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• Born: 10 December 1830
• Birthplace: Amherst, Massachusetts
• Died: 15 May 1886
• Best Known As: The poet called "The Belle of Amherst"

Emily Dickinson lived quietly in Amherst, Massachusetts and wrote poetry for most of her adult life. Her verses were short but inventive, and her themes universal: love, death, and her relationship with God and nature. Dickinson was not famous during her lifetime; she rarely left Amherst and according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "after the late 1860s [she] never left the boundaries of the family's property." Dickinson's output was prodigious -- over 1,700 poems in all -- but only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. Her sister Lavinia actively promoted her work after Emily's death in 1886. Poems of Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, and other new editions of her work appeared over the following decades. Once published, Dickinson's words found a worldwide audience, and she is now considered one of America's finest 19th-century poets. Among her best-known poems are "Because I could not stop for Death" and "I cannot live with You."

Famous Dickinson phrases include "It is better to be the hammer than the anvil" and "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune--without the words / And never stops at all"... The Belle of Amherst, a play about Dickinson, debuted on Broadway in 1976. The play was written by William Luce; the title came from a phrase Dickinson once used to describe herself. The Broadway production was directed by Charles Nelson Reilly and won a Tony Award for actress Julie Harris, who played Dickinson.

• Born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, MA
• Died May 15, 1886 in Amherst, MA
• Country: USA

Biography

Emily Dickinson's life has become a legend. She was a reclusive figure who wrote over 1,100 poems and had only seven published during her lifetime, wrote stunning pieces about travel yet traveled only once in her lifetime, had little literary training and yet created some of the most evocative and extraordinary poems ever written, with an astonishingly visionary scope and vivid use of language. While her songs defy easy setting as deftly as they defy easy interpretation, they have nonetheless intrigued and challenged composers, and over 100 have written settings. While the best-known are Aaron Copland's Poems (12) of Emily Dickinson, Samuel Barber, Vincent Persichetti, Leo Smit, Andre Previn, Robert Baksa, Gloria Coates, John Woods Duke, Charles Griffin, Roland Leich, Jake Heggie, and William Jordan have also produced Dickinson settings. Her contributions to music have been so extensive that in 2002, the New Texas Music Works held a three-day Emily Dickinson Song Symposium, consisting of lectures, discussions, and performances. Dickinson had only one extensive absence from her hometown, when she attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, but left after the first year due to ill health, returning to her home to act as her parents' housekeeper. At first, she privately distributed her poems among her friends, but eventually began to send them to publishers, with very little success. However, she corresponded with editors and literary critics about her work and continued to write and store her poems, convinced that they had literary merit that would one day be recognized. ~ Ann Feeney, All Music Guide

One of the finest Iyric poets in the English language, the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wasa keen observer of nature and a wise interpreter of human passion. Her family and friends published most of her work posthumously.

American poetry in the 19th century was rich and varied, ranging from the symbolic fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe through the moralistic quatrains of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to the revolutionary free verse of Walt Whitman. In the privacy of her study Emily Dickinson developed her own forms and pursued her own visions, oblivious of literary fashions and unconcerned with the changing national literature. If she was influenced at all by other writers, they were John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Isaac Watts (his hymns), and the biblical prophets.

Dickinson was born on Dec. 10, 1830, in Amherst, Mass., the eldest daughter of Edward Dickinson, a successful lawyer, member of Congress, and for many years treasurer of Amherst College, and of Emily Norcross Dickinson, a submissive, timid woman. The Dickinsons' only son, William Austin, also a lawyer, succeeded his father as treasurer of the college. Their youngest child, Lavinia, was the chief housekeeper and, like her sister Emily, remained at home, unmarried, all her life. The sixth member of this tightly knit group was Susan Gilbert, an ambitious and witty schoolmate of Emily's, who married Austin in 1856 and moved into the house next door to the Dickinsons. At first she was Emily's confidante and a valued critic of her poetry, but by 1879 Emily was speaking of her "pseudo-sister" and had long since ceased exchanging notes and poems.

Early Education

Amherst in the 1840s was a sleepy village in the lush Connecticut Valley, dominated by the Church and the college. Dickinson was reared in Trinitarian Congregationalism, but she never joined the Church and probably chafed at the austerity of the town. Concerts were rare; card games, dancing, and theater were unheard of. For relaxation she walked the hills with her dog, visited friends, and read. But it is also obvious that Puritan New England bred in her a sharp eye for local color, a love of introspection and self-analysis, and a fortitude that sustained her through years of intense loneliness.

Dickinson graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847. The following year (the longest time she was ever to spend away from home) she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary at South Hadley, but because of her fragile health she did not return. At the age of 17 she settled into the Dickinson home and turned herself into a competent housekeeper and a more than ordinary observer of Amherst life.

Early Work

It is not known when Dickinson began to write poetry or what happened to the poems of her early youth. Only five poems can be dated prior to 1858, the year in which she began gathering her work into hand-written fair copies bound loosely with looped thread to make small packets. She sent these five early poems to friends in letters or as valentines, and one of them was published anonymously without her permission in the Springfield Republican (Feb. 20, 1852). After 1858 she apparently convinced herself she had a genuine talent, for now the packets were carefully stored in an ebony box, awaiting inspection by future readers or even by a publisher.

Publication, however, was not easily arranged. After Dickinson besieged her friend Samuel Bowles, editor of the Republican, with poems and letters for 4 years, he published two poems, both anonymously: "I taste a liquor never brewed" (May 4, 1861) and "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" (March 1, 1862). And the first of these was edited, probably by Bowles, to regularize (and thus, flatten) the rhymes and the punctuation. Dickinson began the poem: "I taste a liquor never brewed - /From Tankards scooped in Pearl - /Not all the Frankfort Berries/Yield such an Alcohol." But Bowles printed: "I taste a liquor never brewed,/From tankards scooped in pearl;/Not Frankfort berries yield the sense/Such a delicious whirl." She used no title; Bowles titled it "The May-Wine." (Only seven poems were published during her lifetime, and all had been altered by editors.)

Friendship with T. W. Higginson

In 1862 Dickinson turned to the literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson for advice about her poems. She had known him only through his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, but in time he became, in her words, her "preceptor" and eventually her "safest friend." She began her first letter to him by asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?" Six years later she was bold enough to say, "You were not aware that you saved my life." They did not meet until 1870, at her urging, surprisingly, and only once more after that. Higginson told his wife, after the first meeting, "I was never with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."

What Dickinson was seeking was assurance as well as advice, and Higginson apparently gave it without knowing it, through a correspondence that lasted the rest of her life. He advised against publishing, but he also kept her abreast of the literary world (indeed, of the outside world, since as early as 1868, she was writing him, "I do not cross my father's ground to any house or town"). He helped her not at all with what mattered most to her - establishing her own private poetic method - but he was a friendly ear and a congenial mentor during the most troubled years of her life. Out of her inner turmoil came rare lyrics in a form that Higginson never really understood - if he had, he would not have tried to "edit" them, either in the 1860s or after her death. Dickinson could not take his "surgery," as she called it, but she took his friendship willingly.

Years of Emotional Crisis

Between 1858 and 1866 Dickinson wrote more than 1100 poems, full of aphorisms, paradoxes, off rhymes, and eccentric grammar. Few are more than 16 lines long, composed in meters based on English hymnology. The major subjects are love and separation, death, nature, and God - but especially love. When she writes "My life closed twice before its close," one can only guess who her real or fancied lovers might have been. Higginson was not one of them. It is more than likely that her first "dear friend" was Benjamin Newton, a young man too poor to marry, who had worked for a few years in her father's law office. He left Amherst for Worcester and died there in 1853.

During a visit to Philadelphia a year later Dickinson met the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. Sixteen years her senior, a brilliant preacher, already married, he was hardly more than a mental image of a lover. There is no doubt she made him this, but nothing more. He visited her once in 1860. When he moved to San Francisco in May 1862, she was in despair. Only a month before, Samuel Bowles had sailed for Europe to recover his health. Little wonder that in her first letter to Higginson she said, "I had a terror … - and so I sing as the Boy does by the Burying Ground - because I am afraid." She needed love, but she had to indulge this need through her poems, perhaps because she felt she could cope with it no other way.

When Bowles returned to Amherst in November, Dickinson was so overwhelmed she remained in her bedroom and sent a note down, " … That you return to us alive is better than a summer, and more to hear your voice below than news of any bird." By the time Wadsworth returned from California in 1870 and resettled in Philadelphia, the crisis was over. His second visit, in 1880, was anticlimax. Higginson had not saved her life; her life was never in danger. What had been in danger was her emotional equilibrium and her control over a talent that was so intense it longed for the eruptions that might have destroyed it.

Last Years

In the last 2 decades of her life Dickinson wrote fewer than 50 poems a year, perhaps because of continuing eye trouble, more probably because she had to take increasing responsibility in running the household. Her father died in 1874, and a year later her mother suffered a paralyzing stroke that left her an invalid until her death. There was little time for poetry, not even for serious consideration of marriage (if it was actually proffered) with a widower and old family friend, Judge Otis Lord. Their love was genuine, but once again the timing was wrong. It was too late to recast her life completely. Her mother died in 1882, Judge Lord 2 years later. Dickinson's health failed noticeably after a nervous collapse in 1884, and on May 15, 1886, she died of nephritis.

Posthumous Publication

How the complete poems of Dickinson were finally gathered is a publishing saga almost too complicated for brief summary. Lavinia Dickinson inherited the ebony box; she asked Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst astronomy professor, to join Higginson in editing the manuscripts. Unfortunately, they felt even then that they had to alter the syntax, smooth the rhymes, cut some lines, and create titles for each poem. Three volumes appeared in quick succession: 1890, 1891, and 1896. In 1914 Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published some of the poems her mother, Susan, had saved. In the next 3 decades four more volumes appeared, the most important being Bolts of Melody (1945), edited by Mrs. Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, from the manuscripts the Todds had never returned to Lavinia Dickinson. In 1955 Thomas H. Johnson prepared for Harvard University Press a three-volume edition, chronologically arranged, of "variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts." Here, for the first time, the reader saw the poems as Dickinson had left them. The Johnson text of the 1,775 extant poems is now the standard one.

It is clear that Dickinson could not have written to please publishers, who were not ready to risk her striking aphoristic style and original metaphors. She had the right to educate the public, as Poe and Whitman eventually did, but she never had the invitation. Had she published during her lifetime, adverse public criticism might have driven her into deeper solitude, even silence. "If fame belonged to me," she told Higginson, "I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase … My barefoot rank is better." The 20th century has lifted her without doubt to the first rank among poets.

Further Reading

Thomas H. Johnson edited The Letters of Emily Dickinson (3 vols., 1958). His three-volume variorum edition of her poems (1955) was followed by a one-volume The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960) and a selection of 575 poems, Final Harvest (1961).

The best of the early biographies of Emily Dickinson is George Whicher, This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (1938). It has been superseded by Richard Chase, Emily Dickinson (1951); Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (1955); and David Higgins, Portrait of Emily Dickinson: The Poet and Her Prose (1967). Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (2 vols., 1960), is a valuable source book.

There are numerous critical studies. The best general appreciation is Charles R. Anderson, Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (1960). More recent studies are Clark Griffith, The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson's Tragic Poetry (1964); Albert J. Gelpi, Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (1965); Ruth Miller, The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1968); and William R. Sherwood, Circumference and Circumstance: Stages in the Mind and Art of Emily Dickinson (1968). Richard B. Sewall edited Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963). Equally useful is Cesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells, eds., The Recognition of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism since 1890 (1964).

Emily Dickinson's place in the history of American poetry is well established in Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968).

For more information on Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, visit Britannica.com.

(1830-1886), poet. During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson, though known to a few, hardly existed as a national figure. Only ten of her poems found their way into print, all anonymously. There was a flurry of interest during the decade of the 1890s occasioned by the publication of three slim volumes of selections (1890, 1891, and 1896). But the editing during the next half-century was erratic and piecemeal. It was not until 1955 that her entire corpus of 1,775 poems appeared, carefully edited, with variants. The Letters followed (1958), giving, at last, adequate and reliable material for a just estimate of her work. The event, historic in our cultural history, gave rise to much reevaluation and intensified research. It continues unabated.

Not that she had gone unnoticed till then. The flurry of the 1890s showed, among other things, a significant discrepancy between the popular appeal of her poetry, demonstrated by eleven reprintings of the first volume in a single year, and the cautious, mixed reception by the critics. The reviews, generally, recognized her originality and imaginative power but deplored her stylistic eccentricities--her approximate rhymes, jolting rhythms, strained syntax, bizarre imagery, symbol, metaphor. Her first reviewer (Arlo Bates), though sympathetic, called her poems "half barbaric." But it was just such qualities that attracted a new generation of poets--imagists, symbolists, metaphorists--in general, those who responded to a new voice and its capacity to refresh the language. She has been translated into at least six languages (including Japanese, which readily appropriates her often haiku-like manner), and studies of her life and work appear from all quarters of the globe.

The facts of her life are few and simple, the interpretations many and complex. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the time a small farming town with a college and a hat factory; she seldom left it, and she died there. After a year at Mount Holyoke, her growing sense of poetic vocation led to ever deeper concentration and the privacy of her home.

Her reclusiveness has been variously explained--a frustrated love affair, a tyrannical father, an inadequate mother, religious perplexities, failure to publish, the limits imposed upon women in her time. But, as with the attempts to categorize her poetry--is she a transcendentalist? a mystic? a romantic? a metaphysical? a meditative? was she pessimistic? optimistic? a believer? a disbeliever?--no single theory is adequate. Her range is wide, her "voices" many; her heights are high, her depths deep. One of the most private of major poets, she was of little help in answering these questions. Yet, as the studies proliferate, her once "half barbaric" poems become available to an ever-widening public and her place in the pantheon of world poets ever more secure.

Bibliography:

Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960); Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974).

Author:

Richard B. Sewall

See also Literature.

1830–86, American poet, b. Amherst, Mass. She is widely considered one of the greatest poets in American literature. Her unique, gemlike lyrics are distillations of profound feeling and original intellect that stand outside the mainstream of 19th-century American literature.

Life

Dickinson spent almost all her life in her birthplace. Her father was a prominent lawyer who was active in civic affairs. His three children (Emily; a son, Austin; and another daughter, Lavinia) thus had the opportunity to meet many distinguished visitors. Emily Dickinson attended Amherst Academy irregularly for six years and Mount Holyoke Seminary for one, and in those years lived a normal life filled with friendships, parties, church, and housekeeping. Before she was 30, however, she began to withdraw from village activities and gradually ceased to leave home at all. While she corresponded with many friends, she eventually stopped seeing them. She often fled from visitors and eventually lived as a virtual recluse in her father's house. As a mature woman, she was intense and sensitive and was exhausted by emotional contact with others.

Even before her withdrawal from the world Dickinson had been writing poetry, and her creative peak seems to have been reached in the period from 1858 to 1862. Although she was encouraged by the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who never truly comprehended her genius, and Helen Hunt Jackson, who believed she was a great poet, Dickinson published only seven poems during her lifetime. Dickinson's mode of existence, although circumscribed, was evidently satisfying, even essential, to her. After her death in 1886, Lavinia Dickinson discovered over 1,000 poems in her sister's bureau. For too long Dickinson was treated less as a serious artist than as a romantic figure who had renounced the world after a disappointment in love. This legend, based on conjecture, distortion, and even fabrication, has been known to plague even some of her modern biographers.

Works

While Dickinson wrote love poetry that indicates a strong attachment, it has proved impossible to know the object of her feelings, or even how much was fed by her poetic imagination. The chief tension in her work comes from a different source: her inability to accept the orthodox religious faith of her day and her longing for its spiritual comfort. Immortality she called “the flood subject,” and she alternated confident statements of belief with lyrics of despairing uncertainty that were both reverent and rebellious. Her verse, noted for its aphoristic style, its wit, its delicate metrical variation and irregular rhymes, its directness of statement, and its bold and startling imagery, has won enormous acclaim and had a great influence on 20th-century poetry.

Dickinson's posthumous fame began when Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson edited and published two volumes of poems (1890, 1891) and some of her correspondence (2 vol., 1894). Other editions of verse followed, many of which were marred by unskillful and unnecessary editing. A definitive edition of her works did not appear until the 1950s, when T. H. Johnson published her poems (3 vol., 1955) and letters (3 vol., 1958); only then was serious study of her work possible. Dickinson scholarship was further advanced by R. W. Franklin's variorum edition of her poetry (3 vol., 1998).

Bibliography

See also R. W. Franklin, ed., Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981) and Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986). Valuable biographies of Dickinson include G. F. Wicher, This Was a Poet (1938, repr. 1980); M. T. Bingham, Emily Dickinson: A Revelation (1954) and Emily Dickinson's Home (1955, repr. 1967); J. Leyda, Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (2 vol., 1960, repr. 1970); R. B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (2 vol., 1974); C. G. Wolff, Emily Dickinson (1986); and A. Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2001). Among the many studies of Dickinson are those by C. R. Anderson (1960), A. J. Gelpi (1965), D. J. M. Higgins (1967), W. R. Sherwood (1968), S. Wolosky (1984), B. L. St. Armand (1986), and J. Farr (1992).

(1830-1886)

1890	Poems. Following Dickinson's death in 1886, nearly two thousand poems had been discovered among her effects. Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) and Thomas Wentworth Higginson selected and edited some poems for publication, adding titles, regularizing the rhymes and meter, and using conventional punctuation. This collection of 115 poems is the first of three volumes edited by the duo and contains famous works (identified here by their first lines, since Dickinson did not title the poems) such as "I taste a liquor never brewed," "Much Madness is divinest Sense," and "Because I could not stop for Death." Poems, Second Series would appear in 1891 and Poems, Third Series in 1896. A complete scholarly edition would not be published until 1955.
1914	The Single Hound. An important collection of 146 previously unpublished poems, chiefly verses sent to the poet's sister-in-law and Amherst neighbor, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, on various religious, metaphysical, and literary topics.
1929	Further Poems. This is another cache of previously unpublished poems, some of Dickinson's best.
1936	Unpublished Poems. Edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Dickinson's niece) and Alfred Leete Hamilton, the volume makes available poems and fragments discovered when Bianchi was gathering material for her book Emily Dickinson: Face to Face (1932).
1945	Bolts of Melody. Edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, this selection of more than 660 previously unpublished poems allows readers for the first time to appreciate the full range of the nineteenth-century poet's masterful achievement.
1955	The Complete Poems. The scholarly complete edition of Dickinson's poetry is edited by Thomas H. Johnson (1902-1985), who restores the poet's original texts. As Robert Hillyer declares in his review, this "is not only a major work of scholarship; it is a monument in American literature."

Quotes:

"A wounded deer leaps the highest."

"Assent -- and you are sane -- , demur -- you're straightway dangerous -- , and handled with a Chain -- ."

"Surgeons must be very careful. When they take the knife!, underneath their fine incisions, stirs the Culprit -- Life!"

"Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, Sir."

"Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate."

"The fog is rising."

See more famous quotes by Emily Dickinson

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