Dickinson, Emily

Dickinson, Emily (1830–1886), poet.Emily Dickinson was one of the two finest American poets of the nineteenth century. She managed this extraordinary achievement despite powerful obstacles, many of them self‐imposed. She had little of what normally counts as “experience,” and whatever wisdom she displayed about the world's ways resulted from keen self‐awareness and hard thought, rather than close encounters with life. Except for a year at nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847–1848, she lived out her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, in houses belonging to her father, Edward, a prominent lawyer. Toward the end, she rarely even ventured onto the few streets of Amherst. She never married or bore a child, and she probably never had carnal knowledge of another human body, male or female. If she loved, it was brief, furtive, and incomplete. She never earned any money or held any sort of “job”; she listed herself in local records as “at home”—the era's term for “housewife.”

Her subjects were conventionally Victorian: flowers and birds, death and dying, immortality, and the travail of religious faith, love and loss. Her models were equally conventional: poets much less talented than herself, like Robert Burns and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She avoided the other truly fine American poet of her time, Walt Whitman, because her father told her that Whitman's Leaves of Grass was naughty. For her cadences, she went mainly to Protestant hymns, with their steady iambic lines of eight or ten syllables. Instead of audiences that might have given her encouragement or useful commentary, she shared her work with only a couple of relatives—her sister, Lavinia; her sister‐in‐law, Susan, wife of her brother, Austin—and a few friends. Almost none of it was published in her lifetime; a complete scholarly edition first appeared in 1955.

But out of this seeming dearth of possibility and these potentially inhibiting choices, she wrung a large and remarkable body of poetry—thousands of poems with such stunning opening lines as “It would have starved a Gnat—/ to live so small as I,” “I felt a Funeral in my Brain,” “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” or “My business is circumference—/ A fairer house than prose.” The most concentrated frenzy of work came in her thirty‐third year, 1862, when she wrote more than three hundred poems, turning out brilliant pieces at the astonishing rate of almost one a day.

In the spring of that critical year, she confronted the possibility of publishing her work. She initiated a correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) of Boston, who had published “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly. The situation seemed perfect: Higginson was a successful professional author and editor who had offered friendly advice to novice writers; the Atlantic Monthly, found in most upper‐middle‐class New England homes, regularly published poetry by women and men whose abilities were meager compared to Dickinson's. Sending carefully chosen samples of her work, she asked Higginson for his editorial judgment—was her poetry “alive”?

A series of letters ensued in which Higginson offered cautious encouragement, trying all the while to penetrate the mystery in which his curious correspondent wrapped herself. When he suggested that she might eventually publish her work, Dickinson replied, “That is as foreign to my thought as Firmament to Fin.” With that richly alliterative and perfectly iambic sentence, she transformed what had been mere hesitation into principaled refusal. In so doing, she created the one fact of mythic proportions that still clings to her: the poet of enormous talent who disdained to do anything so tawdry with her art as to put it into print.

But she did know how to put the disdain into verse:Publication—is the Auction
Of the Mind—of Man—
Poverty—be justifying
For so foul a thing
Possibly….


These lines resonated with generations of admirers who made Dickinson into something of a cult figure, celebrated as much for her refusal to allow her art to become merchandise as for the art itself, and revered as much for the oddments of her personality as for her poetry. But the deeper meaning of the way Dickinson justified her refusal to publish lies in the way it reveals how completely, by the mid–nineteenth century, literature had in fact become a commodity, poetry a species of intellectual property with a cash value.
See also Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras; Literature: Civil War to World War I.

Bibliography

Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols., 1955.
Richard B. Sewall , The Life of Emily Dickinson, 1974.
R. Jackson Wilson , Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson, 1989.

R. Jackson Wilson