Emily Dickinson

You know who's awesome, when she's not being crazy morbid? Emily Dickinson.

Come here often?

E.D. (as I call her - don't confuse this with the all-too-common male ailment) has the distinction of having written the first and only poem I have ever memorized:

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses -- past the headlands --
Into deep Eternity --

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

This was published in 1924, 38 years after her death. She only published 7 poems during her lifetime, after being continually discouraged by the poet Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Check out this selection of their correspondence, published in 1891 in The Atlantic Monthly.

So thank you, Emily Dickinson, for your vivacious wordsmithery - and for giving hope to pallid, garret-bound Emo poets everywhere.