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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May
15, 1886) was an American poet. Though almost
unknown and nearly unpublished in her own
lifetime, Dickinson has since come to be regarded
along with Walt Whitman as one of the two great
American poets of the 19th century. Often called
reclusive, Dickinson lived nearly her whole life
at the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst,
Massachusetts.

Dickinson\'s poetry is often recognizable at a
glance, and is unlike the work of any other poet.
Her facility with ballad and hymn meter, her
extensive use of dashes and unconventional
capitalization in her manuscripts, and her
idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery combine to
create a unique lyric style. Her work was
initially published in heavily-edited form,
finding popularity in the 1890s. Her poetry was
republished in 1955 in a form closer to her
manuscripts. It still appears strikingly modern in
many respects. Her life, about which little is
definitively known, has inspired numerous
biographers and voluminous speculation.

Family background

Dickinson was born in Amherst in western
Massachusetts to a prominent family. The extended
Dickinson family was spread across much of the
Connecticut River Valley and was known for its
work in the local politics, education, and
business. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson
(1775–1838), was one of the founders of Amherst
College, whose campus stands less than a mile from
the family\'s home.

Her father, Edward Dickinson (1803–1874), was a
lawyer and treasurer for the college. He was also
politically prominent, serving on the
Massachusetts General Court from 1838 to 1842, the
Massachusetts Senate from 1842 to 1843, and the
U.S. House of Representatives (to which he was
elected as a Whig candidate in 1852). Among his
projects was extending a railroad into Amherst;
when he succeeded he became for a time the
president of the Amherst & Belchertown Railroad.
Edward Dickinson has often been described as a
stern patriarch, even as a household tyrant; other
biographers have disagreed, though, calling him a
good father by 19th-century standards though a bit
distant, professional, and cold. He was, in any
case, well-educated and well-read, valued
education for his daughters as well as his son,
and had a wide circle of social contacts among
America\'s powerful and learned classes.

His wife, and the poet\'s mother, was Emily
Norcross Dickinson (1804–1882). She was quiet and
deferential, even meek; when her father spoke, the
daughter wrote critically, her mother \"trembled,
obeyed, and was silent.\" Her chronic illness was
a source of anxiety to her children, but the poet
primarily expressed disappointment with her
mother\'s submissive personality.

The poet\'s siblings played important roles in her
life, as friends and companions. William Austin
Dickinson (1829–1895), usually known by his middle
name, was her older brother, later married her
friend Susan Gilbert in 1856 and made his home
next door to the house in which Emily lived most
of her life. He was among Emily Dickinson\'s
closest confidants. Their younger sister, Lavinia
Norcross Dickinson (1833–1899), often known as
\"Vinnie,\" was also close to the poet, and after
her death was largely responsible for the
posthumous editing and publication of her
sister\'s poetry.


Early life

Dickinson lived most of her life in the family\'s
houses in Amherst. She was born in the brick
homestead on Main Street in Amherst, which her
parents then shared with a cousin\'s family;
quarters were close, and as was common in
19th-century America, siblings shared their beds.
In 1840, her father purchased a wood-frame house
on West Street (now North Pleasant Street) about a
mile away, and the family moved into a somewhat
less crowded home. During the poet\'s youth,
Austin, her older brother, bore much of the burden
of his parents\' expectations, though the family
educated both daughters. Some biographers contend
that Edward Dickinson was anxiously overprotective
of his daughters during their childhood (Habegger
75-120).

Beginning in 1840, Emily was educated at the
nearby Amherst Academy, a former boys\' school
which had opened to female students just two years
earlier. She studied English and classical
literature, learning Latin and reading the Aeneid
over several years, and was taught in other
subjects including religion, history, mathematics,
geology, and biology. The academy\'s teachers were
often recent graduates of Amherst College, and its
students sometimes attended lectures there. During
this time, Emily traveled to Boston and Worcester,
visiting family there in 1844 and recuperate from
illness the next year.

At the age of 13, she befriended fellow student
Abiah Palmer Root, and they remained close friends
and correspondents during Dickinson\'s youth. Root
left Amherst in 1845, and thereafter the two
exchanged frequent letters; in 1846, amid the
Second Great Awakening religious revival which
swept through the area, Root was converted while
Dickinson remained unconvinced. The friendship
ended decisively in 1848 when Dickinson\'s
sentiments cooled.

At 17, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon\'s
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which would later
become Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley,
about ten miles from her home. The school was
academically strict, even disciplinarian, and
religiously evangelical, strongly encouraging
conversion. This atmosphere did not prove
completely hospitable for Emily, who was
academically successful and socially content but
remained a spiritual skeptic rather than a
Christian convert. When she again became ill in
the spring, her brother Austin was sent to bring
her home after less than a year at the Seminary,
and she did not return to the school.

After that, she left home only for short trips to
visit relatives in Boston, Cambridge, and
Connecticut. For decades, popular wisdom portrayed
Dickinson as an agoraphobic recluse peeking out
from the attic window and always wearing white.
New scholarship suggests a much wider circle of
influence than previously thought, including
friends and extended family whom Dickinson kept in
contact with through letters and their occasional
visits to her Amherst home.


Loves

Dickinson\'s possible romantic and sexual
attachments have been matters of great controversy
among her biographers and critics. There is little
reliable evidence on which to base a conclusion
about the objects of her affection, though
Dickinson\'s passion is made clear by some of her
poems and letters. Attention has focussed
especially on a group of letters addressed only to
\"Master\" (and so known as the Master letters),
in which Dickinson appears to be writing to a male
lover; neither the addressee of these letters, nor
whether they were sent, has been established.

For a century following her death, immense efforts
were made to speculate about whether any men in
her life might once have been her lovers. Dozens
of men were suggested, and many biographers have
been particularly convinced of the possibility
that Dickinson might have been romantically
involved with the newspaper publisher Samuel
Bowles, or a friend of her father\'s, Judge Otis
Lord. Lord was 18 years older than she, and their
possible romantic relationship, if it existed at
all, probably did not begin until she was over 50
years old.

Biographers have also found evidence that
Dickinson may have had romantic attachments to
women in her younger years, a hypothesis which has
grown in popularity. After a possible short-lived
romance with Emily Fowler circa 1850, some
conjecture that the first major love interest of
Dickinson\'s life was Susan Gilbert, a
schoolteacher whom Dickinson fell in love with in
1851 and to whom she wrote numerous love letters.
All of Gilbert\'s replies were burnt by
Dickinson\'s family after Dickinson\'s death
(possibly to conceal her lesbianism), but
Dickinson\'s letters to Gilbert have survived. The
following is excerpted from a letter from
Dickinson to Gilbert in late April 1852.

        Sweet Hour, blessed Hour, to carry me to
you, and to bring you back to me, long enough to
snatch one kiss, and whisper Good bye, again.
        I have thought of it all day, Susie, and I
fear of but little else, and when I was gone to
meeting it filled my mind so full, I could not
find a chink to put the worthy pastor; when he
said \"Our Heavenly Father,\" I said \"Oh Darling
Sue\"; when he read the 100th Psalm, I kept saying
your precious letter all over to myself, and
Susie, when they sang—it would have made you laugh
to hear one little voice, piping to the departed.
I made up words and kept singing how I loved you,
and you had gone, while all the rest of the choir
were singing Hallelujahs. I presume nobody heard
me, because I sang so small, but it was a kind of
a comfort to think I might put them out, singing
of you. I a\'nt there this afternoon, tho\',
because I am here, writing a little letter to my
dear Sue, and I am very happy. I think of ten
weeks—Dear One, and I think of love, and you, and
my heart grows full and warm, and my breath stands
still. The sun does\'nt shine at all, but I can
feel a sunshine stealing into my soul and making
it all summer, and every thorn, a rose. And I pray
that such summer\'s sun shine on my Absent One,
and cause her bird to sing!

Gilbert married Dickinson\'s brother Austin
Dickinson in 1856, and some think this broke
Emily\'s heart. The correspondence between them
ceased for two years, and so few traces have been
found of what Emily did during that period that
some biographers have speculated that she may have
had a nervous breakdown.

Emily reconciled with Susan Gilbert in 1858 and
resumed correspondence with her in a different
tone, asking Gilbert to critique her poems, which
at this time she began working harder at than
ever. Dickinson went on to romance a variety of
other women, whose names she summed up thus in a
March 1859 letter to one of them, Catherine Scott
Turner: \"I never missed a Kate before,—Two
Sues—Eliza and a Martha, comprehend my girls.\"

Another possible argument adduced in support of
her love of women is Dickinson\'s propensity to
play with gender signifiers in her letters. She
referred to herself in either the text or the
signature of many of her letters with various
names including \"Emily,\" \"Emilie,\" \"Uncle
Emily,\" and \"Brother Emily.\"

Dickinson died of what would today be called
nephritis. Her last words were: \"I must go in,
for the fog is rising.\"


Dickinson\'s poems

During a religious revival that swept Western
Massachusetts during the decades of 1840-50,
Dickinson found her vocation as a poet. One of her
biographers has suggested that Dickinson thought
of becoming a poet in the Biblical terms of Jacob
wrestling with the angel.

Most of her work is not only reflective of the
small moments of what happens around her, but also
of the larger battles and themes of what was
happening in the larger society. For example, over
half of her poems were written during the years of
the American Civil War. In the words of one of her
most memorable lines, Dickinson\'s poems tell all
the truth but tell it slant:

        Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
        Success in Circuit lies
        Too bright for our infirm Delight
        The Truth\'s superb surprise

        As Lightning to the Children eased
        With explanation kind
        The Truth must dazzle gradually
        Or everyman be blind—

Dickinson toyed briefly with the idea of having
her poems published, even asking Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, a literary critic and family friend,
for advice. Higginson immediately realized the
young poet\'s talent, but when he tried to
\"improve\" Dickinson\'s poems, adapting them to
the more florid, romantic style popular at the
time, Dickinson quickly lost interest in the
project.

By the time of her death, only ten of Dickinson\'s
poems (which number almost 1800) had been
published. Three posthumous collections in the
1890s established her as a powerful eccentric, but
it wasn\'t until the twentieth century that she
was truly appreciated as one of the greatest
American poets.


Posthumous publication

Dickinson\'s poetry was collected after her death
by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, with Todd
initially collecting and organizing the material
and Higginson editing. They edited the poems
extensively in order to regularize the
manuscripts\' punctuation and capitalization to
late nineteenth-century standards, occasionally
also rewording poems to reduce Dickinson\'s
obliquity. A volume of Dickinson\'s Poems was
published in Boston in 1890, and became quite
popular; by the end of 1892 eleven editions had
sold. 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, heavily edited and selected by Todd (who
falsified dates on some of them), were published
in 1894. This wave of posthumous publications was
Dickinson\'s poetry\'s first real public exposure,
and it found an immediate audience. Backed by
Higginson and William Dean Howells with favorable
notices and reviews, the poetry was popular from
1890 to 1892; later in the decade, though, the
critical opinion (which had from the first been
mixed) shifted toward the negative, as poetry
readers of the 1890s disliked its
\"formlessness,\" unclear grammar, and half-rhyme.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich published an influential
negative review anonymously in the January 1892
Atlantic Monthly:

    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 — I don\'t know how to designate them —
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. (in Buckingham 281-282)

In the early 20th century, Dickinson\'s niece,
Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published a series of
further 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, Further Poems of Emily
Dickinson in 1929. Other volumes edited by Todd
and Bianchi emerged through the 1930s, releasing
gradually more previously unpublished poems. With
the rise of modernist poetry, Dickinson\'s failure
to conform to nineteenth-century ideas of poetic
form was no longer so surprising or distasteful to
new generations of readers. And a new wave of
feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her
as a woman poet. Her stock had clearly risen, but
Dickinson was not generally thought a great poet
among the first generation of modernists, as is
clear from R.P. Blackmur\'s critical essay of
1937:

    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. (195)

The texts of these early editions would hardly be
recognized by later readers, though, as their
extensive editing had altered the texts found in
Dickinson\'s manuscripts substantially. 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, and provided the Dickinson known to
readers thereafter: the poems were untitled, only
numbered in an approximate chronological sequence,
were strewn with dashes and irregularly
capitalized, and were often extremely elliptical
in their language. They were printed for the first
time much more 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. Possibly 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 multiple
typographic symbols of varying length and angle;
even 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. Some scholars
claimed that the poems should be studied by
reading the manuscripts themselves (which have
subsequently also become available in facsimile,
for those interested in an unmediated reading of
Dickinson\'s own texts).


See also

    * Identification of Emily Dickinson poems
    * List of Emily Dickinson poems



References

    * Blackmur, R.P.. \"Emily Dickinson: Notes on
Prejudice and Fact (1937).\" In Selected Essays,
ed. Denis Donoghue. New York: Ecco, 1986.
    * Buckingham, Willis J., ed. Emily
Dickinson\'s Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary
History. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8229-3604-6. A sourcebook
containing a comprehensive selection of reviews
and notices for the initial 1890s publications of
Dickinson\'s poetry; the most complete volume of
source material on the poems\' initial reception.
    * Crumbley, Paul. Inflections of the Pen: Dash
and Voice in Emily Dickinson. Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Claiming
several angles and lengths of dash in Dickinson\'s
manuscripts are significant, argues for
interpreters to inspect the poems\' handwritten
text. The book itself uses a variety of
typographic symbols to approximate Dickinson\'s
written dashes.
    * Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of
Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston:
Little, Brown, and Company, 1960. ISBN
0-316-18413-6 (and others). The standard text of
Dickinson\'s poetry.
          o The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R.W.
Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998. A more
recent text which may be supplanting Johnson\'s
edition as the new scholarly standard, this
three-volume variorum edition was followed by a
one-volume 1999 \"Reading Edition\" without
textual variants and scholarly apparatus. The
chronology of the poems in this edition is based
on extensive analysis of the poet\'s handwriting
and is probably better-established than earlier
ones, though there remains some uncertainty.
          o The Manuscript Books of Emily
Dickinson. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap, 1981. Facsimile edition of many of
Dickinson\'s manuscripts, bound into fascicles as
she first assembled them. In two large volumes.
    * Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in
Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York:
Random House, 2001. A recent popular biography.
    * Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An
Interpretive Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap,
1955.
    * Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily
Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux,
1974. ISBN 0-374-51581-9. The standard biography,
running to more than 800 pages and covering most
topics of importance to Dickinson\'s life and
family.