狄瑾荪(1830～1886年)

Dickinson, Emily (Elizabeth)

美国诗人，世界抒情短诗的大师之一。祖父是阿默斯特学院的创办人之一。父亲是位受尊敬的律师，曾担任一届国会议员。狄瑾荪曾在阿默斯特学院和曼荷莲女子神学院求学。终其一生几乎都隐居在家乡阿默斯特。1850年代开始写作；到1860年代，开始在文字与韵律方面有了创新。她常用的诗体是四行诗抑扬格，也常用其他形式，她甚至把最简单的圣诗的节奏予以变更，以表达自己的思想。她的警句简练，没有多余的辞藻，而是生动、准确。她的诗用平凡亲切的词句描写了爱情和死亡、自然。她的安静隐居的家庭生活和她的诗作中深沈和强烈的词句所形成的对比，引起人们猜测她的性格和她与别人之间的个人关系。1870年後她在家只穿白色服装，很少会客。遗留下来的一千七百七十五首诗，生前仅发表了七首。去世後的出版品，使她的声望和读者大为增加。1955年她的作品全部出版，并普遍被视为最伟大的美国诗人之一。

English version：

1830～1886年

Dickinson, Emily (Elizabeth)

U.S. poet. Granddaughter of the cofounder of Amherst College and daughter of a respected lawyer and one-term congressman, she was educated at Amherst (Mass.) Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She subsequently spent virtually all her life, increasingly reclusive, in her family home in Amherst. She began writing in the 1850s; by 1860 she was boldly experimenting with language and prosody, striving for vivid, exact words and epigrammatic concision, while adhering to the basic quatrains and meters of the Protestant hymn. The subjects of her deceptively simple lyrics, whose depth and intensity contrast with the apparent quiet of her life, include love, death, and nature. Her numerous letters are sometimes equal in artistry to her poems. By 1870 she was dressing only in white and declining to see most visitors, and she never again left the boundaries of the house. Of her 1,775 poems, only seven were published during her lifetime. After posthumous publications (some rather inaccurate), her reputation and readership grew. Her complete works were published in 1955, and she has since become universally regarded as one of the two or three greatest American poets.