Emily Dickinson

1830 - 1886

Early Life

• She was born to religious,

well-to-do family and had a normal childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts, attending school, taking part in church activities, reading books, learning to sing and play the piano, writing letters, and taking walks.

1840, Emily was educated at the nearby Amherst Academy

She studied English and classical literature, and Latin; also was taught in other subjects including religion, history, mathematics, geology, and biology.

In 1847, at 17, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary ( Mount Holyoke College)

Returned home after less than a year at the Seminary, and she did not return to the school. Some speculate that she was homesick, however there is also speculation that she refused to sign an oath stating she would devote her life to Jesus Christ

Everyone expected her to marry and raise a family like most women of her class.

During this time Dickinson also referred to a trauma that shedescribed in a letter: "I had a terror -- since September -- I could tell to none". The cause of that terror is unknown.

She became a poet and recluse.

• “Dickinson used precise language and unique poetic forms to simultaneously reveal and conceal her private thoughts and feelings” (Elements of Literature 345).

• What happened to turn a young girl into an unrecognized poet who never left her house?

Dickinson's youthful years were not without turmoil. Deaths of friends and relatives, including her young cousin Sophia Holland, promptedquestions about death and immortality.

From the Pleasant Street house, located near the town cemetery, Dickinson could not have ignored the frequent burials that later provided powerful imagery for her poems.

Speculations

• Went to DC with her father, a congressman, because she had fallen in love with a married lawyer, who soon died of TB.

• There fell in love with another married man, a minister. He moved to San Francisco in 1862. About this time she wrote, “I sing as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.”

Return to Amherst

• Within a few years, she had retreated from all social life in Amherst. She remained in her parents’ house and where she gardened, did household work and wrote poetry, which she would sometimes send to people as gifts for valentines or birthdays, along with a pie or cookies.

Only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime. She sent four of them to a critic, Mr. Higginson, asking for his help. When he sent suggestions for changing her poems, she replied in a letter, “Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask.”

Dickinson was not the innocent, lovelorn and emotionally fragile girl sentimentalized by the Dickinson myth. Her decision to shut the door on Amherst society in the 1850’s transformed her house into a kind of magical realm in which she was free to engage her poetic genius.

Her seclusion was not the result of a failed love affair, but rather a part of a more general pattern of renunciation through which she, in her quest for self-sovereignty, carried on an argument with the puritan fathers, attacking with

wit and irony their cheerless Calvinist doctrine, their stern

patriarchal God, and their rigid notions of “true womanhood.”

“Heaven is what I cannot reach!”

“Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed,”

“Water, is taught by thirst”

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

“I dwell in Possibility.”

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--Success in Circuit lies.”

-Emily Dickinson

• After her death, friends and relatives found bundles of her poems, nearly 1800 in all. They edited and “corrected” her poetry and had it published in installments.

• In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson finally published a collection of her poems that had not been “corrected.” These are the versions we read today.

Here are two versions of one stanza of one of her poems. The first is unedited; the second has been “corrected.”

We passed the School, where Children stroveAt recess—in the Ring—We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—We passed the Setting Sun—

We passed the school where children playedTheir lessons scarcely done;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.

See the differences? How does the poem change?

Why was she a poet?

Many people have commented that there are no great woman artists. Would Emily Dickinson have become such a renowned poet if she had married and had children?

What evidence is there in her poetry that she had a rich emotional life in spite of the fact that she rarely left home?

What sort of poet was she?

• Dickinson is known for using poetry as private observation.

• Her poems are carefully crafted in rhyme and meter.

• What autobiographical references do you find in the following poems?

Heart! We will forget him!You and I—tonight!You may forget the warmth he gave—I will forget the light!

When you have done, pray tell meThat I may straight begin!Haste! Lest while you’re laggingI remember him!

This shows a conflict between her mind and her heart. What controls you, your mind or your heart?

Is she referring to unrequited love (love that is not returned) or love that is impossible because of the circumstances?

The Soul selects her own Society—Then—shuts the Door—To her divine Majority*—Present no more—

Unmoved—she notes the Chariots—pausing—At her low Gate—Unmoved—an Emperor be kneelingUpon her Mat—

I’ve known her—from an ample nation—Choose One—Then—close the Valves of her attention—Like Stone—

Majority can mean reaching 21, or the greater part of something, or superior.

Do we make choices with our minds (thoughts) or our souls (feelings)?

Does this describe her in any way?

How would you punctuate this poem?

What examples does this poem contain of slant rhyme? Rhyme Scheme?

Another Poet Writes about Dickinson:

We think of her hidden in a white dress among the folded linens and sachets of well-kept cupboards, or just out of sight sending jellies and notes with no address to all the wondering Amherst neighbors. Eccentric as New England weatherthe stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,blew two half-imagined lovers off.Yet legend won’t explain the sheer sanityof vision, the serious mischiefof language, the economy of pain.

--Linda Pastan (Elements of Literature 371)

She sweeps with many-colored brooms, And leaves the shreds behind; Oh, housewife in the evening west, Come back, and dust the pond!

You dropped a purple ravelling in, You dropped an amber thread; And now you've littered all the East With duds of emerald!

And still she plies her spotted brooms, And still the aprons fly, Till brooms fade softly into starsAnd then I come away.