Emily Dickinson

Birth Name:

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Birth Date:

December 10, 1830

Birth Place:

Dickinson Homestead, 280 Main Street, Amherst, Massachusetts

Death Date:

May 15, 1886

Place of Death:

Dickinson Homestead, 280 Main Street, Amherst, Massachusetts

Age:

Cause of Death:

Heart failure induced by severe hypertension

Cemetery Name:

West Cemetery

Claim to Fame:

Writers and Poets

Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. A lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision, together with Walt Whitman Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.

Fun Fact

While Dickinson was a prolific writer, her only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, and one letter.

Cemetery Information:

Final Resting Place:

West Cemetery

Triangle Street

Amherst, Massachusetts, 01002

USA

North America

Map:

Grave Location:

Dickinson Family Lot, Lot 53, Grave 3

Grave Location Description

As you enter the cemetery from Triangle Street, veer to the right and drive along past the apartments on your right. Park at the curve about 200 feet from the entrance and look to your left, along the gravel road, for the Dickinson Family Lot surrounded by a black iron fence.