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 Emily Dickinson | "Write what you know." This maxim of creative writing classes has been the despair of many young writers whose immediate response is, "But I don't know anything." In his guidebook Writing a Novel (1975), the late British novelist John Braine cited the maxim and endorsed its soundness, and then attempted to console and encourage his readers by telling them that even if they had never made love or experienced the death of anyone close to them, they had already experienced enough life to provide the basis for a thousand novels. No better example could be found to illustrate Braine's point than the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson lived almost her entire life in the same town (much of it in the same house), traveled infrequently, never married, and in her last years never left the grounds of her home and avoided direct personal contact with anyone except the members of her family. And yet despite this narrow—some might say pathologically constricted—outward experience, she was an extremely intelligent, highly sensitive, and deeply passionate person who throughout her adult life wrote poems that were startlingly original in both content and technique, poems that would profoundly influence several generations of American poets, and that would win her a secure position as one of the greatest poets that America has ever produced. |
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, the second of three children of Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. Samuel Fowler Dickinson, her grandfather, had been one of the founders of Amherst College, and had built a mansion on Main Street, reputed to be the first brick house in Amherst, which became known in the family as the Homestead. Her father was, like his father before him, a lawyer, just as, in his turn, Emily's older brother Austin would be as well. Treasurer of Amherst College for twenty years and in later life a pillar of the Congregationalist Church, Edward Dickinson appears to have been as limited emotionally as his wife was intellectually. Neither of them was equipped to deal with a genius in the family, especially a female genius. After several years of primary school, Emily attended Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847. From September 1847 to August 1848, she was a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Despite her interest in her studies, including chemistry, her father decided not to send her to Mount Holyoke for an additional year, and thus her formal education came to an end. |  Emily (Norcross) Dickinson, Dickinson's mother |
 Dickinson as a child | In all outward respects, Emily Dickinson was in these years indistinguishable from other young people of Amherst. She was a lively and engaging young woman who, with her younger sister Lavinia, participated in local social events with a circle of friends of both sexes. With Lavinia, she would visit Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in 1854 and 1855. One friendship in particular would be crucial to her as she began to write poetry as a teenager: Benjamin Franklin Newton, a young clerk in her father's law office, helped to guide her in the development of her literary taste and her independent-minded spiritual sensibility, and was also the first to recognize her talent and encourage her poetic aspirations. Even after he married and moved away from Amherst, they continued to write to one another, and his death in 1853 at the age of thirty-two was the first of many bereavements that Dickinson would endure; the cruelest was the death in 1883 of her beloved nephew Gilbert, Austin's eight-year-old son. |
With the passing of time, Dickinson's social life began to be carried on less through personal contact than through correspondence. Her letters, like her poems, display a witty and constantly stimulated mind expressing itself in effortlessly fresh and inventive turns of phrase. As she matured, she became increasingly aware of the gap between herself and her family in intellectual and religious attitudes. Hers was a profoundly religious sensibility, but not at all a conventional one. She caused something of a stir as a young woman by her refusal to accept the God of her parents. Accepting things as they were, or as the majority of people saw them, was never quite her style. It was unthinkable in nineteenth-century New England for a well-bred, unmarried young woman to live on her own, so in effect the only direction in which Emily could move was inward. Luckily for her, the New England tradition, however rigid it might be in many ways, had at its best always included a healthy tolerance for personal eccentricity, and her parents, although largely uncomprehending, were quite indulgent toward their "peculiar" daughter. As a young girl, she regarded them with affectionate bemusement; in her maturity, she came to appreciate and to sympathize with the sadness inherent in their constrained lives.
What some consider the most significant emotional occurrence in her life is an event totally lost to history, if it took place at all. She is assumed to have undergone a crisis in the early 1860s, culminating in 1862, in which single year she wrote the phenomenal total of 366 poems. This crisis is usually ascribed to a failed romantic relationship. Speculation has centered on several married men of her acquaintance, including the Reverend Charles Wadsworth and Judge Otis Lord, but no conclusive evidence exists to support any of these claims. In recent years, there has been a movement away from these essentially fruitless biographical musings to a more direct focus on the poetry itself.
Emily Dickinson's was the most wholly private literary career of any major American writer. One of her poems, a valentine, appeared in the Amherst College Indicator in February 1850, and another valentine was published in the Springfield Republican, a newspaper, in February 1852. At various times in the 1860s, the Republican would print four more of her poems, out of nearly forty that she sent to Samuel Bowles, one of the paper's editors and also one of the proposed candidates for her supposed love interest. Among these four were three of her most famous works: "I taste a liquor never brewed," "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass." Another poem was published in 1866 in a New York journal called The Round Table, and in 1878 "Success is counted sweetest" appeared anonymously, like all the contributions to the volume, in an anthology entitled A Masque of Poets. Thus, over her entire lifetime, she published only eight of the 1,775 poems she is known to have written. |  Samuel Bowles |
Her only other serious attempt at publication—or, at the very least, validation—came in 1862, when she wrote to the well-known literary figure Thomas Wentworth Higginson (yet another, albeit unlikely, nominee for the object of her affections) in response to his "Advice to a Young Contributor" in the April 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Emboldened by his seeming receptivity to new writers, both male and female, she sent him four of her poems, asking "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Even though they would correspond regularly, and Higginson would visit her in Amherst in 1870 and again in 1873, he did not encourage her to publish her work. Like many another representative of the conservative poetic taste of the time, he was less impressed by the power and originality of her work than he was put off by her violations of the rules of "correct" versification—her eccentric punctuation and capitalization, her irregular rhythms and slant rhymes, and her unique phrasing. Robert Lowell's famous line in a poem to his friend John Berryman, "John, we used the language as if we made it," was infinitely more true of Dickinson than it was of either Berryman or Lowell.
Dickinson had sufficient strength of purpose to value her artistic integrity over any desire for publication and fame. Rather than conform herself to Higginson's and the prevailing culture's expectations, she chose to forego a public career and continue to write her poetry in her own style. Her interest in publication, even on her own terms, apparently receded with the years. In the 1870s, the writer and editor Helen Hunt Jackson, a close friend who recognized Dickinson's genius despite the conventionality of her own poetry, repeatedly sought to publish Dickinson's work, but except for the single lyric that appeared anonymously in A Masque of Poets, her efforts were in vain.
There was one other person—also, significantly, a woman—who recognized the greatness of Dickinson's work during the author's lifetime. This was Mabel Loomis Todd, the vivacious young wife of an astronomy professor who had relocated to Amherst in August 1881. Approximately one year later, she began a notorious love affair with Emily's brother Austin which would continue until his death in 1895, a relationship that would seriously affect not only the families of both lovers but also the posthumous editing and publication of Emily's poetry. After Emily's death, her sister Lavinia discovered the manuscripts of more than one thousand poems in Emily's bedroom, and enlisted Mabel Todd's help in seeking their publication. In cooperation with Higginson, Todd prepared three substantial volumes of poems for the press, although the texts were rather heavily edited, rewritten to make them more palatable to traditional expectations of rhyme, meter, and diction. With much of the poetry still unpublished, a quarrel over real estate led to an estrangement between Lavinia Dickinson and Mabel Todd, with each remaining in possession of a portion of the manuscripts. When publication of the poetry was resumed years later, it was under the editorship of Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Austin's daughter.
It was not until 1955, a century and a quarter after the poet's birth, that all of Emily Dickinson's poems were published together in one edition, transcribed directly from her own manuscripts and printed exactly as she had written them, without editorial "improvements." Two books—Ancestors' Brocades (1945) by Millicent Todd Bingham, the daughter of Mabel Loomis Todd, and The Editing of Emily Dickinson (1967) by R. W. Franklin—recount the absorbing literary and human drama of Dickinson's publication history.
The last years of Dickinson's life saw the deaths of many of the people close to her—her mother and Reverend Wadsworth in 1882, Judge Lord in 1884, and Helen Hunt Jackson in 1885. Her own death, from kidney disease, came on May 15, 1886, when she was fifty-five years old. The first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, with two further selections appearing in 1891 and 1896, although it would take until 1945 for all of her poetry to find its way into print. From the beginning, her work received wide notice and enthusiastic response. Willis J. Buckingham's Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (1989) reprints nearly six hundred references, a great many of them strongly positive.
Her literary legacy is immense. She is, with Walt Whitman, one of the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century. In many ways they are opposites: his long (at times long-winded) lines, social inclusiveness, and democratic optimism contrast sharply with her compressed and elliptical structures, unique perspective, and chill appraisal of human isolation and vulnerability. But, in their very different ways, both are bold thematic and technical innovators, not only saying new things but devising new ways in which to say them. Dickinson's work began to appear at just the right historical moment, when the careers of the great nineteenth-century poets were ended and the traditions they represented were exhausted, when it was clear that some new direction was needed--and just such a direction was provided by the exciting experiments in sound and in sensibility of a stubborn, isolated, brilliant poet from Amherst, Massachusetts.
Additional Resources: The online Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about Emily Dickinson. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Dickinson Links.
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