Hope is the thing with feathers

Ballads of a Lonely Poet

When people think of Emily Dickinson, they tend to think of her shut up in her room, writing poems in her own unique format. The shut-in image is probably overblown, but there's no denying a Dickinson poem when you see one: short stanzas, written in ballad meter and sprinkled liberally with cryptic dashes and funky capitalization. Check out "I like to see it lap the Miles", "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", or "I taste a liquor never brewed" for just a few other examples of her work.