Romantic Correspondence with Judge Otis Phillips Lord
Poet involved
What happened
In the late 1870s, Emily Dickinson began a passionate, though likely unconsummated, romantic correspondence with Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Their letters, most of which have not survived, reveal Dickinson at her most playful and openly affectionate, conducted between Amherst and Salem, Massachusetts.
Literary impact
This late-in-life romance, which ended with Lord's death in 1884, gave Dickinson a rare opportunity to express romantic love directly and inspired some of her most tender and erotic verses. The relationship's secrecy and its ultimate frustration by death reinforced her poetic themes of desire, loss, and the impossibility of earthly fulfillment.
Source: Wikipedia
