Emily Dickinson resembles Shakespeare in the respect that a lack of biographical data frustrates curiosity about the person who could have produced such a body of work, thereby encouraging the invention of theories more grounded in fancy than fact. She is not as remote in time, of course, but at least with Shakespeare his progress in the world may be traced through the real estate transactions to which he was party: as an adult, Dickinson never lived in any house but her father's, and she hardly ever ventured out of it. She never married, and likely died a virgin. At her death, bundles of paper packets of poetry were discovered in a chest, a total of almost 1800 untitled and eccentrically punctuated poems, including:
Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile—the Winds—
To a heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In thee!
She was born on December 10, 1830, at Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father, Edward, was a lawyer, the treasurer of Amherst College, and, for one term, a member of the United States House of Representatives. Her mother seems to have left almost no mark in the world and was an invalid for the last 25 years of her life. From some of her surviving letters, written to friends and relatives, one concludes that Emily found her mother to be a distant, unengaged parent and that she regarded her father with reverence and awe. When he died in 1874, the funeral service was at the house, and Emily, now in her mid-40s, could not bear to attend, choosing instead to listen through an open bedroom door. There were two other children, a girl, Lavinia, who like Emily never married and lived at home, and a boy, Austin, whose marital troubles, eventually involving the wife of an Amherst astronomer, were a small scandal around town.
Edward Dickinson took care that his kids were all educated—considering that two were girls, this was a bit out of the ordinary for the times. We know that Emily's instructors at Amherst Academy had a high opinion of her abilities, and that the curriculum included math, science (her particular interest: botany), classical languages and literature, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Upon graduating at age 17, she enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where, though it was only about nine miles away, she suffered acute homesickness and returned to Amherst after less than a year. This is where the biographical light almost flickers out for a few years. She went on a month-long trip to Washington—her father was in the Congress—and Philadelphia in 1855. The next year she won second place for a bread she entered in a local competition. The year after that, 1857, she was a judge in the same competition. She had been a kind of Valentine's poetess, but sometime around in here she began writing more steadily and seriously. Scholarship has determined that the years of her greatest productivity coincided almost exactly with the Civil War—by one estimate, she wrote 86 poems in 1861, 366 in 1862, 141 in 1863, and 174 in 1864. There seems to be no connection, however, between the national tumult and her apparently feverish literary activity. There is no mention of the war (that I'm aware of) in any of her poems, certainly not in the ones that get printed in anthologies. That they are so short accounts (to a degree) for how she could write about three or four a week for four years, and also makes it easy to set a few down in their entirety. Here's one:
I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!
Angels—twice descending
Reimbursed my store—
Burglar! Banker—Father!
I am poor once more!
And another:
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
I picked these partly for their biographical interest. There's been a lot of effort expended at identifying the two events, but the biographical record supplies only candidates, with the result that the quest goes on. As linguistic performances, these poems are unusual and, in the judgment of time, dazzling. Words of a single syllable abound, but the extreme simplicity is joined to a kind of obliquity of expression. Burglar, banker, father—what's going on here? The standard line of English verse had had ten syllables, which she usually reduces, often in alternate lines, to eight and six: compression. The longer line accommodates some peculiarities of English. In Latin and Greek, nouns are inflected to indicate their grammatical place in a sentence. That is, while we add -s for plural and -'s for possessive, Latin and Greek nouns take different endings depending upon whether they are the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, etc.,—relationships that in English are conveyed by words, usually prepositional phrases that use up syllables and have the effect of dissipating meaning—I mean that the meaning is spread out over too many words, which are however necessary. Thus perhaps the familiar poetic contractions like o'er and e'er: no one talks like that, but they save a syllable. Dickinson eschews "poetic" language. The problem I've alluded to she seems to have solved to her satisfaction by denying that the necessary words are really necessary. The eccentric punctuation, especially the dashes, stand in sometimes for elisions, kind of like they might in the personal letter of a person with a racing mind. This simplicity and compression is her leading technical innovation and gives her best poems a quality of wildness, ferocity. There's something austere, controlled but aggressive, about them—the way, for instance, that in the second poem the simplicity of the seventh line gives way to something even more pared down in the eighth and last line, six emphatic monosyllables landing like blows.
Death is her leading theme but her attitude toward it is inconstant: on different occasions, in different poems, dread, fear, sorrow, something like relief, or even exhilaration, predominate. Her status is such that some of her lines, usually the openings to poems, will sound familiar to people who have never read them.
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
And:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
Her mental health was perhaps not the best. By the late 1860s she almost never left the house. And what an odd household it must have been. The father, a distinguished member of the community; a mother whose health kept her mostly bedridden from the mid-1850s until her death in 1882; and two old maid daughters, one of whom never left the house but would after her death be recognized as one of the country's greatest poets. In 1862, she sent a letter and four of her poems to the literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and asked, in the letter’s first sentence: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" She seems to have had an eye toward publication, but Higginson, though impressed, did not strongly encourage her. He did visit her in Amherst and committed his impressions to his diary:
a step like a pattering child's in entry . . . . a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face . . . with no good feature. . . . She came to me with two day-lilies, which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand and said "These are my introduction," in a soft, frightened, breathless childlike voice—and added under her breath, "Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers and hardly know what to say"—but she talked soon and thenceforth continuously—and deferentially—sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her—but readily recommencing.
In the end, ten of her poems were published during her lifetime. The editorial process tamed them, made them more conventional. Her family may have thought there were no more. She died, age 55, on May 15, 1886. A doctor gave Bright's disease as the cause of death and its duration as 2.5 years. She had instructed Lavinia to burn her letters but said nothing about the poems bound together in the chest. Does this suggest she knew their worth and hoped for what has in fact come to pass? A volume, edited more or less in the manner of the ten poems published in her lifetime, appeared in 1891. Not until 1955 was there published a complete edition of all her poems, following her texts as carefully copied out in the papers and notebooks contained in the chest. A fairly wide selection of her poems can be read online, here.
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