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A life-long resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson
left her hometown for only one year, when she attended Mt.
Holyoke Female Seminary. She was raised in an intellectual
and socially prominent family and at the age of eighteen had
received a better formal education than most of her American
contemporaries, both male and female. Yet Dickinson led a
largely sequestered existence, and she devoted much of her
time to writing poetry, producing close to eighteen hundred
poems, which were characterized by terse lines, "slant"
rhymes, and keen observation. Although most of Dickinson's
work was not published in her lifetime, she did see three
small collections of poems printed (1890, 1891, and 1896).
A half-century later, the three volumes of The Poems of
Emily Dickinson (1955) and two volumes of The Letters
of Emily Dickinson (1958) appeared.
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