Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Largely unpublished and unknown during her lifetime, her work is now widely regarded as canonical. Her poems have a unique style, piercing intelligence and wit.
Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts to a prominent family. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years, and briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning home to Amherst.
Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, during her lifetime only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published. Those publications were severely edited to fit poetic conventions of the time. Today her poems are recognized as groundbreaking with their short acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and use of slant or off-rhyme. Her poetry deals with nature and mortality, primarily.
Few in Dickinson's circle were aware of her writing until after her death, when her younger sister Lavinia discovered the poems in her desk. First published as a selection in 1890, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd,the poems were significantly altered to fit the prevailing fashion. Not until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson compiled a complete collection of her poetry, "The Poems of Emily Dickinson," was Dickinson's work restored closer to her original intention. The collection garnered wide recognition for her innovating talent, a regard that continues to this day.
At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, Some scholars believe censorship helped to obscure the nature of Emily and Susan's relationship, which has been interpreted as romantic.
Life
Family and early childhood
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the family's homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a prominent, but not wealthy, family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer in Amherst and a trustee of Amherst College.Two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered. Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College. In 1813, he built the Homestead, a large mansion on Amherst's main street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century.
Samuel Dickinson's eldest son, Edward, was treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Massachusetts Senate, and represented Massachusetts's 10th congressional district in the 33rd U.S. Congress. On May 6, 1828, he married Emily Norcross from Monson, Massachusetts. They had three children: William Austin, known as Austin, Aust or Awe; Emily Elizabeth; and Lavinia Norcross, known as Lavinia or Vinnie.
She was also a distant cousin to Baxter Dickinson and his family, including his grandson, the organist and composer Clarence Dickinson.
On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Dickinson's Aunt Lavinia described her as "perfectly well and contented—She is a very good child and but little trouble." Dickinson's aunt also noted the girl's affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano, which she called "the moosic".
Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street. Her education was "ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl". Wanting his children to be well-educated, her father followed their progress even while away on business. When Dickinson was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to "keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned".
While Dickinson consistently described her father warmly, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a confidante, Dickinson wrote she "always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me. She was an awful Mother, but I liked her better than none."
On September 7, 1840, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia started together at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had opened to female students just two years earlier. At about the same time, her father purchased a house on North Pleasant Street. Dickinson's brother Austin later described this large new home as the "mansion" over which he and Dickinson 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".
Teenage years
Dickinson spent seven years at the academy, taking classes in English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, "mental philosophy," and arithmetic. Daniel Taggart Fiske, the school's principal at the time, later recalled that Dickinson was "very bright" and "an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties". Although she took a few terms off due to illness—the longest of which was in 1845–1846, when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks—she enjoyed her strenuous studies, writing to a friend that the academy was "a very fine school".Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the "deepening menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and a close friend, grew ill from typhus and died in April 1844, Dickinson was traumatized. Recalling the incident two years later, she 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." She became so melancholic that her parents sent her to stay with family in Boston to recover. With her health and spirits restored, she soon returned to Amherst Academy to continue her studies. During this period, she met people who were to become lifelong friends and correspondents, such as Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Huntington Gilbert, who later married Dickinson's brother Austin.
In 1845, a religious revival took place in Amherst, resulting in 46 confessions of faith among Dickinson's peers. Dickinson wrote to a friend the following year: "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 it was her "greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers." The experience did not last: Dickinson never made a formal declaration of faith, and attended services regularly for only a few years. After her church-going ended, about 1852, she wrote a poem opening: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home".
During the last year of her stay at the academy, Dickinson became friendly with Leonard Humphrey, its popular new young principal. 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 from Amherst. She stayed at the seminary for only ten months. Although she liked the girls at Mount Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there. The explanations for her brief stay at Mount 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 reasons for leaving Mount Holyoke, her brother Austin appeared on March 25, 1848, to "bring home at all events". Back in Amherst, Dickinson occupied her time with household activities. She took up baking for the family and enjoyed attending local events and activities in the budding college town.
Early influences and writing
When she was eighteen, Dickinson's family befriended a young attorney, Benjamin Franklin Newton. According to a letter written by Dickinson 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". Although their relationship was probably not romantic, Newton was a formative influence and became the second in a series of older men, after Humphrey, that Dickinson referred to, variously as her tutor, preceptor, or master.Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring". Newton held her in high regard, believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw. Biographers believe that Dickinson's statement of 1862—"When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned"—refers to Newton.
Dickinson was familiar with the Bible and contemporary popular literature. She was probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, another gift from Newton. After reading it, she gushed "This then is a book! And there are more of them!". Her brother smuggled a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Kavanagh into the house for her, because her father might disapprove. and a friend lent her Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in late 1849. Jane Eyres influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him "Carlo" after the character St. John Rivers' dog. William Shakespeare was also a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote to one friend, "Why clasp any hand but this?" and to another, "Why is any other book needed?"
Adulthood and seclusion
In early 1850, Dickinson wrote, "Amherst is alive with fun this winter... Oh, a very great town this is!". Her high spirits soon turned to melancholy after another death. The Amherst Academy principal, Leonard Humphrey, died suddenly of "brain congestion" at age 25. Two years after his death, she revealed to her friend Abiah Root the extent of her sadness:... 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.
In the 1850s, Dickinson's strongest and most affectionate relationship was with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, who married Dickinson's brother Austin in 1856 after a four-year courtship, though their marriage was not a happy one. Edward Dickinson built a house for Austin which Gilbert named the Evergreens, a stand of which was located on the west side of the Homestead.
Dickinson eventually sent Susan Gilbert over three hundred letters, more than to any other correspondent, over the course of their relationship. Susan was supportive of the poet, playing the role of "most beloved friend, influence, muse, and adviser" whose editorial suggestions Dickinson sometimes followed. In an 1882 letter to Susan, Dickinson said, "With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living."
The importance of Dickinson's relationship with Susan Gilbert has been widely overlooked due to a point of view first promoted by Mabel Loomis Todd, who was involved for many years in a relationship with Austin Dickinson and who diminished Gilbert's role in Dickinson's life due to her own poor relationship with Gilbert, her lover's wife.
In 1998, The New York Times reported on a study in which infrared technology revealed that certain poems of Dickinson's had been deliberately censored to exclude the name "Susan". Dickinson's dedications of 11 poems to Susan Gilbert were deliberately censored, presumably by Todd, Gilbert's romantic rival.
The notion of a "cruel" Susan - as promoted by Todd - has been questioned, most especially by Dickinson's nieces and nephews, with whom Dickinson was close. Many scholars interpret the relationship between Emily and Susan as a romantic one. In The Emily Dickinson Journal Lena Koski wrote, "Dickinson's letters to Gilbert express strong homoerotic feelings." She quotes from many of their letters, including one from 1852 in which Dickinson proclaims,
Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to? I hope for you so much and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you—that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast my darling, so near I seem to you, that I disdain this pen, and wait for a warmer language.
The relationship between Emily and Susan is portrayed in the film Wild Nights with Emily and explored in the TV series Dickinson.
Until 1855, Dickinson had not strayed far from Amherst. That spring, accompanied by her mother and sister, she took one of her longest and farthest trips away from home. First, they spent three weeks in Washington, where her father was representing Massachusetts in Congress, then travelled to Philadelphia for two weeks to visit family. While in Philadelphia, she met Charles Wadsworth, a famous minister of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, with whom she forged a strong friendship that lasted until he died in 1882. Despite seeing him only twice after 1855, she variously referred to him as "my Philadelphia", "my Clergyman", "my dearest earthly friend" and "my Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood".
From the mid-1850s, Dickinson's mother became effectively bedridden with chronic illnesses until she died in 1882. Writing to a friend in the summer of 1858, Dickinson said 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 more heavily upon her and she confined herself within the Homestead. Forty years later, Lavinia said that because their mother was chronically ill, one of the daughters had to remain always with her. Dickinson took 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, Dickinson 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 to 1865 eventually held nearly eight hundred poems. No one was aware of the existence of these books until after her death.
In the late 1850s, the Dickinsons befriended Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, and his wife Mary. They visited the Dickinsons regularly for years to come. During this time, Dickinson sent him over three dozen letters and nearly fifty poems. Their friendship brought out some of her most intense writing and Bowles published a few of her poems in his journal. It was from 1858 to 1861 that Dickinson is believed to have written a trio of letters that have been called "The Master Letters". These three letters, drafted to an unknown man simply referred to as "Master", continue to be the subject of speculation and contention amongst scholars.
Dickinson also became friends with Springfield Republican Assistant Editor J. G. Holland and his wife and frequently corresponded with them. She was a guest at their Springfield home on numerous occasions. Dickinson sent more than ninety letters to the Hollands between 1853 and 1886 in which she shares "the details of life that one would impart to a close family member: the status of the garden, the health and activities of members of the household, references to recently-read books."
Dickinson was a poet "influenced by transcendentalism and dark romanticism," and her work bridged "the gap to Realism." Of the ten poems published in her lifetime, the Springfield Republican published five, with Sam Bowles and Josiah Holland as editors, between 1852 and 1866. Some scholars believe that Bowles promoted her the most; Dickinson wrote letters and sent her poems to both men. Later, as editor of Scribner's Monthly beginning in 1870, Holland told Dickinson's childhood friend Emily Fowler Ford that he had "some poems of under consideration for publication —but they really are not suitable—they are too ethereal."
The first half of the 1860s, after she had largely withdrawn from social life, proved to be Dickinson's most productive writing period. Modern scholars and researchers are divided as to the cause for Dickinson's withdrawal and extreme seclusion. While she was diagnosed as having "nervous prostration" by a physician during her lifetime, some today believe she may have suffered from illnesses as various as agoraphobia and epilepsy. Julie Brown, writing in Writers on the Spectrum, argues that Dickinson had Autism Spectrum Disorder, but this is generally regarded as being more speculation than a retrospective diagnosis, and although the theory has been echoed on the internet especially, it has not been advanced by Dickinson scholars.