Question

Emily Dickinson is considered one of America’s greatest poets, but few of her poems were published in her lifetime. Born in 1830, Dickinson grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and attended school there and in nearby Holyoke. She was no doubt familiar with other popular New England writers of her day, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dickinson had a fairly normal social life until she reached her mid-twenties, after which she rarely left the home she inherited from her parents. Instead, she may have been able to understand the world better by viewing it from a distance. With a sharp eye and keen intellect, she pondered nature, friendship, love, and death in poems of powerful simplicity. Only about seven of her poems were published during her lifetime, all without her consent. When she died in 1886, relatives found over 1,500 more of Dickinson’s poems, many of them written on napkins and slips of paper neatly tied up with ribbons. Which word best describes the author’s tone in this passage? informal formal humorous negative

Answer 1

Formal is correct.....