Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Though almost unknown and nearly unpublished in her own lifetime, Dickinson has since come to be regarded along with Walt Whitman as one of the two great American poets of the 19th century. Often called reclusive, Dickinson lived nearly her whole life at the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Poetry and Influence

Dickinson's poems

During a religious revival that swept Western Massachusetts during the decades of 1840-50, Dickinson found her vocation as a poet. One of her biographers has suggested that Dickinson thought of becoming a poet in the Biblical terms of Jacob wrestling with the angel.

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Most of her work is not only reflective of the small moments of what happens around her, but also of the larger battles and themes of what was happening in the larger society. For example, over half of her poems were written during the years of the American Civil War. Many suggest that the Civil War gave some of the tense feeling in her poetry. In the words of one of her most memorable lines, Dickinson's poems tell all the truth but tell it slant:

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::Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

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::Success in Circuit lies

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::Too bright for our infirm Delight

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::The Truth's superb surprise

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::As Lightning to the Children eased

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::With explanation kind

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::The Truth must dazzle gradually

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::Or everyman be blind—

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Dickinson toyed briefly with the idea of having her poems published, even asking Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic and family friend, for advice. Higginson immediately realized the young poet's talent, but when he tried to "improve" Dickinson's poems, adapting them to the more florid, romantic style popular at the time, Dickinson quickly lost interest in the project.

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By the time of her death, only seven of Dickinson's poems (which number almost 1800) had been published. (Five of those seven were published in the Springfield Republican). Three posthumous collections in the 1890s established her as a powerful eccentric, but it wasn't until the twentieth century that she was truly appreciated as one of the greatest American poets.

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Because of her characteristic meter and rhyme scheme, it has been observed that many if not most of Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. ("A bird came down the walk one day / he did not know I saw...")

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Posthumous publication

Dickinson's poetry was collected after her death by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, with Todd initially collecting and organizing the material and Higginson editing. They edited the poems extensively in order to regularize the manuscripts' punctuation and capitalization to late nineteenth-century standards, occasionally also rewording poems to reduce Dickinson's obliquity. A volume of Dickinson's Poems was published in Boston in 1890, and became quite popular; by the end of 1892 eleven editions had sold. Poems: Second Series was published in 1891 and ran to five editions by 1893; a third series was published in 1896. Two volumes of Dickinson's letters, heavily edited and selected by Todd (who falsified dates on some of them), were published in 1894. This wave of posthumous publications was Dickinson's poetry's first real public exposure, and it found an immediate audience. Backed by Higginson and William Dean Howells with favorable notices and reviews, the poetry was popular from 1890 to 1892; later in the decade, though, the critical opinion (which had from the first been mixed) shifted toward the negative, as poetry readers of the 1890s disliked its "formlessness," unclear grammar, and half-rhyme. Thomas Bailey Aldrich published an influential negative review anonymously in the January 1892 Atlantic Monthly:

Related Topics:
1890 - William Dean Howells - 1890s - Thomas Bailey Aldrich - Atlantic Monthly

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: It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson....But the incoherence and formlessness of her — I don't know how to designate them — versicles are fatal....n eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. (in Buckingham 281-282)

Related Topics:
Blake - Emerson

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In the early 20th century, Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published a series of further collections, including many previously unpublished poems, with similarly normalized punctuation and capitalization; The Single Hound emerged in 1914, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1924, Further Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1929. Other volumes edited by Todd and Bianchi emerged through the 1930s, releasing gradually more previously unpublished poems. With the rise of modernist poetry, Dickinson's failure to conform to nineteenth-century ideas of poetic form was no longer so surprising or distasteful to new generations of readers. And a new wave of feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her as a woman poet. Her stock had clearly risen, but Dickinson was not generally thought a great poet among the first generation of modernists, as is clear from R.P. Blackmur's critical essay of 1937:

Related Topics:
Modernist poetry - Feminism - R.P. Blackmur

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: She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars....She came, as Mr. Tate says, at the right time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of sophisticated, eccentric vision. That is what makes her good — in a few poems and many passages representatively great. But...the bulk of her verse is not representative but mere fragmentary indicative notation. The pity of it is that the document her whole work makes shows nothing so much as that she had the themes, the insight, the observation, and the capacity for honesty, which had she only known how — or only known why — would have made the major instead of the minor fraction of her verse genuine poetry. But her dying society had no tradition by which to teach her the one lesson she did not know by instinct. (195)

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The texts of these early editions would hardly be recognized by later readers, though, as their extensive editing had altered the texts found in Dickinson's manuscripts substantially. A new and complete edition of Dickinson's poetry by Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was published in three volumes in 1955. This edition formed the basis of all later Dickinson scholarship, and provided the Dickinson known to readers thereafter: the poems were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, were strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and were often extremely elliptical in their language. They were printed for the first time much more nearly as Dickinson had left them, in versions approximating the text in her manuscripts. A later variorum edition provided many alternate wordings from which Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention, had been forced to choose for the sake of readability.

Related Topics:
1955 - Variorum

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Later readers would draw attention to the remaining problems in reading even Johnson's relatively unaltered typeset texts of Dickinson, claiming that Dickinson's treatment of her manuscripts suggested that their physical and graphic properties were important to the reading of her poems. Possibly meaningful distinctions could be drawn, they argued, among different lengths and angles of dash in the poems, and different arrangements of text on the page. Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using multiple typographic symbols of varying length and angle; even R.W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems, which aimed to supplant Johnson's edition as the scholarly standard text, used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely. Some scholars claimed that the poems should be studied by reading the manuscripts themselves (which have subsequently also become available in facsimile, for those interested in an unmediated reading of Dickinson's own texts).

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