Isaac Watts

The Dickinson family had many hymns written by Isaac Watts in their house. Born in 1674 in Northampton, England, Watts was an Anglican dissenter who became a priest in an independent church. He wrote 600 hymns, and used the common meter that Dickinson adopted in so many of her poems. However, Watts' influence on Dickinson does not end with common meter - he also used loose rhyme and an air of breathlessness (he used many exclamation marks, mirrored by Dickinson with her prolific use of dashes for the same effect) that is very apparent in Dickinson's work.