NERD OF THE DAY: Emily Dickinson (Sigh)

I can't seem to mention Emily Dickinson without sighing. How can one not sigh at the thought of a frail, reclusive poet, who chooses to experience the world from her bedroom overlooking a cemetery? She never married and lived her 56 years with her family (her brother, marrying the girl next door, MOVED INTO the house next door and her sister was, like Dickinson, a recluse). One biography mentions that, during her life "[Dickinson] attended almost exclusively to household chores and to writing poetry." Dickinson's isolation provided her a unique and sharp focus on her world, and she wrote poems solely based on her own experiences, thereby making it difficult to place her within a historical or social context. In describing her experience with poetry to her sister-in-law, Dickinson said, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." SIGH. The hold that the written word has over me is just as visceral and, dare I say, devastating as it was for Dickinson. It was after her death that Dickinson's family discovered close to 1800 poems in her room. They were published posthumously. Sigh.