Overview

Though Emily Dickinson spent almost all her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, her poems represent a broad range of imaginative experience. They are rich in feeling, wide in their knowledge of nature, books, and geography, and expansive in their vision. Dickinson’s training in science suggests a source for her skill in accurate observation, whether of plants and animals or the workings of her own mind. The greatest effect of her scientific studies, though, is in her experimental attitude about life’s great issues.