Few people saw Dickinson in the last 15 years of her life. By this time, Dickinson was well known in the community as a recluse.

Dickinson seemed to enjoy isolation, however, and confined herself to her family home even after her mother passed away in 1882. Though Dickinson still kept in contact with friends through correspondence, she was nervous about leaving her sick mother, and she rarely left the house. During this time, Dickinson took care of her mother and their home. In the mid-1850s, Dickinson’s mother became chronically ill. Though Dickinson only formally attended church for a few years, and expressed religious skepticism, the form and content of her poetry is influenced by religious hymns and psalms. Dickinson also attended the local Calvinist church after a 1845 religious revival in Amherst but stopped attending by 1852 when she was in her early twenties. Dickinson was part of a well-connected family in Amherst and, in her early life, often made social calls on her family’s behalf. She later studied for 10 months between 18 at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley. Dickinson attended the Amherst Academy as a youth. Each editor numbers the poems in the order they judge to be chronological.Įmily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. Johnson assigns the poem the number 254 in his 1955 edition, and R. Like most of her poems, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” was untitled at the time of Dickinson’s death, and the poem is identified by its first line. The poem was originally published in 1891, five years after Dickinson’s death. It is one of Dickinson’s many poems that explore the concept of hope through a metaphorical incarnation-in this case, as a bird. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” exemplifies Dickinson’s idiosyncratic verse and use of religious forms. Instead, many of Dickinson’s poems fit into an older tradition of religious writing and are more influenced by hymns and psalms than by contemporary poetry. Dickinson expresses interest in American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Romantic understanding of the natural world (the Romantic imagination celebrated humanity’s relationship to nature as a near-divine source of enlightenment), but these interests are difficult to see in her poetry. Dickinson’s verse is idiosyncratic and difficult to classify.

Hope poem by emily dickinson