Born into a prominent family of Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson attended the local schools but thereafter lived a mainly reclusive life in the family homestead, though she corresponded extensively with several women and men. A gift of Emerson’s poems in 1850 made a deep impression, but she read widely, including the English Romantics. She composed over 1700 brief poems, a great many of them between 1859 and 1865, but only a handful of them were published in her lifetime. The numbers on the poems below are those assigned by Thomas Johnson in his modern editions and are widely used; they indicate his estimate of the order in which they were written.