Ted Hughes called her “one of the oddest and most intriguing personalities in literary history”. In the course of her life, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only saw six of her poems in print. She never strayed far from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her poetry was playful and profound by turns but also often very cryptic. She uses punctuation in an idiosyncratic fashion, littering her verse with hyphens and capital letters. There is an erotic charge to much of her writing.