Emily Dickinson

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Taylor Swift Is Related to an Actual Tortured Poet

Guess who's related to Emily Dickinson?

(Newser) - Taylor Swift has a rather interesting sixth cousin, three times removed. Ancestry.com gives Today the scoop that dangling out on the songstress's family tree is another bit of American royalty: Emily Dickinson. "Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant (Swift's ninth great-grandfather and...

Emily Dickinson’s 'Envelope Poems' Revealed

Envelope poems showcase another side of poet's artistry

(Newser) - Emily Dickinson's use of small, often oddly-shaped bits of paper torn from 19th-century envelopes—on which she wrote sentences, stanzas, and entire rough poems in pencil—have been published, as a group, for the first time. Historian Marta Werner first came across one in the 1990s. Known as the...

2nd Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Surfaces

1859 daguerreotype believed to show the poet with her widowed friend

(Newser) - If you're a lover of poetry, history, and mystery, listen up: Amherst College believes a photo that first surfaced in 2007 is indeed one of Emily Dickinson—making it just the second known image of the poet in existence, reports the Guardian . The previously verified photo is one of...

Martinis, Vinegar: Famed Writers' Favorite Snacks

Authors look to everything from sherry to popsicles for inspiration

(Newser) - Some of history's greatest writers have relied on "food for thought." For Truman Capote, a daily regimen of coffee, tea, sherry, and martinis was his path to creative greatness. Others kept it simpler: Marcel Proust relied on espresso, while Jesus Land author Julia Scheeres swears by the...

Dear Writers: 'Leave the Damn Em Dash Alone'

It's overused and inefficient: Noreen Malone

(Newser) - Might one overused punctuation threaten the integrity of modern prose? Noreen Malone thinks so, and she points to the em dash as culprit. But wait, "doesn't a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?" she asks in her anti-em-dash essay...

How an Affair Gave Us the Emily Dickinson We Love

Why her brother's trysts with Mabel Loomis Todd matter

(Newser) - Salacious things were afoot in Emily Dickinson's family home: During the last two years of her life, her married brother, Austin, would leave his house next-door under the pretense of calling on his sisters—but instead would have sex with the also-married Mabel Loomis Todd on the dining room couch...

An Outsider Becomes Poet Laureate
An Outsider Becomes Poet Laureate

An Outsider Becomes Poet Laureate

Kay Ryan, master of introverted verse, takes the national stage

(Newser) - Kay Ryan, a poet from Fairfax, Calif., with a reputation as an individualist, has been chosen as the nation's new poet laureate. The 62-year-old writer is known for her sly, concise verse that incorporates plays on words and uses intricate rhyme structures. Despite receiving many of the field's highest accolades,...

7 Stories