Which poet wrote 'Hope is the thing with feathers'?

Emily Dickinson wrote “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” a lyric poem that compares hope to a small bird singing within the soul. It is one of Dickinson’s best-known poems and illustrates her distinctive use of compressed imagery and unconventional punctuation.

Dickinson composed the poem around 1861 and included it in Fascicle 13, one of her hand-sewn manuscript collections. It was published posthumously in 1891 in Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Because Dickinson did not publish most of her poems during her lifetime, early printed versions often altered punctuation, capitalization, and line presentation.

The poem has three four-line stanzas, or 12 lines total, and uses a hymn-like ballad meter that alternates iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Its bird image represents hope as persistent and self-sustaining: it sings through storms, cold lands, and strange seas, yet never asks anything in return.

Readers sometimes confuse the poem’s title with later works that borrow or adapt its wording. The original poem is commonly identified by its opening line, while the exact capitalization and dash placement vary among editions. Scholarly editions may also number it differently; it is poem 254 in Thomas H. Johnson’s edition and number 314 in R. W. Franklin’s.