Quote by Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — success in circuit lies.”

Sometimes the direct, blunt truth is too bright to look at without flinching. Dickinson suggests that the wisest way to share hard truths — about death, pain, reality — is to approach them indirectly, using metaphor and story to let the mind ease in rather than be blinded.

This poem was written around 1868, during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. America was attempting to process an enormous national trauma, and Dickinson's private verse was doing something parallel — finding indirect routes into unbearable truths.

American poet who lived almost entirely in Amherst, Massachusetts, publishing fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime but leaving behind nearly 1,800 works discovered after her death. Her compressed, unconventional verse explored death, immortality, nature, and the inner life with startling originality.