Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (Amherst, Massachusetts, December 10, 1830 - ibid, May 15, 1886) was an American poet, whose passionate poetry has placed its author in the reduced pantheon of American founding poets that today shares with Edgar Allan Poe Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson spent much of his life confined in a room in the house of his father in Amherst and, except five poems (three of them published without his signature and one without the author's knowledge), his enormous work remained unpublished and hidden until after his death