Emily Dickinson Free Documentary Online

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, Emily Dickinson's sheltered life belied a vivid inner world that generated some of the most emotionally lucid poetry ever written. Growing up during a time when many (mostly male) American writers were working to define a singular voice that was independent of European influence, Dickinson stands apart from contemporaries such as Longfellow and Whitman, not only for being female, but for her reclusive nature. A voracious reader, Dickinson wrote on scraps of paper as she maintained her family's house into adulthood, hardly ever leaving her hometown and barely seeing her work published during her lifetime. As the documentary argues, Dickinson used her poetry to escape the confines of her physical reality and the enforced social realities of her puritan upbringing.