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60 free Emily Dickinson trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Emily Dickinson trivia quiz covers the reclusive poet from Amherst whose 1,800 poems were almost all unknown until her sister opened a locked chest after her death. The easy questions cover the town, the state, the sister who found the poems, the ten poems published in her lifetime, the famous white dress and the dashes. From there it moves through the life: Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke, the herbarium of 424 pressed flowers, the fascicles she sewed by hand, the letter asking a stranger whether her verse was alive, and the sister-in-law who received more than three hundred letters. The harder end covers the Springfield Republican, the Master letters, Judge Otis Lord, the poem retitled 'The Snake', the censored dedications revealed by infrared, the 1955 Johnson edition, the Brontë poem read at her funeral, the coffin carried through buttercups, and her modern life on screen and in Taylor Swift's 'quill pen songs'. Every answer was checked against Dickinson's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our poetry and famous authors quizzes are the natural next stop.
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Q 01In which US state was Emily Dickinson born, and did she spend almost her whole life?
Massachusetts
The family Homestead in Amherst, built by her grandfather in 1813, is now the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Q 02Roughly how many poems did Dickinson write?
Nearly 1,800
Only ten of them appeared in print during her lifetime, all anonymously and heavily edited.
Q 03How many of Dickinson's poems were published in her lifetime?
Ten
Five of them ran unsigned in a Springfield newspaper between 1852 and 1866.
Q 04Who discovered Dickinson's poems in her desk after her death?
Her younger sister Lavinia
Lavinia had promised to burn her sister's papers, and did burn most of the letters, but recognised the poems' worth.
Q 05Which two people edited the first selection of Dickinson's poems, published in 1890?
Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd
They altered punctuation and capitalisation to suit the taste of the day; the 115-poem volume went through eleven printings in two years.
Q 06Whose 1955 edition first restored Emily Dickinson's poems close to her manuscripts?
Thomas H. Johnson
His three-volume variorum left the poems untitled and numbered, punctuation and odd capitals intact.
Q 07What was the profession of Dickinson's father, Edward?
Lawyer
He was also treasurer of the college for nearly forty years and served a term in the U.S. Congress.
Q 08Dickinson's grandfather Samuel was one of the founders of which institution?
Amherst College
He also built the Homestead in 1813, the mansion that anchored family life for most of a century.
Q 09Which family member did Dickinson call 'Awe' and run to as a child 'if anything befell me'?
Her brother Austin
In the same letter she called her mother 'an awful Mother, but I liked her better than none'.
Q 10For how many years did Dickinson study at Amherst Academy?
Seven
The former boys' school had opened to girls only two years before she and her sister enrolled in 1840.
Q 11Which school did Dickinson attend for less than a year after leaving Amherst Academy?
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
Explanations for her early exit range from poor health to rebellion against its evangelical fervour to plain homesickness.
Q 12Which second cousin's 1844 death from typhus traumatised the teenage Emily Dickinson?
Sophia Holland
She wrote two years later that she felt she would die too if she could not watch over her friend's face.
Q 13Which poet's work, sent to Dickinson in 1850 by Benjamin Franklin Newton, taught her that 'words had life'?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Q 21Which newspaper, owned by family friend Samuel Bowles, published Dickinson poems anonymously?
The Springfield Republican
It retitled one of her poems 'The Snake' and added punctuation she said changed its meaning.
Q 22Three drafts Dickinson wrote between 1858 and 1861 to an unidentified man are known as what?
The Master Letters
Who 'Master' was, or whether he was anyone at all, is still argued over by scholars.
Q 23Dickinson wrote to Higginson in 1862 after reading his 'Letter to a Young Contributor' in which magazine?
The Atlantic Monthly
She later listed Keats and the Brownings as her poets, and Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne and Revelation for prose.
Q 14Dickinson kept a leather-bound herbarium containing how many pressed flower specimens?
424
She classified them with the Linnaean system across 66 pages; a facsimile was published in 2006.
Q 15According to scholar Judith Farr, Dickinson was better known in her lifetime as what than as a poet?
A gardener
Friends who received her flowers with verses attached 'valued the posy more than the poetry'.
Q 16What did Dickinson call the small hand-sewn manuscript books in which she gathered her poems from 1858?
Fascicles
The forty booklets held nearly eight hundred poems, and nobody knew they existed until after she died.
Q 17To which correspondent did Dickinson send more than three hundred letters, more than to anyone else?
Susan Gilbert, her sister-in-law
She told her in 1882 that, Shakespeare excepted, she had taught her more than anyone living.
Q 18What was the name of the house Edward Dickinson built next door for his son Austin?
The Evergreens
Their daughter Martha Dickinson Bianchi inherited it along with the copyright to her aunt's poems.
Q 19A 1998 infrared study found which name deliberately erased from some of Dickinson's poems?
Susan
Eleven dedications were censored, presumably by Austin's lover, who was her rival.
Q 20On her longest trip from home in 1855, Dickinson met the minister Charles Wadsworth in which city?
Philadelphia
She called him 'my Shepherd from Little Girlhood' and saw him only twice more after he moved to San Francisco.
Her unsigned letter asked whether her verse was 'alive' and enclosed four poems.
Q 24What was the name of Dickinson's dog, whom she called one of her only real companions?
Carlo
After sixteen years of companionship the dog died in 1866, and she never owned another.
Q 25How did Dickinson describe her eyes to Higginson?
Like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves
In the same self-portrait she was 'small, like the wren' with hair 'bold, like the chestnut bur'.
Q 26How did Dickinson sign some of her letters to Higginson?
'Your Scholar'
She also signed as 'Your Gnome' and told him years later that he had saved her life in 1862.
Q 27From about 1867, how did Dickinson often talk with visitors?
From the other side of a door
Locals who exchanged messages with her in her last fifteen years rarely saw her in person.
Q 28What colour was Dickinson usually dressed in when she was seen at all in her later years?
White
Her one surviving garment is a white cotton dress, probably sewn between 1878 and 1882.
Q 29When Higginson finally met Dickinson in 1870, which colour did he say her hair was?
Reddish
He also said no one had ever 'drained my nerve power so much' and that he was glad not to live near her.
Q 30When Higginson urged her to visit Boston in 1868, Dickinson replied that she did not cross what?
Her father's ground
He gave in and came to Amherst two years later for their first meeting.