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There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
~ Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.
~ Emily Dickinson
Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.
~ Emily Dickinson |
Quick Facts
Full Name: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Born: December 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died: May 15, 1886, Amherst (aged 55)
Cause of Death: “Bright's Disease,” a general diagnosis that included hypertensive symptoms, as well as symptoms of nephritis, a disease of the kidneys.
Emily Dickinson was an American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. Critics widely rank Dickinson among the two leading 19th-century American poets. The other is Walt Whitman.
In her lifetime, publishers published only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems! Dickinson sent hundreds of poems to friends and correspondents while apparently keeping the greater number of her poems to herself. She habitually worked in verse forms suggesting hymns and ballads, with lines of three or four stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes show both experimentation and the influence of 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even grammar, and in the intellectual content of her work, she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original. Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic brilliance, and lack of polish.
Her Early Years
The second of three children, Dickinson grew up in moderate privilege and had strong local and religious attachments. For her first nine years, she lived in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who had helped found Amherst College but then went bankrupt shortly before her birth. As a prosperous lawyer, Emily’s father, Edward Dickinson, served as the college treasurer and won a term in Congress.
Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, from the leading family in nearby Monson, was an introverted wife and hardworking housekeeper; her letters seem equally inexpressive and quirky. Emily’s parents, though loving, were strict, and she grew close to her siblings, Austin and Lavinia. Never marrying, the two sisters remained at home, and when their brother married, he and his wife established their own household next door. Because of their strikingly different, even odd, personalities, the three siblings maintained a strict distance from one another. Only after the poet’s death did Lavinia and Austin realize how dedicated she was to her art.
Emily’s parents and others saw her as frail and often kept her home from school. Her prodigious composition abilities earned her recognition from teachers and students at the coeducational Amherst Academy. She also excelled in other subjects emphasized by the school, most notably Latin and the sciences. A class in botany inspired her to assemble a herbarium containing numerous pressed plants identified by their Latin names. Despite enjoying her teachers, the atmosphere at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was unappealing to her. Mount Holyoke’s strict rules, invasive religious practices, and her own homesickness and growing rebelliousness help explain why she did not return for a second year.
At home, school, and church, evangelical Calvinism—a faith built on the belief that humans are inherently depraved and can only achieve salvation through a transformative conversion accepting Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice—defined the poet’s early years. Questioning this tradition soon after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson was to be the only member of her family who did not experience conversion or join Amherst’s First Congregational Church. Yet she seems to have kept a belief in the soul’s immortality or at least to have transmuted it into a Romantic quest for the transcendent and absolute. One reason her mature religious views elude specification is that she took no interest in creedal or doctrinal definition. She was influenced by the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mid-century tendencies of liberal Protestant orthodoxy. These influences pushed her toward a more symbolic understanding of religious truth and helped shape her poetry vocation.
Development as a Poet
While Dickinson’s poetic career began in her youth, a few early poems still exist. Among them are two of the burlesque “Valentines”—the exuberantly inventive expressions of affection and esteem she sent to friends of her youth. In the early 1850s, two additional poems contrast reality and a more peaceful ideal: eternity or a serene, imaginative world. She sent all her known early writings to friends, and these writings engage in a striking play of visionary fancies.
Until her mid-20s, Dickinson mostly wrote letters, and a surprising number of those she wrote from age 11 onward survive. Sent to her brother, Austin, or friends of her own sex, these communications overflow with humor, anecdote, invention, and somber reflection. Dickinson seems to have given and demanded more from her correspondents than she received. Occasionally, she interpreted her correspondents’ laxity in replying as evidence of neglect or betrayal. Indeed, the loss of friends, whether through death or cooling interest, became a basic pattern for Dickinson. Underlying much of her poetic and epistolary work is a sense of abandonment and a corresponding struggle to reject, transcend, or analyze solitude.
The Career of Emily Dickinson
In summer 1858, Dickinson began assembling her manuscript-books. She made clean copies of her poems on fine-quality stationery and then sewed small bundles of these sheets together at the fold. Over the next seven years, she created 40 booklets and several other bundles. Altogether, they contained about 800 poems. No doubt she intended to arrange her work conveniently, perhaps for her own use in sending poems to friends. Possibly the assemblage was meant to remain private, like her earlier herbarium. Or perhaps, as implied in a poem of 1863, “This is my letter to the world,” she expected posthumous publication. Since she left no instructions on what to do with her manuscript books, we can only guess her purpose in assembling them.
The Legacy of Emily Dickinson
Dickinson’s exact wishes regarding the publication of her poetry are in dispute. When Lavinia (Emily's sister) found Emily's manuscripts, she decided the poems should be made public and sought to prepare an edition.
Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared in 1890, drew widespread interest and a warm welcome from the eminent American novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who saw the verse as a signal expression of a distinctively American sensibility.
Despite her “modernism,” Dickinson’s verse drew little interest from the first generation of “High Modernists.” From the beginning, however, Dickinson has strongly appealed to many ordinary or unschooled readers. Her unmistakable voice, private yet forthright—“I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?”—establishes an immediate connection.
Readers responded to her poems' impression of a haunting private life, one marked by extremes of deprivation and refined ecstasies. At the same time, her rich abundance, her great range of feeling, and her supple expressiveness testify to an intrinsic poetic genius. Dickinson’s writings have been widely translated into Japanese, Italian, French, German, and many other languages. Dickinson has struck readers as the one American lyric poet who belongs in the pantheon with the likes of Sappho, Catullus, Saʿdī, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Rimbaud.
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Poetry: May 14, 2025 Issue [#13131]
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