Rotten Reviews: Emily Dickinson

An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village -- or anywhere else -- cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar ... Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.

~Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly, 1892

Emily Dickinson is one of the most influential poets of the last 150 years. For more information on her life go here and here, and for a complete collection of her works online, go here or here. Here is a link to the previous Rotten Review. And finally, one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then't is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

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