Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson is known as one of the greatest poets of all time, writing 1,775 brief poems in her lifetime! She is famous for her vast sense of style and theme. Author David Porter said, “by mapping the themes in a poet’s oeuvre we seek in a standard way to classify and thereby broadly comprehend the writer . . . we want to know what besides the book binding and the author’s name holds the …showed first 75 words of 1310 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1310 total…a symptom of serious, undiagnosed mental illness (52). A scholar—using handwriting and other tools—was able to sequence the writing of her work and draw a new analysis based on that sequencing (52). He noted that Dickinson was highly productive in the spring and summer months—“with summer accounting for three times the productivity of fall and winter combined” (52). John F. McDermott says that such a pattern reveals a “seasonal affective disorder”, a form of depression (52).