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Emily Dickinson

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Table of Contents

FROM THE PAGES OF THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON

Title Page

EMILY DICKINSON

THE WORLD OF EMILY DICKINSON AND HER POETRY

Introduction

PART ONE - LIFE

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PART TWO - NATURE

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PART THREE - LOVE

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PART FOUR - TIME AND ETERNITY

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PART FIVE - THE SINGLE HOUND

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INSPIRED BY EMILY DICKINSON’S POETRY

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

FOR FURTHER READING

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

FROM THE PAGES OF THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain. (page 8)

Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there were

A day when it was not. (page 16)

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all. (page 22)

For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

To the ecstasy. (page 25)

Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!

Underneath their fine incisions

Stirs the culprit,—Life! (page 28)

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell. (page 56)

We never know how high we are

Till we are called to rise;

And then, if we are true to plan,

Our statures touch the skies. (page 56)

It sounded as if the streets were running,

And then the streets stood still.

Eclipse was all we could see at the window,

And awe was all we could feel. (pages 102-103)

I’ll tell you how the sun rose,—

A ribbon at a time. (page 127)

If certain, when this life was out,

That yours and mine should be,

I’d toss it yonder like a rind,

And taste eternity. (pages 154-155)

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality. (page 200)

They say that “time assuages”,—

Time never did assuage;

An actual suffering strengthens,

As sinews do, with age. (page 233)

Death is the common right

Of toads and men. (pages 257-258)

To be alive is power,

Existence in itself. (page 266)

That Love is all there is,

Is all we know of Love. (page 312)

Published by Barnes & Noble Books

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Emily Dickinson’s poems were first published between 1890 and 1891 in three

volumes, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel L. Todd.

The Single Hound was edited by Dickinson’s niece Martha

Dickinson Bianchi, and published in 1914.

Published in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,

Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,

and For Further Reading.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Note on Emily Dickinson, The World of Emily Dickinson and Her Poetry,

Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, and Comments & Questions

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and

retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-050-1

ISBN-10: 1-59308-050-6

eISBN : 978-1-411-43193-5

LC Control Number 2003106733

Produced and published in conjunction with:

Fine Creative Media, Inc.

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Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

Printed in the United States of America

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

EMILY DICKINSON

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second child of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson. Emily’s family was prosperous and well established in Amherst society: Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was the founder of the prestigious Amherst Academy and a cofounder of Amherst College; her father, Edward, a lawyer and politician, was treasurer of Amherst College. The family lived in Amherst’s first brick building, the Homestead, built by Emily’s grandfather in 1813. Dickinson grew up in a strict religious household governed mainly by her father, who often censored her reading choices.

She attended Amherst Academy until she was seventeen, and then spent a year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College). She studied a diversity of subjects, including botany and horticulture, which would become lifelong interests. Among writers she studied, she was particularly inspired by the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the novelist George Eliot. It was during her year at Mount Holyoke that she began to question, and even to voice dissension from, her father’s strict religious views.

In 1848, when she was eighteen years old, Dickinson left college and returned to the Homestead, where she lived for the rest of her life. She left home for only a few brief trips to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Boston. It was during a trip to Philadelphia that she met her lifelong friend the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. In 1856 her brother, Austin, married Susan Huntington Gilbert, who would become one of Dickinson’s closest friends. The couple moved next door to the Homestead into a house built by Dickinson’s father, the Evergreens. At the Evergreens, Dickinson met and began a correspondence with Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.

Dickinson wrote the bulk of her nearly 1,800 poems during her years at the Homestead. Five of her poems were printed in the Springfield Republican, but Dickinson herself made only one serious attempt at further publication, sending four poems in 1862 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Higginson advised her against publication, saying that the style of her poetry—its unusual rhythm and rhyming—was not commercial. The two continued to correspond, however, and became close friends.

Following the death of her father in 1874, Dickinson became increasingly reclusive, corresponding with friends mainly through letters. She continued writing poetry, and she and her sister, Lavinia, nursed their bedridden mother. Over the next ten years, many of her close friends and family died, including Samuel Bowles, Charles Wadsworth, her mother, and her nephew. In 1884 Dickinson was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a serious kidney disorder. She died from complications of the disease on May 15, 1886.

After Dickinson’s death, Lavinia discovered her sister’s poems, arranged into little packets bundled with string. She gave them to Higginson and her friend Mabel Loomis Todd for editing. The first of three volumes, titled Poems, came out in 1890. A revival of interest in Dickinson’s life and poetry occurred in the late 1950s, when Thomas H. Johnson published the first complete edition of Dickinson’s poems that was faithful in wording and punctuation to her original manuscripts.

THE WORLD OF EMILY DICKINSON AND HER POETRY

1630

Nathaniel Dickinson, the first of Emily Dickinson’s family to arrive in America, settles in New England.

1813

Dickinson’s grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, builds the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts; the town’s first brick house, it will be Dickinson’s home for most of her life.

1814

Samuel Fowler Dickinson founds Amherst Academy, which quickly becomes a leading preparatory school in western Massachusetts.

1821

He cofounds the Amherst Collegiate Institution, renamed Amherst College in 1825.

1830

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson is born on December 10, the second child of Edward Dickinson, a prominent lawyer, and Emily Norcross Dickinson

1835

Edward Dickinson is appointed treasurer of Amherst College.

1840

The Dickinsons move from the Homestead to North Pleasant Street. In the fall Emily and her sister, Lavinia, enter Amherst Academy. Emily is particularly influenced by a teacher, Edward Hitchcock, who emphasizes both religion and science in his lectures and writings.

1847

She attends Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley, Massachusetts. At Mount Holyoke, she begins to question her father’s Puritanical religious convictions.

1848

In the fall Dickinson leaves Mount Holyoke and moves back into her father’s home. She becomes friends with Ben Newton, a young lawyer in her father’s office.

1850

Her brother, Austin, begins courting Susan Huntington Gilbert, with whom Dickinson develops an intimate correspondence. Ben Newton gives her a copy of Emerson’s poems for Christmas.

1853

Ben Newton’s death on March 24 has a profound effect on Dickinson.

1855

Dickinson makes a brief trip with her sister and father to Philadelphia; she meets the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who becomes a close friend and correspondent. Edward Dickinson repurchases the Homestead ; he builds an addition to the house, including a conservatory for Emily’s exotic plants.

1856

Austin Dickinson and Susan Gilbert marry; they move into the Evergreens, a house adjacent to the Homestead built for them by Edward as a wedding present.

1858

At the Evergreens, Dickinson meets the literary editor and critic Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield

Republican

; they begin a correspondence.

1861

The Civil War breaks out.

1855

Dickinson sends four of her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, poetry editor of the

Atlantic Monthly.

He advises her to regularize the “rough rhythms” and “imperfect rhymes” of her poetry, which he thinks damage its commercial potential. She instead chooses not to publish her works. Dickinson and Higginson begin a correspondence that lasts twenty years.

1864

Dickinson makes two trips to Boston over the next two years to visit an eye specialist. These are the last times she leaves Amherst.

1874

Dickinson’s father dies in Boston on June 16. With his death, Dickinson becomes more reclusive, keeping contact with friends and family mainly through letters. She and Lavinia maintain the Homestead and nurse their invalid mother.

1878

Samuel Bowles dies on January 16.

1882

Charles Wadsworth dies on April 1; Dickinson’s mother also dies this year, on November 14.

1883

Dickinson’s nephew Gilbert, the son of Austin and Susan Gilbert, dies.

1884

On June 14 Dickinson suffers her first attack of Bright’s disease, a serious kidney disorder.

1886

Dickinson dies on May 15. Among those attending her funeral is her lifelong friend and mentor Thomas Higginson.

1890

Lavinia finds Dickinson’s poems, untitled and bundled into fascicles (sewn paper booklets). She gives them to Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, another friend of Dickinson‘s, for editing. The first of three volumes titled Poems is published (the other two are published in 1891 and 1896). The manuscripts are then kept in storage for the next sixty years.

1894

Letters of Emily Dickinson,

edited by Mabel Todd, is published.

1899

Lavinia dies in 1899.

1914

An edition of Dickinson’s poetry

—The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime—

edited by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi is published.

1955

Thomas H. Johnson rediscovers Dickinson’s original poems; he publishes The Poems of Emily

Dickinson,

the first complete collection of her poetry that is free from editorial revisions. The book’s publication leads to a renewed interest in Dickinson’s poetry.

1963

The Homestead is designated a National Historic Landmark.

1965

Amherst College purchases the Homestead and opens the house as the Emily Dickinson Museum.

1977

The State of Massachusetts establishes the Emily Dickinson Historic District, which includes the Homestead, the Evergreens, and surrounding properties.

INTRODUCTION

Emily Dickinson, writing to the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson in July 1862, reported that she “had no portrait,” but offered the following description in place of one: “Small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well?” (Selected Letters, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, p. 175; see “For Further Reading”). Despite Dickinson’s claim, we do possess one photograph of her—a daguerreotype taken in 1847 or 1848, when she was in her late teens. The image certainly confirms her self-portrait: Her frame is tiny; her shiny hair does indeed sit boldly atop her head; and her dark eyes really do glisten like liquor at the bottom of a glass.

The photograph also suggests many of the rich puzzles and paradoxes that have informed our view of Dickinson since the last decade of the nineteenth century, when readers and critics began to read, study, and obsess over her poems. Dickinson’s body, with its delicate hands and slender torso, may resemble the fragile form of someone too weak to venture far from home; but her huge moist eyes stare at us with the wisdom, depth, and longing of a woman who has traveled around the world and come back with stories, not all of them fit for mixed company. She demurely clutches a bouquet of flowers, and a book rests primly at her side; but her full, sensuous lips reveal a person whose thoughts may not always tend toward such tidy subjects as flowers and books. We look away from the photograph intrigued and stirred: What’s going on in her mind? How could this slight figure be the author of some of the most passionate love poems, the most searing descriptions of loss, the most haunting religious lyrics ever written?

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, the middle child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson; her brother, Austin, was born in 1829 and her sister, Lavinia, in 1833. Her father, a lawyer, served as treasurer of Amherst College (her grandfather was a cofounder of the college), and also occupied important positions on the General Court of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts State Senate, and the United States House of Representatives. “His Heart,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists” (Selected Letters, p. 223). He was strictly religious (something she would later rebel against), leading the family prayers every day and often censoring her reading; but he also ensured that Dickinson grew up in a household surrounded by books and heated intellectual debates. Her mother was a more shadowy presence ; Dickinson wrote that she “does not care for thought” (Selected Letters, p. 173); more harshly, she claimed, “I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled” (Letters, vol. 2, p. 475). Even so, the Dickinsons remained an extremely close-knit family; after her brother, Austin, married, he and his wife settled right next door.

Dickinson attended the coeducational Amherst Academy from the ages of ten to seventeen, and then went on to the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley. She blossomed there into a social and spirited young woman. The most significant event of her stay occurred at a fundamentalist Calvinist revival meeting, when she was asked to stand and declare herself a Christian and refused. After one year at Mount Holyoke she returned in 1848 to Amherst, where she remained, apart from brief trips to Boston, Cambridge, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., for the rest of her life.

At school and at home, Dickinson received an excellent education. At the Amherst Academy alone she studied the arts, English literature, rhetoric, philosophy, Latin, French, German, history, geography, classics, and the Bible; she also received a firm grounding in the sciences, mathematics, geology, botany, natural history, physiology, and astronomy. At home the Dickinsons’ large and varied library included books by Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Keats, the Brownings, the Brontës, and George Eliot, along with Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language—which for Dickinson would prove one of the most important books of all—and a healthy dose of newspapers and romance novels.

During her early twenties, Dickinson began to dress in white, to leave her house only on rare occasions, and to restrict the circle of her acquaintances until it numbered just a few people. Often speaking to visitors through a screen or from an adjoining room, she soon developed a reputation as a town eccentric. The young Mabel Loomis Todd, having recently moved to Amherst with her husband, David, remarked in a letter to her parents about a strange resident:

I must tell you about the character of Amherst. It is a lady whom all the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. Dickinson, & seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. She has not been outside her house in fifteen years, except once to see a new church, when she crept out at night, & viewed it by moonlight. No one who calls upon her mother & sister ever sees her, but she allows little children once in a great while, & one at a time, to come in, when she gives them cake or candy, or some nicety, for she is very fond of little ones. But more often she lets down the sweetmeat by a string, out of a window, to them. She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful. She writes finely, but no one ever sees her. Her sister... invited me to come & sing to her mother sometime.... People tell me the myth will hear every note—she will be near, but unseen.... Isn’t that like a book? So interesting (Farr, Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 20).

One can hardly blame Todd for being fascinated by such an unusual “character.” But unfortunately, the “myth” she takes such pleasure in describing influenced our later notions of Dickinson much too heavily. Despite her seclusion, a large number of prominent figures came and went through her house. She also developed deep, though largely epistolary, friendships with several people: the clergyman Charles Wadsworth, whom she met in Philadelphia and described as her “dearest earthly friend”; Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican; and Judge Otis Phil lips Lord of Salem, Massachusetts.

During this time Dickinson also began to write poetry. On April 15, 1862, she read in the Atlantic Monthly a “Letter to a Young Contributor,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In the letter Higginson, a man of letters, active abolitionist, and early supporter of women’s rights offered advice to novice writers about finding an audience for their work. Dickinson sent him four poems, along with a letter inquiring “if my Verse is alive?” and telling Higginson, “Should you feel it breathed—and had you leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—” (Selected Letters, p. 171). Although Higginson may have been politically ahead of his time, his literary tastes were not quite as advanced; he suggested that Dickinson revise her unusual punctuation and syntax. Still, their correspondence, which lasted until the last month of her life, seems to have gone a long way toward helping Dickinson feel part of a greater literary community.

Dickinson experienced her most tumultuous decade during the 1860s, when several events took their toll on her: the outbreak of the Civil War, the changed circumstances of several friends (Bowles was sick in Europe, Wadsworth moved to San Francisco, and Higginson served as an officer in the Union Army), and her own severe eye trouble in 1864 and 1865. After the late 1860s she never again left her home. In April 1862 she wrote mysteriously to Higginson, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—” (Selected Letters, p. 172). These lines certainly confirm Dickinson’s difficulties during this time, even though no one knows exactly what her “terror” was. This period, however, proved to be the most productive of Dickinson’s life; between 1860 and 1865 she wrote an average of three hundred poems each year.

Although Dickinson never married, her passionate poems, as well as a series of letters that have come to be called “The Master Letters,” suggest that she may have been deeply in love at least once; it remains in doubt whether the object of her affection was Charles Wadsworth, Otis Lord, her sister-in-law Susan, or indeed any real person.

The last years of Dickinson’s life were sad ones, due to the numerous deaths she experienced. Her father died in 1874, Samuel Bowles in 1878, her nephew Gilbert in 1883, and both Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882. In April 1884 Otis Lord died, and Dickinson herself suffered the first attack of an illness that would prove fatal; she died on May 15, 1886.

With a few exceptions, Dickinson’s poems are quite short, and they consist of stanzas written in what is known as common measure, also called common meter: four iambic lines that alternate between four and three beats. They recall the hymns that would have been intimately familiar to Dickinson from her childhood on. By far the most popular writer of these hymns was Isaac Watts, whose collections of hymns and other books could be found in every New England home. Opening Watts’s Divine Songs for Children (1715), Dickinson would have encountered stanzas like this:

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,

For God hath made them so;

Let bears and lions growl and fight,

For ‘tis their nature, too.

But, children, you should never let

Such angry passions rise;

Your little hands were never made

To tear each other’s eyes.

(from “Against Quarreling and Fighting”)

Another perennially popular example of common measure is the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which begins: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me.” But, although Dickinson’s poems may superficially resemble sternly moralistic or sweetly consoling hymns, a closer look reveals that they are anything but:

The Soul’s superior instants

Occur to Her alone,

When friend and earth’s occasion

Have infinite withdrawn. (p. 275)

Faith is a fine invention

For gentlemen who see;

But microscopes are prudent

In an emergency! (p. 36)

Unfolding as predictably as a hymn, these two stanzas nevertheless show—with their preference for individuality over community, attention to detail over the “invention” of faith—how in Dickinson’s crafty hands form is an occasion for cutting ironies, allowing her poems to enact an ongoing battle between received opinion and “superior instants.” (The abrupt rhythm achieved by her characteristic use of dashes in place of expected punctuation also helps advance the battle; Dickinson’s use of dashes may not always be evident in this edition, as discussed later in this essay.)

Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of rhyme adds even more tension to her deceptively hymn-like poems. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” she famously wrote (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, poem 1129); and she practiced this wily doctrine in almost every poem:

The heart asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;

And then, if it should be

The will of its Inquisitor,

The liberty to die. (p. 10)

This wrenching little poem attains much of its power from Dickinson’s use of “slant rhymes,” or off-rhymes, like “pain-suffering” and “be-die,” which don’t allow the comfort that might come from exact rhymes and instead remind us of life’s conflicts and near misses. Slant rhyme can also be a way to express the pleasure of messiness, the joy of not being able to “Tell all the Truth” once and for all:

To tell the beauty would decrease,

To state the Spell demean,

There is a syllableless sea

Of which it is the sign. (pp. 316-317)

Appropriately for a poem about how not “telling beauty” only increases beauty’s strength, the near-rhymes “demean” and “sign” mirror the inexactness that Dickinson applauds. (The coinage “syllableless” is a good example of Dickinson’s fondness for making up new words when the old ones are not adequate to her needs.)

Dickinson is as ardent a revisionist of syntax as she is of form, as is evident in the following single-stanza poem:

Adventure most unto itself

The Soul condemned to be;

Attended by a Single Hound—

Its own Identity. (p. 264)

Here, by reordering a statement that we might have expected to begin, “The Soul is condemned,” Dickinson can start her poem with her true subject: the terror and the necessity of the soul’s “Adventure.” Similarly, by stripping the poem of verbs (“[is] condemned,” “[It is] attended”), and by boldly capitalizing its final word, “Identity,” she increases its starkness and strangeness. Isaac Watts would be appalled by such stylistic departures from tradition, but it is precisely these quirks that make Dickinson’s poems so continually exciting.

Her liberties extend even further. Rather than begin her poems with elaborate contexts or settings, Dickinson plunges us right away into the pulsing heart of things. Her poems often start with a bold proclamation or definition that the rest of the poem explores : “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul” (p. 22); “Heaven is what I cannot reach!” (p. 53); “Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn” (p. 124). Other poems lead us straight into an extreme situation without warning:

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me. (p. 56)

I felt a cleavage in my mind

As if my brain had split;

I tried to match it, seam by seam,

But could not make them fit. (p. 61)

Wild nights! Wild nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild nights should be

Our luxury! (p. 168)

Her endings can be just as abrupt. Whether a poem takes the form of a riddle, proverb, or narrative—for her genres are just as varied as her use of common measure is uniform—it often ends with a terrifying lack of closure. Two of her most well-known poems make this clear. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” the speaker rides with Death in most leisurely fashion past children at play and the setting sun; but at the poem’s end, time rushes suddenly forward, and the speaker looks back on the scene just described from the sudden vantage point of one who has been dead a long time:

Since then ‘tis centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses’ heads

Were toward eternity. (p. 201)

In “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” Dickinson again assumes the role of a dead person and imagines the “stillness” of the scene around her, then brings the poem to a crashing halt with the following lines, horrifying for their utter absence of comfort or conclusion : “And then the windows failed, and then / I could not see to see” (p. 253).

Point of view in Dickinson’s hands is an unstable thing, too. The majority of her poems feature an “I” who tells stories, describes nature, or dissects belief (142 of them even begin with “I”), and her use of first-person perspective is every bit as innovative as is her handling of form, language, and structure. Writing to Higginson in July 1862, Dickinson remarked, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person” (Selected Letters, p. 176). Thus, in the two poems described above, Dickinson’s narrators are not actual people who lived and died in a specific time and place, but emblematic figures whose deaths might just as well be ours. She also occasionally employs a “we” to narrate, as in the poem “Our journey had advanced” (p. 200).

Perhaps Dickinson’s most radical departures from convention occur in her use of paradox to unsettle our most firmly held opinions and beliefs. As the critic Alfred Kazin writes, “She unsettles, most obviously, by not being easily locatable” (Kazin, “Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson’s Room of Her Own,” p. 164). To enter Dickinson’s world is to step into a scary but electrifying funhouse where paradoxes serve like distorting mirrors to show us new ways of seeing just about everything: love, death, solitude, the soul. Throughout her work, opposites change places: Distance is nearness in disguise; absence is the most vital form of presence; alone-ness is the greatest company. In several painful but illuminating poems, for example, she argues in favor of hunger and longing, maintaining that the lack that occasions desire makes the object of desire all the more precious:

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne‘er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need. (p. 6)

I taste a liquor never brewed,

From tankards scooped in pearl;

Not all the vats upon the Rhine

Yield such an alcohol! (p. 16)

Delight becomes pictorial

When viewed through pain,—

More fair, because impossible

That any gain. (pp. 29-30)

Elsewhere Dickinson uses paradox to destroy and reassemble our notions of other states of being, as when she writes, “Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye” (p. 11), or asserts, “A death-blow is a life-blow to some” (p. 210), or describes just how deep still waters can run:

The reticent volcano keeps

His never slumbering plan;

Confided are his projects pink

To no precarious man. (p. 61)

But for all the paradoxes, a wonderfully direct and opinionated personality emerges from Dickinson’s poems; the more of them we read, the more familiar we become with all her cranky, passionate likes and dislikes. Often she wears her disapproval on her sleeve, as in the following poem:

What soft, cherubic creatures

These gentlewomen are!

One would as soon assault a plush

Or violate a star.

Such dimity convictions,

A horror so refined

Of freckled human nature,

Of Deity ashamed,—

It’s such a common glory,

A fisherman’s degree!

Redemption, brittle lady,

Be so, ashamed of thee. (p. 72)

The poem’s opening lines prepare us for a hymn of praise to these delicate ladies. But Dickinson’s descriptions are double-edged: “Soft” connotes flimsy as well as feminine, and even though “cherubic” likens the women to angels, it also reveals their infantile, diminutive status. As the poem goes on, Dickinson’s mocking scorn becomes more evident: The women are compared to “plush”—the filling of a sofa!—and their “star”-like nature may make them celestial, but it also puts them miserably out of touch with the real world. Their beliefs are as fragile as “dimity,” a sheer cotton fabric; they are so “refined” that they cannot appreciate the rich complexity of “freckled human nature.” As the poem reaches its close, Dickinson grows even harsher, calling the women “brittle” —a far cry from the first stanza’s “soft”—and claiming that “Redemption” is “ashamed” of, and therefore unavailable to, these “creatures” in all their superficiality and passiveness.

Dickinson also disapproves of people who are incapable of feeling or showing emotions:

A face devoid of love or grace,

A hateful, hard, successful face,

A face with which a stone

Would feel as thoroughly at ease

As were they old acquaintances,—

First time together thrown. (p. 58)

If soft flimsiness is a fault in the previous poem, here it is stone-like hardness that Dickinson cannot abide; the face may be a conventionally “successful” one, but Dickinson is outraged by the idea that nothing deeper or richer lurks beneath it. Like the “gentlewomen” poem, with its references to “assaulting” and “violating,” this poem contains hints of violence that reveal the depth of Dickinson’s dislike: The last line conjures an almost wittily surreal image of the face and the stone being recklessly “thrown” at each other.

In two single-stanza poems, Dickinson expresses her strong distaste for still other personality types. She simply cannot understand how people can look at the world and not be fascinated by it:

The Hills erect their purple heads,

The Rivers lean to see-

Yet Man has not, of all the throng,

A curiosity. (p. 287)

She denounces people who don’t know how to keep secrets:

Candor, my tepid Friend,

Come not to play with me!

The Myrrhs and Mochas of the Mind

Are its Iniquity. (p. 311)

While many appreciate directness, for Dickinson—who writes elsewhere in praise of indirection, claiming that “Success in Circuit lies” (Complete Poems, poem 1129)—directness creates a false sense of comfort, an overly perfumed “Myrrh” and a sickeningly sweet “Mocha.”

In rich contrast to these poems, however, are moments in other poems when Dickinson lavishes praise on the types of people and behavior she does like. Pain, in her opinion, reveals people’s depths more than any intrusive “candor”:

I like a look of agony

Because I know it’s true;

Men do not sham convulsion,

Nor simulate a throe.

The eyes glaze once, and that is death.

Impossible to feign

The beads upon the forehead

By homely anguish strung. (pp. 192-193)

Dickinson also heartily approves of those who are willing to put themselves in danger, since it puts them in touch with their own deepest “creases”:

Peril as a possession

’T is good to bear,

Danger disintegrates satiety;

There’s Basis there

Begets an awe,

That searches Human Nature’s creases

As clean as Fire. (pp. 265-266)

She likes people who respect privacy:

The suburbs of a secret

A strategist should keep,

Better than on a dream intrude

To scrutinize the sleep. (pp. 271-272)

And she is utterly smitten with the transporting power of books, a love she reveals in poem after poem:

There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away,

Nor any coursers like a page

Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of toll;

How frugal is the chariot

That bears a human soul! (pp. 57-58)

Even though Dickinson is one of the most difficult poets to interpret, she is also, as these poems reveal, one of the most refreshingly straightforward.

In Dickinson’s work, apparent opposites—hunger and fulfillment, the self and God, death and life—turn out to have more in common than we’d thought. In her more explicitly religious poems, she violently overturns traditional Christian beliefs in order to create her own homespun theology. Despite her revisionary zeal, Dickinson never completely abandons her faith in God: “I know that he exists,” she writes, “Somewhere, in silence” (p. 49). Rather, she is determined to explore new forms that God’s “existence” might take. She is achingly up-front about her desire to know what God is really like:

The Look of Thee, what is it like?

Hast thou a hand or foot,

Or mansion of Identity,

And what is thy Pursuit? (p. 303)

But she also admits the possibility that we have invented the concept of life after death:

Immortal is an ample word

When what we need is by,

But when it leaves us for a time,

’T is a necessity. (p. 241)

She is capable of considerable anger about the rift between humans and God:

Is Heaven a physician?

They say that He can heal;

But medicine posthumous

Is unavailable. (p. 30)

Still, faced with this “unavailable” comfort, Dickinson responds not by giving up faith, but rather by constructing new versions of it. In several poems she asserts that the self’s depths bring us as close to God as we can hope to come, and allow us a glimpse of what she calls “Finite Infinity” (p. 272):

To be alive is power,

Existence in itself,

Without a further function,

Omnipotence enough. (pp. 266-267)

Other poems locate divinity in nature:

The color on the cruising cloud,

The interdicted ground,

Behind the hill, the house behind,—

There Paradise is found! (p. 53)

In the name of the bee

And of the butterfly

And of the breeze, amen! (p. 110)

Whether looking inward or out her window, Dickinson radically replaces the traditional image of a distant, all-powerful God with a local divinity residing right by her side. Although “Some keep the Sabbath going to church,” she writes, “I keep it staying at home.... / So instead of getting to heaven at last, / I’m going all along!” (p. 116). Dickinson never becomes complacent—she remains one of the greatest poets of loss—but she does find great solace in her bravely domestic cosmology:

Who has not found the heaven below

Will fail of it above.

God’s residence is next to mine,

His furniture is love. (p. 58).

Because of her many poems about death—some of which happen to be among her most famous—Dickinson has been unfairly labeled a morbid poet. In fact, her interest in death makes perfect sense for a number of reasons. For one thing, Dickinson’s subject matter is so varied that it would be stranger if she didn’t write about death. Furthermore, as her biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff has pointed out, Dickinson grew up in a culture highly preoccupied with death. Nineteenth-century children were taught to read with the New England Primer, which contained prayers that, as Wolff writes, “served to initiate even the youngest into an acknowledgment of death” (Wolff, Emily Dickinson, p. 69). Deaths from childbirth were extraordinarily common; New England grave-stones frequently represented death with vivid and memorable icons; and deathbed vigils—so eerily described in “I heard a fly buzz” (p. 252)—were practically social events. Not surprisingly, this cultural saturation influenced Dickinson’s poetry. This does not make her morbid; it merely shows how she transformed cultural preoccupations into poetic concerns. If Dickinson is obsessed with death, she is also capable of writing the most life-affirming of poems, as the following poem not included in this edition demonstrates :

Did life’s penurious length

Italicize its sweetness,

The men that daily live

Would stand so deep in joy

That it would clog the cogs

Of that revolving reason

Whose esoteric belt

Protects our sanity. (Complete Poems, poem 1717)

Here, adding her bracing contribution to the carpe diem genre, Dickinson argues that an awareness of death can fill us with an intoxicating, almost crazy joy in being alive. It is one of the least morbid poems ever written.

The long, involved story of the posthumous fate of Dickinson’s poems could fill its own volume. Only seven of her poems were published in her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican. But after her death, her sister Lavinia discovered almost two thousand poems in her desk drawer, many written on scraps of paper or the back of grocery lists, others bound into what were later called “fascicles,” or sewn paper booklets. Lavinia resolved to see them into print. Soon she had persuaded Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson to help her edit the poems, and the three of them approached Robert Brothers, a publishing house in Boston. The first volume of Poems appeared in 1890 and became a bestseller. Already, however, the long history of modifying Dickinson’s poems had begun, with some of her best and strangest lines omitted or changed, sentimental titles attached, rhymes regularized, and syntax standardized. Later editions, including The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (1914), edited by Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi, also distorted the poems. In her acute short poem “Emily Dickinson,” the contemporary British poet Wendy Cope wryly comments on this unfortunate trend:

Higgledy-piggledy

Emily Dickinson

Liked to use dashes

Instead of full stops.

Nowadays, faced with such

Idiosyncrasy,

Critics and editors

Send for the cops.

(Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, p. 23)

Finally, in 1955, Thomas H. Johnson’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson offered readers access to all of Dickinson’s poems, arranged in estimated chronological order and with her idiosyncrasies—slant rhymes, dashes, capitals—intact. Johnson’s restored text went a long way toward undoing the follies of earlier editors. (To take just one example, Todd and Higginson had changed “Because I could not stop for Death” (p. 200) so that the line “Cornice—in the Ground” read “The cornice but a mound,” thereby reducing an eerily sinking grave to a simple pile of dirt.)

For a long while (until the publication in 1999 of an edition of the poems by R. W. Franklin), most readers, scholars, and teachers regarded Johnson’s edition as the authoritative one. But for some, it did not go far enough. The critics Sharon Cameron and Susan Howe, for example, argue that the variant words Dickinson often included at the bottom of a manuscript page should be read as essential parts of the poems; among Dickinson’s myriad innovations, they claim, is a new approach to poetics in which writers and readers need not always choose one word and meanings can proliferate in fruitful mayhem. (Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles, and Howe, My Emily Dickinson). Others have complained that the fascicles should be treated as separate volumes; or that Johnson’s division of most of the poems into quatrains is too sweeping and Dickinson’s stanza divisions are more varied than he allowed. In the original manuscript, for example, the first words of the poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” (p. 96) are on two lines, with “the Grass” set as a separate line against the left margin; Johnson argues that this was due to lack of writing space, but others suggest a more deliberate experimentation with line breaks on Dickinson’s part.

It should be noted that this edition arranges Dickinson’s poems by theme, and regularizes her punctuation and capitalization; readers eager for a version of the poems closer to the manuscripts should seek out Johnson’s edition, as well as the stimulating criticism of Cameron, Howe, and others.

In a poem not included in this edition, Dickinson wrote about the posthumous fate of poets:

The Poets light but Lamps—

Themselves—go out—

The wicks they stimulate—

If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns-

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference—(Complete Poems, poem 883)

Crudely paraphrased, the poem asserts that after poets die, they are interpreted—if they are “vital” enough—in different ways by different people. This has certainly been the case with Dickinson, who has influenced later writers in an astonishing variety of ways.

Hart Crane’s sonnet “To Emily Dickinson,” though it overlooks her wit and range, tenderly invokes a “sweet, dead Silencer”:

You who desired so much—in vain to ask-

Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,

Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—

Achieved that stillness ultimately best.

(Crane, The Poems of Hart Crane, p. 128)

Here and elsewhere, Crane’s obsessive use of dashes shows that Dickinson’s ghost was never far from his side. Archibald MacLeish claimed, somewhat condescendingly, “Most of us are half in love with this girl” (in Bogan, Emily Dickinson: Three Views, p. 20). William Carlos Williams remarked in an interview,

She was an independent spirit... She did her best to get away from too strict an interpretation. And she didn’t want to be confirmed to rhyme or reason.... And she followed the American idiom.... She was a wild girl. She chafed against restraint. But she speaks the spoken language, the idiom, which would be deformed by Oxford English.... She was a real good guy (Williams, Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, p. 169).

Elizabeth Bishop, though she admitted that “I still hate the oh the-pain-of-it-all poems,” noted, “I admire many others” (Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 132).

Confessional poetry, with its harsh excavations of the self’s deepest places, would not be as rich without Dickinson’s example. Robert Frost, though seldom classed as a confessional poet, wrote several poems in which exploration of his “Desert Places” leads him to a terrifying inner antagonist, a “blanker whiteness” (Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 296) that recalls both Dickinson’s customary dress color and her observations: “Pain has an element of blank” (p. 16) and “One need not be a chamber to be haunted” (p. 224). Finding depths within oneself, of course, can be cause for celebration as well as fear, a fact of which Wallace Stevens seems acutely aware in these lines from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”:

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

(Stevens, The Collected Poems, p. 65)

Here, as often happens in Dickinson’s work, the human and the divine change places, and the mind’s capacity is found to be equal or superior to God’s.

Several later poets, like Dickinson before them, make death a character: Anne Sexton titled one of her poems “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Death & Co.” personifies not one but two Deaths. (There are also numerous moments in the work of both poets when they imagine their own deaths.) And the popular poet Billy Collins cheerfully profanes Dickinson’s woman-in-white mystique in “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” describing how

I could plainly hear her inhale

when I undid the very top

hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,

the way some readers sigh when they realize

that Hope has feathers,

that reason is a plank,

that life is a loaded gun

that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

(Collins, Picnic, Lightning, p. 75)

Adrienne Rich, in several striking poems, presents a feisty and determined Dickinson. In the fourth section of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” she portrays her

Reading while waiting

for the iron to heat,

writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,

or, more often,

iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,

dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

(Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, p. 18)

And in “The Spirit of Place,” Rich angrily describes the Emily Dickinson Industry’s invasion of her home:

In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst

cocktails are served the scholars

gather in celebration

their pious or clinical legends

festoon the walls like imitations

of period patterns.

(Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, p. 184)

But despite “The remnants pawed the relics / the cult assembled in the bedroom,” the scholars do not get the last word, for “you whose teeth were set on edge by churches / resist your shrine / escape.” Rich vows that her relationship to Dickinson will be a very different one in which “with the hands of a daughter I would cover you / from all intrusion even my own / saying rest to your ghost” (Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, pp. 184-185).

Dickinson’s widespread influence can perhaps best be seen in poets who are in most ways nothing like her. e.e. cummings, as formally explosive as Dickinson was—at least superficially—conservative, begins one poem in this way:

my father moved through dooms of love

through sames of am through haves of give,

singing each morning out of each night

my father moved through depths of height

(e.e. cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962, p. 520)

cummings’s “dooms of love,” “sames of am,” and “haves of give” recall Dickinson’s peculiar use of the genitive case in a poem in which she describes heaven as “The House of Supposition” that “Skirts the Acres of Perhaps” (Complete Poems, poem 696). In addition, the paradoxes of the third and fourth lines of cummings’s stanza—“each morning out of each night” and “depths of height”—resemble Dickinson’s characteristic trait, discussed earlier, of translating big into small, life into death, and—in the case of poem 696, riches into poverty: “The Wealth I had—contented me—/ If ‘twas a meaner size—”.

Dickinson has even made her way into fiction. Judith Farr’s 1996 novel I Never Came to You in White offers a fictionalized biography of Dickinson. And in A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel Possession: A Romance—a double love story in which two modern academics investigate the secret love affair of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte—Dickinson is the model for the female heroine. At the beginning of the novel, Byatt provides a list of some of the more silly-sounding articles critics have written about her heroine:

They wrote on “Arachne’s Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte.” Or “Melusina and the Daemonic Double : Good Mother, Bad Serpent.” “A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte’s Ambivalent Domesticity” (Byatt, Possession: A Romance, p. 43).

But before long, these limited views of LaMotte give way to a much more rich and complex one, mostly because Byatt lets the poet speak for her eccentric, resourceful self, as in this letter:

I have chosen a Way—dear Friend—I must hold to it. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott—with a Narrower Wisdom—who chooses not the Gulp of Outside Air and the chilly river-journey deathwards—but who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web—to ply an industrious shuttle—to make—something—to close the Shutters and the Peephole too—(Byatt, p. 205).

Dickinson’s influence can be felt everywhere. Writers are in her thrall; every year the Poetry Society of America offers an award “for a poem inspired by Dickinson”; the 2002 Modern Language Association featured several panels on her work; she even has her own International Society. As Dickinson herself predicted, her light may have gone out, but the lenses of later ages keep reflecting and refracting it in all sorts of inventive and unexpected ways. The intense eyes of the young woman in the photograph will keep peering into ours for a very long time.

Rachel Wetzsteon received her doctorate in English from Columbia University in 1999 and is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University. She has published two books of poems, The Other Stars and Home and Away, and has received various awards for her poetry. She currently lives in New York City.

PART ONE

LIFE

THIS is my letter to the world,

That never wrote to me,—

The simple news that Nature told,

With tender majesty.

Her message is committed

To hands I cannot see;

For love of her, sweet countrymen,

Judge tenderly of me!

SUCCESS is counted sweetest

By those who ne‘er succeed.