Emily Dickinson

For her originality, range, and emotional depth, Emily Dickinson is now among the most universally admired and extensively studied American poets.

Education

Born on December 10, 1830, Dickinson lived her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts . Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a prosperous lawyer who served as treasurer of Amherst College and held various political offices. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was a quiet and frail woman.

After attending primary school, Dickinson studied at Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847, before spending a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Following the completion of her education, Dickinson lived at home with her parents and younger sister, Lavinia. Her older brother, Austin, and his wife, Susan, lived next door.

Poetry and withdrawal

Details of Dickinson's life are vague. Scholars believe that she first began writing poetry seriously in the early 1850s. Biographers speculate that during a trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania , in the 1850s or 1860s, Dickinson fell in love with a married minister, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and that her disappointment in love caused her later withdrawal from society. Whatever the cause, Dickinson spent most of her time in the following years at home or on long solitary walks.

Biographers generally agree that Dickinson experienced an emotional crisis of an undetermined nature in the early 1860s. Her distressed state of mind is believed to have inspired her to write a great deal. In 1862 alone, she is thought to have composed more than three hundred poems. In that year, Dickinson started to write to and receive letters from Thomas Higginson (1823–1911), the literary editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. During the course of their lengthy exchange, Dickinson sent nearly one hundred of her poems for his criticism. While Higginson had little influence on her writing, he was important to her as a sympathetic adviser.

Dickinson's refusal to leave her home or to meet visitors and her habit of always wearing white garments earned her a reputation for eccentricity (oddity). Her isolation further increased when her father died unexpectedly in 1874 and she was left with the care of her invalid mother. The death of her mother in 1882 contributed to the beginning of what Dickinson described as an “attack of nerves.” In 1886, she was diagnosed as having Bright's disease, a kidney dysfunction that resulted in her death on May 15 of that year.

Discovery and publication of her poems

Only seven of Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime, all anonymously and some apparently without her consent. The editors of the magazines in which her poems appeared made significant changes to them in an attempt to regularize the meter and grammar, thereby discouraging Dickinson from seeking further publication of her verse. Therefore, her poems found only a private audience among the people she wrote letters to, her family, and old school friends.

Even her family was unaware of the enormous quantity of verse that she composed. After Dickinson's death, her sister Lavinia was astounded to discover hundreds of poems among her possessions. Despite the disordered state of the manuscripts, Lavinia Dickinson was determined to publish her sister's poetry. She turned to Higginson and editor Mabel Loomis Todd (1858–1932), a friend of the Dickinson family, for assistance.

In 1890, Poems of Emily Dickinson appeared. Even though most initial reviews were highly unfavorable, the work went through eleven editions in two years. Encouraged by the popular acceptance of Poems, Todd edited and published two later collections of Dickinson's verse in the 1890s, as well as a two-volume selection of her letters. Over the next fifty years, more previously unprinted poems continued to appear in new collections. It was not until 1955 that Dickinson's complete poems—nearly eighteen hundred poems—were collected and published together in one text.

A distinctive style

Dickinson's poems were in the form of brief lyrics, often of only one or two quatrains (a group of four lines of verse), and few of them were titled. In her verse, Dickinson explores various subjects: nature, death, immortality, love and loss, and fame. Drawing on imagery from biblical sources, particularly from the Book of Revelation, and from the works of English writers such as dramatist William Shakespeare (1564–1616), poet John Keats (1795–1821), and poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), Dickinson developed a highly personal system of symbol and allusion (indirect reference), assigning complex meanings to colors, places, times, and seasons. Her tone in the poems ranges widely, from wry humor to anguished self-examination, from flirtatious puzzles to childlike openness.

The language in Dickinson's poems incorporates New England slang, religious and scientific terminology, and out-of-date words. The meters of her poems are often adapted from the rhythms of English hymns or nursery rhymes. Her rhyme and tonal harmony did not conform to the usual rules of poetry of her day. She employed quirky capitalization and punctuation. Many aspects of Dickinson's style distinguish her poetry from the mainstream of nineteenth-century American verse.

Most nineteenth-century critics viewed Dickinson's poetry with a combination of disapproval and bewilderment, objecting to her disregard for convention. By the turn of the century, despite her enthusiastic popular following, Dickinson was still regarded as a sentimental poet of minor importance.

After the publication of her complete poems in 1955, however, numerous studies of her works followed, leading to her acceptance by writers and academics as a master poet. Dickinson is now studied in high schools and colleges throughout the English-speaking world. As author Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) wrote in a Critical Inquiry article entitled “‘Soul at the White Heat’: The Romance of Emily Dickinson's Poetry,” “Here is an American artist of words as inexhaustible as Shakespeare, as vigorously skillful in her craft as Yeats, a poet whom we can set with confidence beside the greatest poets of modern times.”