Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions and, because of the variety of her themes, her work does not fit conveniently into any one genre. She has been regarded, alongside Emerson (whose poems Dickinson admired), as a Transcendentalist. Dickinson's poetry frequently uses humor, puns, irony and satire. Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and persistent figure in American culture. She has become widely acknowledged as an innovative, pre-modernist poet. Twentieth-century critic Harold Bloom has placed her alongside Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane as a major American poet, and among the thirty greatest Western Writers of all time.