It’s the birthday of Emily Dickinson, born in Amherst in 1830. The famous recluse loved to read, and her favorite writer was Shakespeare, but she kept up with and admired her contemporaries in England and America.
She liked George Eliot, Emily Brontë, and also Charles Dickens — she sent him a letter calling him “dear Dickens,” to thank him for teaching her about using language. Her favorite contemporary poets were Robert Browning, John Keats, and especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning, another famous recluse. On the other hand, Dickinson had this to say about Walt Whitman: “I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.” And she said, “Of Poe, I know too little to think — Hawthorne appalls — entices […] of Howells and James, one hesitates.”
She said: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
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