Emily Dickinson
Quick answer: Emily Dickinson's craft explained for poets: slant rhyme, hymn metre bent to new ends, her dash punctuation and riddle definitions. Guide and tips.
When Emily Dickinson died in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1886, her sister Lavinia opened a drawer and found nearly eighteen hundred poems, many sewn into small hand-bound booklets. Fewer than a dozen had been published in the poet's lifetime, most of those altered by editors. The reclusive woman in the white dress turned out to be one of the greatest and strangest poets in the language.
Dickinson matters to working poets because her innovations are so concrete: a rhyme practice, a metre source, a punctuation system, a way of defining abstractions. You can name them, isolate them and practise them, which is exactly what this guide sets out to help you do.
The poem
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
Emily Dickinson, 'Hope is the thing with feathers' (written c. 1861, published 1891)
The private experimentalist
Born in 1830 into a prominent Amherst family, Dickinson received a strong education, read widely, and from her thirties onward rarely left her father's house and garden. Seclusion was not silence: she conducted intense friendships by letter and sent hundreds of poems to correspondents, including the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who admired and misunderstood her in roughly equal measure.
Her subjects are the largest available, death, eternity, pain, hope, the mind watching itself, handled in poems that seldom exceed twenty lines. Complete scholarly editions restoring her original punctuation and word choices did not appear until 1955, which means her real career happened decades after her death.
The signature moves
Four instruments, endlessly recombined, produce the unmistakable Dickinson sound.
What you can learn from Emily Dickinson
Practise slant rhyme deliberately: draft a quatrain poem where no rhyme is exact but every stanza's end words share a vowel or final consonant. You will find the near-miss music makes uncertainty audible. Then borrow a stanza from any hymn or song you know by heart and fill it with your most unsettling material; the friction between familiar tune and strange content is a whole aesthetic in itself, and one that contest judges reading for language and structure notice immediately.
Finally, write definitions. Take an abstraction you overuse, grief, luck, patience, and define it as a creature or object with habits, then follow the logic of those habits for twelve lines without abandoning the image.
Where to start reading
Use an edition based on the restored manuscripts, and read slowly; the poems are dense as seeds.
What poets can take from this
- Use slant rhyme when your subject is doubt; exact rhyme can close doors the poem needs open.
- Steal stanza shapes from hymns and songs, then load them with unexpected content.
- Define one abstraction per poem through a single sustained image with habits and behaviour.
- Compress: give yourself a twenty-line ceiling and make every word fight for its place.
- Capitalise or punctuate expressively only where it holds two readings open at once.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of no more than sixteen lines defining an abstraction you distrust, ambition, comfort, closure, as a small animal, using common metre and at least three slant rhymes.
Questions
Why was Emily Dickinson unknown in her lifetime?
She published fewer than a dozen poems while alive, partly by choice and partly because editors regularised her unconventional style. Her sister discovered nearly eighteen hundred poems after her death in 1886, and complete faithful editions appeared only in 1955.
What is slant rhyme?
Rhyme that almost matches, sharing some sounds but not all, such as pairing words with the same final consonant but different vowels. Dickinson used it constantly to create a music of near-resolution suited to her themes of doubt and mystery.
Why did Dickinson use dashes?
Her characteristic dash punctuation suspends syntax, creating pauses, hesitations and double meanings that conventional punctuation would flatten. Early editors removed them; modern editions restore them as essential to her method.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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