The Letters and Poems of Emily Dickinson

The three lessons in the “Letters and Poems of Emily Dickinson” unit module offer high schoolers an opportunity to meet the woman behind the poems. Scholars read letters she wrote to the Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson and her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson that reveal how she developed her poetic style and voice. Three of Dickinson’s poems, “I Dwell in Possibility,” “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers,” and “There’s a Certain Slant of Light,” demonstrate how these collaborations influenced her poems.