"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers

Emily Dickinson is a seminal poet in American literature. Dickinson lived most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and rarely left her home. Despite Dickinson’s reclusion, her unique engagement with ideas of hope, death, and identity have made her renowned the world over.

Dickinson’s verse is idiosyncratic and difficult to classify. Dickinson expresses interest in American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Romantic understanding of the natural world (the Romantic imagination celebrated humanity’s relationship to nature as a near-divine source of enlightenment), but these interests are difficult to see in her poetry. Instead, many of Dickinson’s poems fit into an older tradition of religious writing and are more influenced by hymns and psalms than by contemporary poetry.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” exemplifies Dickinson’s idiosyncratic verse and use of religious forms. It is one of Dickinson’s many poems that explore the concept of hope through a metaphorical incarnation—in this case, as a bird. The poem was originally published in 1891, five years after Dickinson’s death. Like most of her poems, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” was untitled at the time of Dickinson’s death, and the poem is identified by its first line. Thomas H. Johnson assigns the poem the number 254 in his 1955 edition, and R.