The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

INTRODUCTION

Emily Dickinson, writing to the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson in July 1862, reported that she “had no portrait,” but offered the following description in place of one: “Small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well?”
(Selected Letters,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson, p. 175; see “For Further Reading”). Despite Dickinson’s claim, we do possess one photograph of her—a daguerreotype taken in 1847 or 1848, when she was in her late teens. The image certainly confirms her self-portrait: Her frame is tiny; her shiny hair does indeed sit boldly atop her head; and her dark eyes really do glisten like liquor at the bottom of a glass.

The photograph also suggests many of the rich puzzles and paradoxes that have informed our view of Dickinson since the last decade of the nineteenth century, when readers and critics began to read, study, and obsess over her poems. Dickinson’s body, with its delicate hands and slender torso, may resemble the fragile form of someone too weak to venture far from home; but her huge moist eyes stare at us with the wisdom, depth, and longing of a woman who has traveled around the world and come back with stories, not all of them fit for mixed company. She demurely clutches a bouquet of flowers, and a book rests primly at her side; but her full, sensuous lips reveal a person whose thoughts may not always tend toward such tidy subjects as flowers and books. We look away from the photograph intrigued and stirred: What’s going on in her mind? How could this slight figure be the author of some of the most passionate love poems, the most searing descriptions of loss, the most haunting religious lyrics ever written?

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, the middle child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson; her brother, Austin, was born in 1829 and her sister, Lavinia, in 1833. Her father, a lawyer, served as treasurer of Amherst College (her grandfather was a cofounder of the college), and also occupied important positions on the General Court of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts State Senate, and the United States House of Representatives. “His Heart,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists”
(Selected Letters,
p. 223). He was strictly religious (something she would later rebel against), leading the family prayers every day and often censoring her reading; but he also ensured that Dickinson grew up in a household surrounded by books and heated intellectual debates. Her mother was a more shadowy presence ; Dickinson wrote that she “does not care for thought”
(Selected Letters,
p. 173); more harshly, she claimed, “I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled”
(Letters,
vol. 2, p. 475). Even so, the Dickinsons remained an extremely close-knit family; after her brother, Austin, married, he and his wife settled right next door.

Dickinson attended the coeducational Amherst Academy from the ages of ten to seventeen, and then went on to the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley. She blossomed there into a social and spirited young woman. The most significant event of her stay occurred at a fundamentalist Calvinist revival meeting, when she was asked to stand and declare herself a Christian and refused. After one year at Mount Holyoke she returned in 1848 to Amherst, where she remained, apart from brief trips to Boston, Cambridge, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., for the rest of her life.

At school and at home, Dickinson received an excellent education. At the Amherst Academy alone she studied the arts, English literature, rhetoric, philosophy, Latin, French, German, history, geography, classics, and the Bible; she also received a firm grounding in the sciences, mathematics, geology, botany, natural history, physiology, and astronomy. At home the Dickinsons’ large and varied library included books by Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Keats, the Brownings, the Brontës, and George Eliot, along with Noah Webster’s
An American Dictionary of the English Language
—which for Dickinson would prove one of the most important books of all—and a healthy dose of newspapers and romance novels.

During her early twenties, Dickinson began to dress in white, to leave her house only on rare occasions, and to restrict the circle of her acquaintances until it numbered just a few people. Often speaking to visitors through a screen or from an adjoining room, she soon developed a reputation as a town eccentric. The young Mabel Loomis Todd, having recently moved to Amherst with her husband, David, remarked in a letter to her parents about a strange resident:

One can hardly blame Todd for being fascinated by such an unusual “character.” But unfortunately, the “myth” she takes such pleasure in describing influenced our later notions of Dickinson much too heavily. Despite her seclusion, a large number of prominent figures came and went through her house. She also developed deep, though largely epistolary, friendships with several people: the clergyman Charles Wadsworth, whom she met in Philadelphia and described as her “dearest earthly friend”; Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield
Republican
; and Judge Otis Phil lips Lord of Salem, Massachusetts.

During this time Dickinson also began to write poetry. On April 15, 1862, she read in the
Atlantic Monthly
a “Letter to a Young Contributor,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In the letter Higginson, a man of letters, active abolitionist, and early supporter of women’s rights offered advice to novice writers about finding an audience for their work. Dickinson sent him four poems, along with a letter inquiring “if my Verse is alive?” and telling Higginson, “Should you feel it breathed—and had you leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—”
(Selected Letters,
p. 171). Although Higginson may have been politically ahead of his time, his literary tastes were not quite as advanced; he suggested that Dickinson revise her unusual punctuation and syntax. Still, their correspondence, which lasted until the last month of her life, seems to have gone a long way toward helping Dickinson feel part of a greater literary community.

Dickinson experienced her most tumultuous decade during the 1860s, when several events took their toll on her: the outbreak of the Civil War, the changed circumstances of several friends (Bowles was sick in Europe, Wadsworth moved to San Francisco, and Higginson served as an officer in the Union Army), and her own severe eye trouble in 1864 and 1865. After the late 1860s she never again left her home. In April 1862 she wrote mysteriously to Higginson, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—”
(Selected Letters,
p. 172). These lines certainly confirm Dickinson’s difficulties during this time, even though no one knows exactly what her “terror” was. This period, however, proved to be the most productive of Dickinson’s life; between 1860 and 1865 she wrote an average of three hundred poems each year.

Although Dickinson never married, her passionate poems, as well as a series of letters that have come to be called “The Master Letters,” suggest that she may have been deeply in love at least once; it remains in doubt whether the object of her affection was Charles Wadsworth, Otis Lord, her sister-in-law Susan, or indeed any real person.

The last years of Dickinson’s life were sad ones, due to the numerous deaths she experienced. Her father died in 1874, Samuel Bowles in 1878, her nephew Gilbert in 1883, and both Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882. In April 1884 Otis Lord died, and Dickinson herself suffered the first attack of an illness that would prove fatal; she died on May 15, 1886.

 

With a few exceptions, Dickinson’s poems are quite short, and they consist of stanzas written in what is known as common measure, also called common meter: four iambic lines that alternate between four and three beats. They recall the hymns that would have been intimately familiar to Dickinson from her childhood on. By far the most popular writer of these hymns was Isaac Watts, whose collections of hymns and other books could be found in every New England home. Opening Watts’s
Divine Songs for Children
(1715), Dickinson would have encountered stanzas like this:

Another perennially popular example of common measure is the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which begins: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me.” But, although Dickinson’s poems may superficially resemble sternly moralistic or sweetly consoling hymns, a closer look reveals that they are anything but:

Unfolding as predictably as a hymn, these two stanzas nevertheless show—with their preference for individuality over community, attention to detail over the “invention” of faith—how in Dickinson’s crafty hands form is an occasion for cutting ironies, allowing her poems to enact an ongoing battle between received opinion and “superior instants.” (The abrupt rhythm achieved by her characteristic use of dashes in place of expected punctuation also helps advance the battle; Dickinson’s use of dashes may not always be evident in this edition, as discussed later in this essay.)

Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of rhyme adds even more tension to her deceptively hymn-like poems. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” she famously wrote
(The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson, poem 1129); and she practiced this wily doctrine in almost every poem:

This wrenching little poem attains much of its power from Dickinson’s use of “slant rhymes,” or off-rhymes, like “pain-suffering” and “be-die,” which don’t allow the comfort that might come from exact rhymes and instead remind us of life’s conflicts and near misses. Slant rhyme can also be a way to express the pleasure of messiness, the joy of not being able to “Tell all the Truth” once and for all:

Appropriately for a poem about how not “telling beauty” only increases beauty’s strength, the near-rhymes “demean” and “sign” mirror the inexactness that Dickinson applauds. (The coinage “syllableless” is a good example of Dickinson’s fondness for making up new words when the old ones are not adequate to her needs.)

Dickinson is as ardent a revisionist of syntax as she is of form, as is evident in the following single-stanza poem:

Here, by reordering a statement that we might have expected to begin, “The Soul is condemned,” Dickinson can start her poem with her true subject: the terror and the necessity of the soul’s “Adventure.” Similarly, by stripping the poem of verbs (“[is] condemned,” “[It is] attended”), and by boldly capitalizing its final word, “Identity,” she increases its starkness and strangeness. Isaac Watts would be appalled by such stylistic departures from tradition, but it is precisely these quirks that make Dickinson’s poems so continually exciting.

Her liberties extend even further. Rather than begin her poems with elaborate contexts or settings, Dickinson plunges us right away into the pulsing heart of things. Her poems often start with a bold proclamation or definition that the rest of the poem explores : “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul” (p. 22); “Heaven is what I cannot reach!” (p. 53); “Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn” (p. 124). Other poems lead us straight into an extreme situation without warning:

Her endings can be just as abrupt. Whether a poem takes the form of a riddle, proverb, or narrative—for her genres are just as varied as her use of common measure is uniform—it often ends with a terrifying lack of closure. Two of her most well-known poems make this clear. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” the speaker rides with Death in most leisurely fashion past children at play and the setting sun; but at the poem’s end, time rushes suddenly forward, and the speaker looks back on the scene just described from the sudden vantage point of one who has been dead a long time: