Special Guest Blogger: Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us!
I may be one of America's greatest poets but I barely published a word in my own lifetime and hardly ventured out of my own front door but somehow people seem to know a lot about me, including my sex life.
I was a recluse, I would spend days hiding away in our family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts and the only time i did go out was to go to school but my love was poetry, and not the usual stuff but i did it differently, breaking the rules of the usual grammar and rhymes, daring concepts and changing the meter on a whim which was a bit of a problem for most editors and why not very much was published at the time.
I had over 1,700 poems in the bottom drawer of my dresser, and only seven were published but after I died of Kidney Disease, my sister in law, Mabel, edited my poetry to fit a more traditional style although we had an agreement that she would burn them all when i died.
I was definitely the stay-at-home type, for the last twenty years of my life I never left the house and because i would always wore white, i became known as the Nun of Amherst but it was one of my favorite colours. If you must know, it looked rather fetching with my fair complexion and chestnut hair.
I did also suffer from problems with my eyes, an  intolerance to direct sunlight, so it was hard to go outside but i had a regular visitor in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who knew about publishing but he was always trying to 'improve' my poetry by straightening out the punctuation, taking out the half rhymes and adding Capital letters but i  said if you can't print them as i intended, stuff you and refused to let him alter them.
One regular thing was the romantic letters i wrote to my friend, Susan Gilbert,  who married my brother Austin and that did break my heart but if I couldn’t have her, I suppose it’s best to keep her in the family.
I did write about death quite a bit and because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me when but i never heard a Fly buzz, all i heard was: 'Shouldn't that sentence start with a Capital Letter'?