Emily Dickinson Trivia
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100 free Emily Dickinson trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In one Dickinson poem, what creature buzzes between the dying speaker and the light?
A fly
A fly, with its 'blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz'; then 'the windows failed', and 'I could not see to see.'
Q 02About how many poems did Dickinson write?
About 1,800
About 1,800, yet fewer than a dozen of them were published while she was alive.
Q 03Dickinson wrote that to make a prairie takes a clover, one bee and what?
Revery
Revery, and she adds that 'The revery alone will do, If bees are few.'
Q 04Who discovered Dickinson's poems in her desk after her death?
Her younger sister Lavinia
Her younger sister Lavinia then spent years urging editors and publishers to print them, and a first selection appeared in 1890.
Q 05In Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain', mourners creak across the soul in boots of what?
Lead
Lead; then 'space began to toll' as if all the heavens were a bell, leaving the speaker 'wrecked, solitary, here.'
Q 06Which American poet did Dickinson tell Higginson she had never read, because she was told his work was disgraceful?
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman. 'I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful,' she wrote, adding that Miss Prescott's 'Circumstance' 'followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.'
Q 07What was the profession of Dickinson's father, Edward?
Lawyer
A lawyer, Edward Dickinson bought his daughter many books, then begged her not to read them because he feared they would 'joggle the mind'.
Q 08In Dickinson's poem 'I never saw a Moor', what does she say she can picture anyway?
The heather
The heather; and though she 'never spoke with God', she is 'certain' of heaven's spot 'As if the chart were given'.
Q 09Dickinson told Higginson that her mother had no interest in what?
Thought
Thought. In the same letter she wrote that her family were all religious 'except me', and addressed 'an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their Father'.
Q 10Dickinson told Higginson that after her tutor died, what was her only companion for several years?
Her dictionary
Her dictionary: 'my lexicon was my only companion,' she wrote, adding, 'I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education.'
Q 11Which school did Dickinson attend for less than a year after leaving Amherst Academy?
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Why she left after one year is still disputed: missing her family, resistance to its religious revivals and a curriculum with little new to offer have all been proposed.
Q 12In one of Dickinson's most famous poems, Death kindly stops to take the speaker for a ride in what?
A carriage
A carriage. The slow ride passes a school, 'fields of gazing grain' and the setting sun, then pauses before a house whose roof is 'scarcely visible', her grave.
Q 13Which poet's collection did Dickinson receive in 1850 from her young friend Benjamin Franklin Newton?
Q 21In the Dickinson poem that calls being somebody dreary, a public name is compared to what creature?
A frog
A frog, telling its name 'the livelong day To an admiring bog!', her joke on how dreary fame would be.
Q 22Three draft letters Dickinson wrote between 1858 and 1861 to an unidentified recipient are known as what?
The Master Letters
The Master Letters survive only as drafts, and no one knows whether finished copies were ever sent.
Q 23Dickinson wrote to Higginson in 1862 after reading his 'Letter to a Young Contributor' in which magazine?
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly essay drew an unsigned reply: she wrote her name in pencil on a card and tucked it inside a smaller envelope.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Newton had spent weeks talking books with her and guiding her reading, and his sudden death in 1853 shook her deeply.
Q 14Dickinson thanked Higginson for his criticism of her poems by calling it what?
The surgery
The surgery, she wrote, 'was not so painful as I supposed', and she sent him more poems in the same letter.
Q 15According to Judith Farr, Dickinson was better known in her lifetime as what than as a poet?
A gardener
A gardener, perhaps, in Farr's view: as she withdrew from society, she sent friends bouquets with verses attached in her place.
Q 16What name is now given to the small handmade booklets into which Dickinson copied her poems from 1858?
Fascicles
Fascicles: no one knew the forty booklets existed until after Dickinson died.
Q 17Dickinson's most productive writing years overlapped which conflict?
The American Civil War
The American Civil War. When Higginson was away in an army camp, she wrote to him there, 'War feels to me an oblique place.'
Q 18What was the name of the neighbouring house Edward Dickinson built for his son Austin?
The Evergreens
The Evergreens was Edward's way of keeping the couple in Amherst after they had considered moving west.
Q 19In Dickinson's poem, what is 'the thing with feathers' that perches in the soul?
Hope
Hope, which sings 'in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea', yet 'never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.'
Q 20During an 1855 trip, Dickinson likely heard the famed preacher Charles Wadsworth in which city?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia. The friendship they began lasted until Wadsworth died in the 1880s, one of a run of deaths that marked her last years.
Q 24What was the name of the big dog that Dickinson's father bought her?
Carlo
Carlo. When he died in 1866, she sent Higginson a terse note, 'Carlo died', signed it, and asked, 'Would you instruct me now?'
Q 25How did Dickinson describe her eyes to Higginson?
Like the sherry the guest leaves
Like the sherry the guest leaves in the glass: she sent that word portrait because, she wrote, 'I had no portrait, now.'
Q 26How did Dickinson sign some of her letters to Higginson?
'Your Scholar'
'Your Scholar' was her customary sign-off, and in one letter she told him, 'You were not aware that you saved my life.'
Q 27From about 1867, how did Dickinson often talk with visitors?
From the other side of a door
From the other side of a door. Researchers still disagree whether her withdrawal was her own decision or the result of a medical condition.
Q 28What colour was Dickinson usually dressed in when she was seen at all in her later years?
White
White, though as a young woman she told a cousin that she wore 'a brown dress with a cape if possible browner'.
Q 29When Higginson finally met Dickinson in 1870, which colour did he say her hair was?
Reddish
Reddish, in 'two smooth bands'; at that first meeting she told him that if a book made her feel 'as if the top of my head were taken off', she knew it was poetry.
Q 30When Higginson urged a meeting in 1868, what did Dickinson say she would never cross?
Her father's ground
Her father's ground: 'I do not cross my father's ground to any house or town,' she wrote, so Higginson came to Amherst himself in August 1870.