote about 1,800 poems, only seven of which were published while she was alive.
The seven that appeared while she was still alive were printed without her approval. She wrote strictly for herself and not for the approval of others. Even the members of her family did not know much about what she was writing.
Since her work was not published until after her death, Dickinson never knew how much her poems would be enjoyed by so many people.
She was born December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Mass. Her severely puritanical family had lived in New England for eight generations.
Dickinson's father was a lawyer who served two terms in Washington, D.C., as a member of Congress.
As a young girl, Dickinson went to Amherst Academy and studied later at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Reports show she was a typical high spirited young lady.
She allegedly suffered a romantic upset and decided that she would retire from society and live a quiet life by herself.
In her later years Dickinson saw very few people. Some of her work was very light while other poems were serious. All of her writings, however, showed a remarkable imagination.
In her poems, she never revealed the name of the person with whom she had been in love. That remained one of her secrets.
After Dickinson's death at the age of 56 in 1886, her poems and many fragments were found in her papers. From the great mass of material Higginson and Mable Loomis Todd edited the first published collection of her work in 1890. Called "Poems," the book enjoyed tremendous popular success.
Editor Higginson Todd never spoke to Dickinson during her lifetime, but he did see her once. He just briefly saw her flitting by an open door. She was wearing all white clothes the only color she ever wore in her later years.
The records show that Dickinson had at least two great loves. One was Charles Wadsworth, a married Philadelphia clergyman. Some of her poems tell of this love and her struggle to get over its disappointment.
A second love was a man named Otis Lord, a friend of her father's. His untimely death ended that relationship.
Brief stanzas are compressed to form many of Dickinson's poems. Her work was most often put in a few different combinations of iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. She used simple rhyme schemes.