Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was one of the greatest
American poets of the
19th century, yet only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime. Her poems are short and often
elusive in their
meaning, but are filled with
evocative language. Dickinson's poems contain few topical references to her time and place--instead they are insightful
meditations on such
universal themes as
love,
death, and
nature. This makes them as fresh and vibrant today as when they were written.
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts and lived almost all her life there, except for a year at college and a few months in Boston. Her father was a successful attorney and legislator. Emily grew up in a large house ("The Homestead") with her younger sister Lavinia and older brother Austin. Neither Emily nor Lavinia ever married. Austin married Emily's friend Susan Gilbert and built a house next door to the Homestead. Susan's house became a kind of salon in Amherst, attracting visitors such as Emerson. Susan and Emily were very close.
Emily was famous in Amherst for her reclusiveness. She did not leave the grounds of the Homestead from around the age of thirty. She accepted few visitors. Instead, Emily worked at home, cooking and running the household. She was not isolated--she was close to her family, and wrote hundreds of letters to friends and family. (I think Emily would have loved the Internet.) This kind of life left Emily plenty of time for her real passion: the poems.
Few people appreciated the full extent of what Emily Dickinson was up to at the little writing desk in her room. At the height of her most prolific period, 1860-1865, Emily finished almost one poem a day. Lightning struck many times during those years. Some of the poems were sent next door to Susan for comment. Many of Emily's letters contained a poem or two. But most remained unseen by anyone but Emily herself while she lived.
The closest that Emily came to seeking publication was to send several of her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. She wanted to know if they were "alive." Higginson responded enthusiastically, and remained a lifelong friend and correspondent, but felt the poems were not suitable for publication. They were not at all the kind of fluffiness that female poets were supposed to write in those days. For whatever reason, Emily made no serious attempt at publication ever again.
Thus matters remained. Emily continued working until her death. A few days later, her sister Lavinia went to Emily's room to take away her things. To her astonishment, she found nearly forty hand-sewn booklets of poems written in longhand (the "fascicles"). As Emily had completed each poem to her satisfaction, she had copied it onto stationery, and when enough pages had accumulated, had sewn the pages into a booklet.
Lavinia gave some of the poems to her brother Austin, and some to Susan. Austin's mistress Mabel Loomis Todd worked with Higginson to prepare a selection of the poems for publication. The first collection was an immediate national success, and was followed by two more collections in the next few years. The rest of the 1775 poems were eventually published, some not until Thomas Johnson's complete edition of 1955.
Dickinson's first editors were unkind to her work. They "corrected" her unorthodox spelling and punctuation, and "fixed" Dickinson's characteristic off-rhymes. These are the versions of the Poems that are now in the public domain. Johnson was the first editor to return to the original manuscripts in an attempt to reproduce Dickinson's intentions as closely as possible. His edition is still copyrighted by Harvard University Press, which makes it difficult to publish Dickinson's poems on the Net. A new variorum edition was published in 1998 by Ralph Franklin, fixing some of Johnson's mistakes, giving all the variations of the poems where different versions are known to exist, and most interestingly, attempting to put the poems into the order in which they were written.
The full details of Emily Dickinson's life will never be known. She preferred to keep her private life to herself. Emily destroyed all the letters that were written to her before she died. Even when her poems seem confessional, we never know for sure if it's the "real Emily" or whether she's just playing with us. Emily Dickinson preferred mystery.