Dickinson, Emily [Elizabeth] (1830–86),the daughter of Edward Dickinson, a prominent lawyer of Amherst, Mass., was educated at Amherst Academy and for one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, under Mary Lyon. Her life was outwardly eventless, for she lived quietly at home and for the last 25 years secluded herself from all but the most intimate friends. Though never married, she cultivated intense intellectual companionships with several men in succession, whom she quaintly called her tutors. The first was Benjamin F. Newton, a law student in her father's office, who introduced her to stimulating books and urged her to take seriously her vocation as poet. Religious questionings prompted by his early death led her to appeal for guidance to the Rev. Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia, whom she met in 1854. She soon came to regard him as her “dearest earthly friend,” and for purposes of poetry created in his image the “lover” whom she was never to know except in imagination. From the time of Wadsworth's removal to San Francisco, in the spring of 1862, may be dated her withdrawal from village society and her increasing preoccupation with poetry. She initiated a literary correspondence with T.W. Higginson, whom she knew only through his papers in the
Atlantic Monthly, and his kindly encouragement was a support to her through years of loneliness. Besides Higginson, the circle of friends to whom she occasionally showed a few of her poems included Samuel Bowles, Dr. J.G. Holland, and Helen Hunt Jackson. For the most part, however, she wrote in secret and guarded her poems even from her family.
Before her death, she had composed well over 1000 brief lyrics, her “letter to the world,” records of the life about her, of tiny ecstasies set in motion by mutations of the seasons or by home and garden incidents, of candid insights into her own states of consciousness, and of speculations on the timeless mysteries of love and death. Her mind was charged with paradox, as though her vision, like the eyes of birds, was focused in opposite directions on the two worlds of material and immaterial values. She could express feelings of deepest poignancy in terms of wit. Like Emerson, her preference for the intrinsic and the essential led her often to a gnomic concision of phrase, but her artistry in the modulation of simple meters and the delicate management of imperfect rhymes was greater than his. Her daringly precise metaphors made her seem to Amy Lowell a precursor of the Imagist school.
Publication, in Emily Dickinson's unworldly view, formed no part of a poet's business. Only six of her poems, not counting an early verse valentine, were printed during her lifetime, and none with her consent. From the chaotic mass of manuscripts found after her death, some carefully revised, others carelessly jotted down on odd scraps of paper, six volumes have been selected:
Poems (1890) and
Poems: Second Series (1891), edited by Mabel L. Todd and T.W. Higginson;
Poems: Third Series (1896), edited by Mrs. Todd;
The Single Hound (1914), edited by Emily's niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi;
Further Poems (1929) and
Unpublished Poems (1936), edited by Mrs. Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. A collection was issued as
Poems: Centenary Edition (1930). Posthumous publication kept the poems from being presented in any effective order. Trifling pieces and fragments were included with major lyrics and the text was often inaccurate, badly punctuated, or poorly displayed on the page. However,
Bolts of Melody (1945), poems long suppressed because of a family feud, was carefully edited by Mabel L. Todd and Millicent Bingham, and a complete
The Poems of Emily Dickinson was issued in a scholarly edition (3 vols., 1955) including variant readings by Thomas H. Johnson, who, in addition to this definitive work, edited the poet's
Letters (3 vols., 1958).
The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1982) reproduces in facsimile the manuscripts of the canon of 1147 poems in the fascicles into which the author gathered them.
Emily Dickinson is considered the prototype of Alison Stanhope in Susan Glaspell's
Alison's House and the heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's
Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876).
