Emily_Dickinson

Emily Dickinson In 1874, Dickinson’s father died. This left her deeply distressed. Her mother suffered paralysis a year later and was invalid for the rest of her life. It was during this time that Dickinson cared for her mother and really came to love her. Dickinson’s mother died in 1882. While growing up, the Dickinson children were devoted to one another, even though the house lacked joy. The children had no relationship with their mother, and their father was stern and involved with his work (Donoghue 452). Dickinson spent the first twenty-five years of her life secluded from all but her closest friends. She had many intense intellectual friendships with several men in succession. She quaintly referred to these men as her tutors. The first of these was Benjamin F. Newton. He was a law student in her father’s office who encouraged her to read and take her talent for writing poetry seriously. Because of Newton’s early death, she looked to Reverend Charles Wadsworth for guidance. “She soon came to regard him as her dearest ‘earthly friend,’ and for purposes of poetry created in his image the ‘lover’ whom she was never to know except in imagination” (Hart 224). Wadsworth’s departure from her dickinson, death, poetry, own, magill, experience, view, provided, poems, mother, life, doriani, vol, tradition, religion, one, living, died, dickinson’s, conventional, allowed, ability, years, wrote, writing, write, without, through, terms, techniques, submission, spirituality, several, read, prophet, poetic