Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley but severe homesickness forced her back home after only one year. A bit later, she seldom left her house and led a somewhat isolated and secluded life. The few people she got acquainted with, however, had a strong influence on the developing of her poetical thought.
As a matter of fact, she had been attracted by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a very handsome man she met on a trip to Philadelphia. When he left for the West Coast soon after visiting her in 1860, his departure was a bad blow to her. By the 1860s, she lived in utter physical isolation, though strove to keep several correspondences. She never married, and according to some scholars, this was actually her response to the narrow literary establishment of her time, which in a way forced female writers to deal with domestic and sentimental matters. To a great extent, her poetry mirrors her loneliness and the protagonists, or better her alter egos, of her poems generally live in a state of want; but her verses are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are strongly alive and suggest the possibility of future happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth-century english literature, as well as by her Puritan upbringing and the Book of Revelation. She mostly admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Keats.
Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman, the two poets are undoubtedly the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet, (author of over 1700 poems) yet, unfortunately, she was not widely recognized (only 10 poems were released in her lifetime). The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Cambridge in 1886.
From The Academy of American Poetry.

links:  - Emily Dickinson International Society  - photographs from Amherst's Jones Library