Emily Dickinson’s Homestead

By Jodi Werner

As a junior in high school, studying American Literature for the first time, I claimed Emily Dickinson as my poet. I felt as though I alone were given the gift to decode her poems. The rest of my class wanted to read more accessible poetry; they hated Dickinson's verse and were indifferent to her life story. Her use of elusive imagery and fourth-definition choices for words frustrated them but only increased my desire to study the poems more closely. I wanted to understand enough about Emily Dickinson so that I could emulate her.

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I stayed in many a Saturday ...