Belle of Amherst

It's the birthday of the poet Emily Dickinson, (books by this author) born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom in her father's house. The room contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle.
She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. She began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself. She eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems. In the year 1862 alone, she wrote 366 poems — about one per day.
Emily Dickinson said, "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."