Emily Dickinson is potentially one of the most famous female poets to have ever hailed from America - she is often considered to be the female counterpart of Walt Whitman. Dickinson was born in Massachusetts in 1830 and was quite the recluse. She attended a girls only school for only one year of her life and was thought to be very isolated, although those that she did encounter had a massive impact on her poetry.
By the 1860s she lived in a way which meant she was almost completely cut off from the rest of the world, and very tragically, the first publication of her poetry was only brought out posthumously after her death in 1886. It took until 1890 for the world to be able to appreciate the poetry she so pensively penned in her agonizing isolation.