Character Catalog

Forty hand-sewn booklets in which Dickinson copied her poems, forming a monumental manuscript work of nearly 800 poems. They represent the editorial form the poet herself chose for her texts.

Published four years after her death by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, this collection introduced Dickinson to the American public at large. It was an immediate success and was reprinted eleven times in two years.

One of her most celebrated poems, in which Death is personified as a courtly carriage driver. This poem is considered a masterpiece of American literature on the theme of mortality.

A poem describing the moment of death from the inside, with the ironic and unsettling presence of a fly. It perfectly illustrates Dickinson's taste for concrete detail at the heart of great metaphysical questions.

A poem built on an extended metaphor comparing hope to a bird singing in the soul. One of the most studied texts in English-language school curricula for its clarity and depth.

A collection of letters exchanged over more than twenty years with the literary critic who was her principal intellectual interlocutor. This correspondence is an essential document on Dickinson's poetics and personality.

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? [...] I had a terror since September — I could tell to none — and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.

Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all.

With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living. To be Susan is Imagination, To have been Susan, is an Ecstasy, To be Susan, is a power.

Because I could not stop for Death — / He kindly stopped for me — / The Carriage held but just Ourselves — / And Immortality.

A collection of 424 dried and labeled plant specimens, gathered from the age of fourteen, bearing witness to her meticulous observation of the natural world.

The Dickinson family home where Emily was born and spent nearly her entire life. Now a national museum, it was in this house that she wrote almost all of her work from her first-floor bedroom.

Founded by her grandfather, this prestigious college profoundly shaped the intellectual environment in which Dickinson grew up. Her herbarium is now preserved there.

The institution where Dickinson studied for one year (1847–1848). Her refusal to make a public profession of faith there was an early sign of her singular relationship to religion and social conformity.

The burial place of Emily Dickinson, located a few minutes' walk from the Homestead. Her gravestone bears simply the inscription 'Called Back', an allusion to her last letter.

Dickinson composed nearly all of her poems with a quill pen, often on loose sheets or recycled envelopes. Her handwriting, distinctive and irregular, is now studied as an integral part of her work.

She sewed small booklets of four to five sheets herself, called fascicles, in which she copied her poems in fair copies. Forty of them were found after her death, containing approximately eight hundred poems.

From adolescence, Dickinson assembled a herbarium of more than four hundred dried plants, carefully labeled. This object reflects her scientific and poetic relationship with nature.

From her forties onward, Dickinson wore only white dresses, refusing colored clothing. This deliberate and meaningful sartorial choice contributed to her legend and to the image of the 'Lady in White'.

She would lower her famous bread and cakes in a wicker basket from her window to the neighborhood children, refusing to receive them directly. This gesture illustrates her indirect mode of contact with the outside world.

Emily Dickinson was a competent pianist and played regularly in the family home. The musicality of her verses, with their rhythms inspired by Protestant hymns, reflects this musical sensibility.