Emily Dickinson

From the daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke, December 1847 or early 1848. It is the only authenticated portrait of Emily Dickinson later than childhood.

Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After being schooled at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before retiring to her family's house, the Homestead. Throughout her adult life she rarely traveled outside of Amherst or very far from home. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

Dickinson was a prolific private poet, choosing to publish fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems. The work that was published during her lifetime was typically altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often utilize slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Her poems also tend to deal with themes of death and immortality, two subjects which infused her letters to friends.

Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics now consider Dickinson to be a major American poet.

Family background

Amherst, Massachusetts as it appeared in 1886.

The Dickinson family's genealogy began in the New World when Nathaniel Dickinson traveled from England with the Great Migration led by the puritan John Winthrop in 1630. After settling in Wethersfield, Connecticut to become a successful land-owner and farmer, Dickinson moved his family along with 58 other men and their families just east of Northampton in Massachusetts to establish the new plantation of Hadley. His great-grandson Nathan and Nathan's son, Nathan Jr., moved from Hadley to the district that would become Amherst in 1759. It was here that Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was born in 1775. From early on, the Dickinsons in western Massachusetts fairly outnumbered other large clans, averaging nine or ten children per family. A family historian recorded in the 1880s that the Dickinsons in the Amherst Hadley area "threatened to choke out all other forms of vegetation."

Samuel H. Dickinson was a well-regarded lawyer in Amherst who began a movement to found Amherst College—which developed out of the secondary school Amherst Academy—and almost singlehandedly organized it. Samuel's oldest son and Emily's father, Edward Dickinson, was the treasurer at Amherst College for nearly forty years. He also served numerous terms as a State Legislator and once represented the Hampshire district in the United States Congress. He married Emily Norcross from Monson and they had three children: William Austin (1829–1895), Emily Elizabeth, and Lavinia Norcross (1833–1899).

Life

Early childhood

A drawing of the young Emily Dickinson, age nine. It was made from a portrait featuring Emily, Austin and Lavinia as children.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 into what had become a prominent, but not opulent, family. The house on Main Street in which Emily was born, lived in most of her life, and died was called the Homestead; built by her grandfather Samuel in 1813, it was the first brick house in Amherst. Eight months before she was born, her father had bought the west half of his father's house. Two families—nearly a dozen people—lived there together until Edward was able to purchase a house of his own on North Pleasant Street in 1840. Emily's brother Austin would later describe this large new home as the "mansion" over which he and Emily presided as "lord and lady" while their parents were absent. The house overlooked Amherst's burial ground, described by one local minister as treeless and "forbidding". Although Emily consistently described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and distant. In a letter to a confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none."

By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Emily's Aunt Lavinia described Emily as "perfectly well & contented—She is a very good child & but little trouble." Emily's aunt also noted the girl's affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano, which she called "the moosic". Her parents only accommodated her talent when her father bought a piano for her at the age of fourteen.

Edward Dickinson emphasized the value of his children's education and kept track of their studies while he was away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home advising his son and daughters to "keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned, since I came away." Emily attended primary school in a two-storey building on Pleasant Street, opposite their future home. She then attended Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had opened to female students just two years earlier. She and Vinnie entered together at the beginning of the fall term, on September 7, 1840. Spending seven years at the Academy, with a few terms off due to illness, Emily took classes in English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, "mental philosophy" and arithmetic. In early 1838, mid-1844, and spring 1848, Emily was forced to miss a great deal of school for unknown health reasons. The longest period of absence, however, was in 1845–1846 when she was only enrolled for eleven weeks.

Late childhood

From a young age, Emily was troubled by the "deepening menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When a close friend and second cousin, Sophia Holland, grew ill from typhus and died in April 1844, Emily was traumatized. Recalling the incident two years later, Emily wrote that "it seemed to me I should die too if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even look at her face." Emily entered into such a state of melancholy that her parents sent her to recover in Boston where she stayed with family for a month. This trip restored her health and spirits, and she soon returned to Amherst Academy to continue her studies. During this period of her life she met a majority of her friends and correspondents, such as Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Jane Humphrey and Susan Huntington Gilbert (who later married Emily's brother Austin).

Dickinson assembled two collections during her lifetime: one was her assortment of poems, the other a sixty-six page book of pressed flowers that she collected herself. Having studied botany from the age of nine, as a teenager Dickinson pieced together a herbarium consisting of 424 pressed specimens in a large leather volume. These flowers were classified using the Linnaean system with handwritten labels. The garden at the Homestead, which Emily personally tended, was well known and admired locally during its time. It has not survived and Dickinson kept no garden notebooks or plant lists, but its layout and what was grown in it can be gleaned from letters and the recollections of her friends and family. One niece, for example, remembered "carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansies, platoons of sweetpeas, hyacinths enough in May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction—a butterfly utopia." In particular, Dickinson cultivated scented exotic flowers, writing that she "could inhabit the Spice Isles merely by crossing the dining room to the conservatory, where the plants hang in baskets." Dickinson would often send her friends bunches of flowers with verses attached, but "they valued the posy more than the poetry".

Maturity

Although Dickinson never formally accepted religion into her life, she confided to a friend in 1846 that she briefly and mistakenly believed that she had found salvation when she was younger. She wrote, "I can say that I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior." She went on to say that it was her "greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers", but the experience did not last. Despite the fact that many of her friends and family experienced a religious conversion—especially in 1845, when a revival in Amherst resulted in 46 confessions of faith from her peers—Emily was either unwilling or unable to do likewise throughout her life. Unorthodox in her religion, having not made a formal declaration of faith, she did however attend services regularly until probably around 1852. A poem that she wrote after she stopped attending church began with the lines: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home."

Supposedly one of only two known daguerreotypes of Emily Dickinson. Made in the 1850s and discovered in 2000 on eBay by Philip F. Gura, its authenticity is questioned.

After finishing her final term at the Academy on August 10, 1847, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which later became Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, about ten miles from Amherst. She was at the Seminary for only ten months. Although she liked the girls at Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there. The explanations for her brief stay at Holyoke differ considerably: either she was in poor health, her father wanted to have her at home, she rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at the school, she disliked the discipline-minded teachers, or she was simply homesick. Whatever the specific reason for leaving Holyoke, her brother Austin appeared on March 25, 1848 to "bring [her] home at all events". After settling once more in Amherst, Dickinson occupied her time with household activities. Baking for the family soon became Emily's vocation. She enjoyed attending local events and activities that took place in the budding college town. In 1850 she wrote that "Amherst is alive with fun this winter... Oh, a very great town this is!"

However, Dickinson's state of mind in 1850 was greatly affected by another untimely death. The 25 year-old Leonard Humphrey, who had been principal of the Academy for the last year of her stay, died suddenly of what was called "brain congestion". As a student, Emily revered him greatly and knew him as a friend. His death came not only as a shock to her, but to the entire community, which greatly mourned him. She later called him "Master", a term that she reserved for the few men in her life whose wisdom, advice, or love she sought. Two years after the young man's death, she revealed to her friend Abiah Root the extent of her melancholy: "...some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep – the hour of evening is sad – it was once my study hour – my master has gone to rest, and the open leaf of the book, and the scholar at school alone, make the tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay the departed Humphrey."

Influence and early writing

By the time she was eighteen, Dickinson's family had befriended a young attorney by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton, who was born in Worcester. According to a letter written by Emily after Newton's death, he had been "with my Father two years, before going to Worcester – in pursuing his studies, and was much in our family." A formative influence of Emily's, Newton would become the second in a series of older men (after Humphrey) that Emily referred to variously as her tutor, preceptor, or master. Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's first book of collected poems, which Newton is known to have given her, had a liberating effect on young Dickinson, who wrote shortly after Emerson's death in 1882 that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring." Although it is unlikely that her relationship with Newton was romantic, he clearly held a high regard for her. He also believed in and recognized her as a poet, writing to her as he was dying of tuberculosis that he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw. It is often thought by biographers that Dickinson's autobiographical statement of 1862—"When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned"—is a reference to Newton.

Dickinson was well versed in the Bible as a result of her upbringing, but was also familiar with some of the popular literature of the day. In addition to Wordsworth and Emerson, Dickinson was also at this time exposed to—and probably influenced by—Lydia Child's Letters from New York, also given to her by Newman (after reading it, she enthused "This then is a book! And there are more of them!"); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Kavanagh, which her brother Austin smuggled into the house for her because of their father's disapproval; and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, lent to her by Elbridge Bowdoin in late 1849. Jane Eyre's total effect on the poet cannot be substantiated, but it is known that when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland who accompanied her everywhere, she named him Carlo after the character St. John Rivers' dog. William Shakespeare also became a potent factor in her life; pointing to the bard's indispensability, she wrote to one friend about his collection of plays, "Why clasp any hand but this?" and "Why is any other book needed?" to another.

The Evergreens, the home of Austin and Susan Dickinson, as it appears today.

Thomas H. Johnson, who later published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955, was able to date only five of Dickinson's poems before 1858. Two of these are mock valentines done in an ornate and humorous style, and two others are conventional lyrics, one of which is about missing her brother Austin. The fifth poem, however, which begins "I have a Bird in spring", conveys her grief over the feared loss of friendship and was sent to her friend Sue Gilbert. During the 1850s, Emily's strongest and most affectionate relationship was with Sue. Emily would eventually send over 300 letters, more letters than any other correspondent, to her over the course of their friendship. Her missives typically dealt with demands for Sue's affection and the fear of unrequited admiration, but because Sue was often aloof and disagreeable, Emily was continually hurt by what was mostly a tempestuous friendship. Sue married Austin in 1856 after a four-year courtship, although their marriage was not a happy one. Edward Dickinson, in order to induce his son not to move west, made Austin full partner. He also built a house for him and Sue called the Evergreens, which stood on the west side of the Homestead—Edward had just a year before purchased his father's brick home and he, along with his wife and daughters, once again took up residence on Main Street.

Seclusion

Until she visited her father in Washington during his tenure as Representative from the Tenth Congressional District of Massachusetts, Emily had not strayed far from Amherst. This trip, which took place from February to March 1855, proved to be her farthest journey away from home and, aside from a brief sojourn to Boston nine years later, the longest. She spent three weeks in Washington with her father, accompanied by her sister and mother, and then two weeks in Philadelphia to visit family. While she was there she met Charles Wadsworth, a famous minister of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, with whom she forged a strong friendship until his death in 1882. Despite only seeing him only twice after 1855 (he moved to San Francisco in 1862), she variously referred to him as "my Philadelphia", "my Clergyman", "my dearest earthly friend" and "my Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood".

Emily's mother suffered from unknown longstanding illnesses that kept her in and out of bed, living an invalid's life from the mid 1850s until her death. Writing a friend in summer 1858, Emily said that she would visit if she could leave "home, or mother. I do not go out at all, lest father will come and miss me, or miss some little act, which I might forget, should I run away – Mother is much as usual. I Know not what to hope of her." As her mother continued to decline, Dickinson's domestic responsibilities weighed heavier upon her and she confined herself within the Homestead. Forty years later, Vinnie stated that because their mother was chronically ill, one of the daughters had to remain always with her; Emily, choosing this role as her own, and "finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it".

Withdrawing more and more from the outside world, Emily began in the summer of 1858 what would be her lasting legacy. Reviewing poems she had written previously, she began making clean copies of her work, assembling carefully pieced-together manuscript books. The forty fascicles she created from 1858 through 1865 eventually held nearly eight hundred poems. No one was aware of these books' existence until after her death.

Publication and productivity

"Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –," entitled "The Sleeping," as it was published in the Springfield Republican in 1862.

In the late 1850s, the Dickinsons befriended Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican. Bowles and his wife Mary began visiting the Evergreens shortly after Austin's and Sue's marriage, and were a common feature amongst the family for years to come. During this time Emily sent him over three dozen letters and nearly fifty poems. Whatever the extent of their relationship, it brought out some of her most intense writing. After reading some of the poems, he offered to publish a few in the Springfield Republican.

These poems were published anonymously and heavily edited for publication, giving them more conventional punctuation, as well as formal titles. The first poem written by Dickinson to appear in the Republican, "Nobody knows this little rose", was published on August 2, 1858, quite possibly without Dickinson's permission; it was written as a private poem for a friend. The other poems that the Republican later published between 1861 and 1866 were "I taste a liquor never brewed –", entitled "The May-Wine"; "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –", entitled "The Sleeping"; "Blazing in the Gold and quenching in Purple", entitled "Sunset"; and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", entitled "The Snake". When "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" was published not only without her permission, but with additional punctuation separating the third and fourth lines, Dickinson complained that it altered the meaning of the entire poem. Another poem, "I taste a liquor never brewed –", had the last two lines in the first stanza completely rewritten for the sake of conventional rhyme:

Original wording	Republican version
I taste a liquor never brewed – From Tankards scooped in Pearl – Not all the Frankfort Berries Yield such an Alcohol!	I taste a liquor never brewed – From Tankards scooped in Pearl – Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense Such a delirious whirl!

The first half of the 1860s, after she had largely withdrawn from social life and rarely left the Homestead, proved to be Dickinson's most productive writing period. Thomas Johnson estimated that she composed 86 poems in 1861, 366 in 1862, 141 in 1863, and 174 in 1864. In February and March 1864, several of her poems were altered and published in Drum Beat, a short-run Brooklyn paper designed to raise money for medical care for Union soldiers in the war. Another poem appeared in April of that same year in the Brooklyn Daily Union, although it is not known who submitted these poems or whether Dickinson gave consent.

Is "my Verse... alive?"

In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic, radical abolitionist and ex-minister, wrote a lead piece for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Letter to a Young Contributor". Higginson's essay, in which he urged aspiring writers to "Charge your style with life", contained practical advice for those wishing to break into print. Seeking literary guidance that no one close to her could provide, Dickinson sent him a letter which read in full:

Mr Higginson,
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask –
Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude –
If I make the mistake – that you dared to tell me – would give me sincerer honor – toward you –
I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true?
That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it's [sic] own pawn –

Thomas Wentworth Higginson in uniform; he was colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers from 1862 to 1864.

The letter was unsigned, but she had included her name on a card and enclosed it in an envelope along with four of her poems. Anxious to retain some anonymity, Dickinson posted every subsequent letter to Higginson not from Amherst, but from nearby Palmer, Hadley, and even one from Middletown, Connecticut. Although Higginson's letters were destroyed and it is not certain exactly what he wrote to her, Dickinson later remarked that he had begun by performing some sort of "surgery" on her submissions. When he apparently praised her, she replied that "I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue." He did, however, suggest that she delay publishing her work until she had written longer, being unaware that she had already appeared in print. She assured him that publishing was as foreign to her "as Firmament to Fin" but also proposed that "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her."

"I have the greatest desire to see you," Higginson wrote to Dickinson, commenting on the lack of personal details in her letters, "always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in a fiery mist and I cannot reach you but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light." Dickinson preferred to enact her fondness for dramatic self-characterization. She said of herself: "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." She stressed her solitary nature, stating that her only real companions were the hills, the sundown, and her dog, Carlo. Although she mentioned both her brother and sister, she said nothing about her sister-in-law. She also mentioned that whereas her mother did not "care for Thought", her father bought her books, but begged her "not to read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind". Dickinson valued his advice, going from calling him "Mr. Higginson" to "Dear friend" as well as signing her letters "Your Gnome" and "Your Scholar". His interest in her work certainly provided great moral support; many years later, Dickinson exaggeratedly told Higginson that he had saved her life in 1862. They corresponded until her death.

The woman in white

In direct opposition to the immense productivity that she displayed in the early 1860s, Dickinson wrote many fewer poems in 1866. Beset with personal loss as well as loss of domestic help, it is possible that Dickinson was too overcome to keep up her previous level of writing. Carlo died during this time after sixteen years of companionship; Dickinson never owned another dog. When the household servant of nine years had married and left the Homestead that same year, it was not until 1869 that her family brought in a permanent household servant to replace the old one. Emily once again was beset with chores, including the baking, at which she excelled.

A solemn thing – it was – I said – A Woman – White – to be – And wear – if God should count me fit – Her blameless mystery –

Emily Dickinson, c. 1861

Around this time, Dickinson's behavior began to change. She did not leave the Homestead unless it was absolutely necessary and as early as 1867, she began to talk to visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking to them face to face. She acquired local notoriety; she was rarely seen and when she was, she was usually clothed in white. Dickinson's one surviving article of clothing is a white cotton dress, possibly sewn circa 1878–1882. Few of the locals who exchanged messages with Dickinson during her last fifteen years ever saw her in person. Austin and his family began to protect Emily's privacy, deciding that she was not to be a subject of discussion with outsiders. Despite her physical seclusion, however, Dickinson was socially active and expressive through what makes up two-thirds of her surviving notes and letters. When visitors came to either the Homestead or the Evergreens, she would often leave or send over small gifts of poems or flowers. Dickinson also had a good rapport with the children in her life. Mattie Dickinson, the second child of Austin and Sue, later said that "Aunt Emily stood for indulgence." MacGregor (Mac) Jenkins, the son of family friends who later wrote a short article in 1891 called "A Child's Recollection of Emily Dickinson", thought of her as always offering support to the neighborhood children.

When Higginson urged her to come to Boston in 1868 so that they could formally meet for the first time, she declined, writing: "Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town." It was not until he came to Amherst in 1870 that they met. Later he referred to her, in the most detailed and vivid physical account of her on record, as "a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair... in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl." He also felt that he never was "with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."

Higginson showed Dickinson's poems to Helen Hunt Jackson, who had coincidentally been at the Academy with Dickinson when they were girls. By the early 1870s, Jackson was deeply involved in the publishing world, with seven books and well over four hundred magazine and newspaper pieces to her credit. Jackson managed to convince Dickinson to publish her poem "Success is counted sweetest" anonymously in a volume called A Masque of Poets. The poem, however, was altered to agree with contemporary taste. It was the last poem published during Dickinson's lifetime.

Later life and loves

On June 16, 1874 while in Boston, Edward Dickinson suffered a stroke and died. When the simple funeral was held in the Homestead's entrance hall, Emily stayed in her room with the door cracked open. She also did not attend the memorial service on June 28. She would write to Higginson that her father's "Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists." A year later, on June 15, 1875, Emily's mother also suffered a stroke that produced a partial lateral paralysis and impaired memory. Lamenting her mother's increasing physical as well as mental demands, Emily wrote that "Home is so far from Home."

Though the great Waters sleep, That they are still the Deep, We cannot doubt – No vacillating God Ignited this Abode To put it out –

Emily Dickinson, c. 1884

Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from Salem, in 1872 or 1873, became an acquaintance of Dickinson's, and her last Master. After the death of Lord's wife in 1877, his friendship with Dickinson probably became a late-life romance though, as their letters were destroyed, this is surmise. Dickinson found a kindred soul in Lord, especially in terms of shared literary interests; the few letters which survived contain multiple quotations of Shakespeare's work, including the plays Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet and King Lear. In 1880 he gave her Cowden Clarke's Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (1877). Dickinson wrote that "While others go to Church, I go to mine, for are you not my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?" She referred to him as "My lovely Salem" and they wrote to each other religiously every Sunday. Dickinson looked forward to this day greatly; a surviving fragment of a letter written by her states that "Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day".

After being critically ill for several years, Judge Lord died in March 1884. Dickinson referred to him as "our latest Lost". Two years prior to this, on April 1, 1882, Dickinson's "Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood", Charles Wadsworth, also passed away after a long illness.

Decline and death

For some reason, although she continued to write as she aged, Dickinson stopped editing and organizing her poems. She also exacted a promise from her sister Vinnie to burn her papers, possibly including her manuscript books and ungathered verse, after her death. Vinnie, who also never married, remained at the Homestead until her own death in 1899.

File:Emilkytumba.jpg

Emily Dickinson's tombstone in the family plot

The 1880s were a difficult time for the remaining Dickinsons. Terminally alienated from his wife, Austin, who had become the treasurer of Amherst College like his father, fell in love in 1882 with Mabel Loomis Todd. Todd was a young faculty wife who had recently moved to Amherst. She became intrigued by the enigma that was Dickinson, who she never met in person, referring to her as "a lady whom the people call the Myth". Austin became more detached as his affair continued and Sue was sick with grief. Dickinson's mother died on November 14, 1882. Writing five weeks later, Dickinson stated that "We were never intimate... while she was our Mother – but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she became our Child, the Affection came." The next year, Austin and Sue's third and youngest child, Gilbert—Emily's favorite—died of typhoid fever.

As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In the fall of 1884, she wrote that "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come." That summer she had seen "a great darkness coming" and fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed. On November 30, 1885, her feebleness and other symptoms were so worrying that Austin canceled a trip to Boston. She was confined to her bed for a few months, but managed to send a final burst of letters in the spring. What is thought to be her last letter was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply read: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily." On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Austin wrote in his diary for the day: "The day was awful. She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the [afternoon] whistle sounded for six." Dickinson's chief physician gave the cause of death as Bright's disease and its duration as two and a half years.

Dickinson was buried on Wednesday, May 19, 1886. Her body, dressed in white, was laid in a white coffin with vanilla-scented heliotrope, a Lady's Slipper orchid and a "knot of blue field violets" placed about it. The funeral service, held in the Homestead's library, was simple and short; Higginson, who had only met her twice, read "No Coward Soul Is Mine", a poem by Emily Brontë that had been a favorite of Dickinson's. At Dickinson's request, her "coffin [was] not driven but carried through fields of buttercups" to the family plot in the West Cemetery on Triangle Street, where it still lies.

Poetry

Style and themes

Dickinson's handwritten manuscript of her poem "Wild Nights – Wild Nights!" This poem is often interpreted as erotic in nature.

Dickinson's poems fall into three distinct periods, the works in each period having certain general characters in common:

• Poems written before 1861, which are often conventional and sentimental in nature.
• Poems written between 1861 and 1865, her most creative period—these poems are more vigorous and emotional. Thomas H. Johnson believed that this is when she fully developed her themes of life and death.
• Poems written after 1866. It is estimated that two-thirds of the entire body of her poetry was written before this year.

The extensive use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in her manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a unique lyric style. She did not write in traditional iambic pentameter (a convention of English-speaking poetry for centuries), and did not even use a five-foot line. Her line lengths vary from four syllables or two feet to often eight syllables or four feet. Her frequent use of approximate, or slant rhyme attracted attention since her work first appeared in print. Her poems are often short to match the length of her lines. They typically begin with a declaration or definition in the first line ("The fact that Earth is Heaven"), which is followed by a metaphorical change of the original premise in the second line ("Whether Heaven is Heaven or not"). Dickinson's poetry also frequently utilizes humor, puns, irony and satire.

With her frequent use of rhyme and free verse, many of Dickinson's poems can easily be set to music. Written for the most part in common meter, the poems can also be set to songs that use the same alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. For example, the meter of "Because I could not stop for Death" ( x / x / x / x / ) has the same meter and is often set to the tune of songs such as "Amazing Grace", "The Yellow Rose of Texas", "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" or the "Gilligan's Island" theme song.

Dickinson did not leave a formal statement of what she was attempting to achieve aesthetically with her poetry. Nonetheless, her work is sometimes placed in assorted literary genres including American Puritanism, English Romanticism, and American modernism. Religion and faith, which often perplexed her in life, are common themes. Dickinson's earliest extant poems, written in verse valentines between 1850 and 1852, were simple declarations of admiration, but themes of romantic love and desire are often found in her mature poems. Critics remark on her nature and philosophy themes, including numerous references to bees and flowers, and sometimes see her as a Transcendentalist. Much of her poetry—including the popular "Because I could not stop for Death –", "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" and "I heard a Fly buzz – when I died"—deals with the themes of death and immortality. Thomas H. Johnson, while recognizing that many poets have made death central in much of their poetry, believed that Dickinson "did so in hers to an unusual degree".

Posthumous publication

Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man – Poverty – be justifying For so foul a thing ... In the Parcel – Be the Merchant Of the Heavenly Grace – But reduce no Human Spirit To Disgrace of Price

Emily Dickinson, c. 1863

Vinnie Dickinson kept her promise and burned most of her older sister's correspondence after the poet's death. When she stumbled across the forty manuscripts that held Emily's vast collection of poetry, however, she recognized their worth and decided to seek their publication. Alone in the Homestead, Vinnie became obsessed with seeing her sister's poetry printed. She turned first to Sue, her brother's wife, but after Sue stalled for several months, Vinnie went to Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress, for assistance.

The first volume of Emily Dickinson's Poems, edited jointly by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, was published in November 1890. They edited the poems extensively in order to regularize the punctuation and capitalization to late 19th century standards, occasionally rewording poems to reduce Dickinson's obliquity. Todd claimed, however, that only absolutely inevitable changes were made. Containing 115 of Dickinson's poems, the first volume was a critical and financial success, going through eleven printings in two years. Poems: Second Series was published in 1891 and ran to five editions by 1893; a third series was published in 1896. Two volumes of Dickinson's letters, selected and heavily edited by Todd, were published in 1894. During this time, Susan Dickinson also placed a few of Emily Dickinson's poems in literary magazines such as Scribner's Magazine and The Independent. One reviewer in 1892 wrote in response to the quick publication of the first two volumes of poetry: "The world will not rest satisfied till every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has been published."

In the early 20th century, Dickinson's niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi published a new series of collections, including many previously unpublished poems, with similarly normalized punctuation and capitalization; The Single Hound emerged in 1914, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1924, and Further Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1929. Other volumes edited by Todd and Bianchi were published through the 1930s, gradually making more previously unpublished poems available.

A new and complete edition of Dickinson's poetry by Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was published in three volumes in 1955. This edition formed the basis of all later Dickinson scholarship. The poems were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and often extremely elliptical in their language. They were printed for the first time very nearly as Dickinson had left them, in versions approximating the text in her manuscripts. A later variorum edition provided many alternate wordings from which Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention, had been forced to choose for the sake of readability.

Later readers would draw attention to the remaining problems in reading even Johnson's relatively unaltered typeset texts of Dickinson, claiming that Dickinson's treatment of her manuscripts suggested that their physical and graphic properties were important to the reading of her poems. Meaningful distinctions could be drawn, they argued, among different lengths and angles of dash in the poems, and different arrangements of text on the page. Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using many typographic symbols of varying length and angle. R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems, which aimed to supplant Johnson's edition as the scholarly standard text, used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely.

Reception

Dickinson wrote and sent this poem ("A Route to Evanescence") to Thomas Higginson in 1880.

The surge of posthumous publication gave Dickinson's poetry its first public exposure. Backed by Higginson and with a favorable notice from William Dean Howells, an editor of Harper's Magazine, the poetry received mixed reviews after it was first published in 1890. Higginson himself stated in his preface to the first edition of Dickinson's published work that the poetry's quality "is that of extraordinary grasp and insight". Maurice Thompson, who was literary editor of The Independent for twelve years, noted in 1891 that her poetry had "a strange mixture of rare individuality and originality." Some critics hailed Dickinson's effort, but disapproved of her unusual non-traditional style. Andrew Lang, a British scholar, poet, historian, journalist and novelist, dismissed Dickinson's poetry, stating that "if poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to rhyme. The wisdom of the ages and the nature of man insist on so much." Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a poet and novelist, equally dismissed Dickinson's poetic technique in the Atlantic Monthly in January of 1892: "It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson... But the incoherence and formlessness of her — versicles are fatal... . [A]n eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar."

Critical attention to Dickinson's poetry was meager from 1897 to the early 1920s. By the start of the 20th century, interest in her poetry became broader in scope and some critics began to consider Dickinson as essentially modern. Rather than seeing Dickinson's poetic styling as a result of lack of knowledge or skill, modern critics believed the irregularities were conscious and of artistic purpose. In a 1915 essay, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant called the poet's inspiration "daring" and named her "one of the rarest flowers the sterner New England land ever bore." With the growing popularity of modernist poetry in the 1920s, Dickinson's failure to conform to 19th century ideas of poetic form was no longer surprising nor distasteful to new generations of readers. Dickinson was suddenly referred to by various critics as a great woman poet and a cult following began to form. R. P. Blackmur, in an attempt to focus and clarify the major claims for and against the poet's greatness, wrote in a 1937 critical essay:

She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars... . She came, as Mr. Tate says, at the right time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of sophisticated, eccentric vision. That is what makes her good — in a few poems and many passages representatively great. But... the bulk of her verse is not representative but mere fragmentary indicative notation. The pity of it is that the document her whole work makes shows nothing so much as that she had the themes, the insight, the observation, and the capacity for honesty, which had she only known how — or only known why — would have made the major instead of the minor fraction of her verse genuine poetry. But her dying society had no tradition by which to teach her the one lesson she did not know by instinct.

The second wave of feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her as a female poet. In 1983's first collection of critical essays on Dickinson from a female perspective, she is heralded as the greatest woman poet in the English language. Biographers and theorists of the past tended to separate Dickinson's roles as a woman and a poet. For example, George Whicher wrote in his 1952 book This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson, "Perhaps as a poet [Dickinson] could find the fulfillment she had missed as a woman." Feminist criticism, on the other hand, declares that there is a necessary and powerful conjunction between Dickinson being a woman and a poet. Adrienne Rich theorized in "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" (1976) that Dickinson's identity as a woman poet brought her power, making her "neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economics."

Legacy

Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and persistent figure in American culture. Although much of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely acknowledged as an innovative pre-modernist poet. As early as 1891, William Dean Howells wrote that "If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it." 20th-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.

Dickinson is frequently taught in American literature and poetry classes in the United States from middle school to college. Her poetry is frequently anthologized and has been used as texts for art songs by composers such as Aaron Copland, Nick Peros, John Adams, and Michael Tilson Thomas. Several schools, such as the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana and P.S. 75 Emily Dickinson School in New York City have been established in her name. A few literary journals—including The Emily Dickinson Journal, the official publication of the Emily Dickinson International Society—have been founded to examine her work.

The Amherst Jones Library's Special Collections department has an Emily Dickinson Collection consisting of approximately 7,000 items, including original manuscript poems and letters, family correspondence, scholarly articles and books, newspaper clippings, theses, plays, photographs, and contemporary artwork and prints. Dickinson's herbarium, which is now held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, was published in 2006 as Emily Dickinson's Herbarium by Harvard University Press. In 1965, in recognition of Dickinson's growing stature as a poet, the Homestead was purchased by Amherst College. It opened to the public for tours, and also served as a faculty residence for many years. The Emily Dickinson Museum was created in 2003 when ownership of the Evergreens, which had been occupied by Dickinson family heirs until 1988, was transferred to the college.

Bibliography

Poetry

• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960.
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999. ISBN 0674676246

Biographies

• Bianchi, Martha Dickinson. Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970.
• Farr, Judith. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0674018297
• Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House, 2001.
• Sewall, Richard B., The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1974. ISBN 0674530802
• Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1998. ISBN 0394544188

Literary criticism

• Bloom, Harold. Emily Dickinson. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0791051064
• Buckingham, Willis J., ed. Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. ISBN 0822936046
• The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521001188
• Crumbley, Paul. Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ISBN 081311988x
• Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. ISBN 0253321700
• Knapp, Bettina L. Emily Dickinson. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1989.
• Ford, Thomas W. Heaven Beguiles the Tired: Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson. University of Alabama Press, 1966.
• McNeil, Helen. Emily Dickinson. London: Virago Press, 1986. ISBN 0394747666
• Pickard, John B. Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.
• The Recognition of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism Since 1890. Ed. Caesar R. Blake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964.
• Smith, Martha Nell. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1992. ISBN 0292776667.
• Stocks, Kenneth. Emily Dickinson and the Modern Consciousness: A Poet of Our Time. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.
• Walsh, John Evangelist. The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.

External links

• Works by Emily Dickinson at Project Gutenberg
• Dickinson Electronic Archives
• Emily Dickinson Museum The Homestead and the Evergreens, Amherst, Massachusetts
• Emily Dickinson at Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Emily Dickinson International Society

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