emily dickinson biographical essay

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Early years

Development as a poet.

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Why is Emily Dickinson important?

What was emily dickinson’s education, what did emily dickinson write.

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Emily Dickinson

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Emily Dickinson is considered one of the leading 19th-century American poets, known for her bold original verse, which stands out for its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, and enigmatic brilliance. Yet it was only well into the 20th century that other leading writers—including Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and Elizabeth Bishop—registered her greatness.

Emily Dickinson attended Amherst Academy in her Massachusetts hometown. She showed prodigious talent in composition and excelled in Latin and the sciences. A botany class inspired her to assemble an herbarium containing many pressed plants identified in Latin. She went on to what is now Mount Holyoke College but, disliking it, left after a year.

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems. Though few were published in her lifetime, she sent hundreds to friends, relatives, and others—often with, or as part of, letters. She also made clean copies of her poems on fine stationery and then sewed small bundles of these sheets together, creating 40 booklets, perhaps for posthumous publication.

Emily Dickinson (born December 10, 1830, Amherst , Massachusetts , U.S.—died May 15, 1886, Amherst) was an American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman , Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.

Only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. Devoted to private pursuits, she sent hundreds of poems to friends and correspondents while apparently keeping the greater number to herself. She habitually worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads , with lines of three or four stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as both experimental and influenced by the 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts . She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even of grammar, and in the intellectual content of her work she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original. Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic brilliance, and lack of high polish.

The second of three children, Dickinson grew up in moderate privilege and with strong local and religious attachments. For her first nine years she resided in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who had helped found Amherst College but then went bankrupt shortly before her birth. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a forceful and prosperous Whig lawyer who served as treasurer of the college and was elected to one term in Congress. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, from the leading family in nearby Monson, was an introverted wife and hardworking housekeeper; her letters seem equally inexpressive and quirky. Both parents were loving but austere , and Emily became closely attached to her brother, Austin, and sister, Lavinia. Never marrying, the two sisters remained at home, and when their brother married, he and his wife established their own household next door. The highly distinct and even eccentric personalities developed by the three siblings seem to have mandated strict limits to their intimacy. “If we had come up for the first time from two wells,” Emily once said of Lavinia, “her astonishment would not be greater at some things I say.” Only after the poet’s death did Lavinia and Austin realize how dedicated she was to her art.

As a girl, Emily was seen as frail by her parents and others and was often kept home from school. She attended the coeducational Amherst Academy, where she was recognized by teachers and students alike for her prodigious abilities in composition . She also excelled in other subjects emphasized by the school, most notably Latin and the sciences. A class in botany inspired her to assemble an herbarium containing a large number of pressed plants identified by their Latin names. She was fond of her teachers, but when she left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College ) in nearby South Hadley , she found the school’s institutional tone uncongenial. Mount Holyoke’s strict rules and invasive religious practices, along with her own homesickness and growing rebelliousness, help explain why she did not return for a second year.

At home as well as at school and church, the religious faith that ruled the poet’s early years was evangelical Calvinism , a faith centred on the belief that humans are born totally depraved and can be saved only if they undergo a life-altering conversion in which they accept the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ . Questioning this tradition soon after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson was to be the only member of her family who did not experience conversion or join Amherst’s First Congregational Church. Yet she seems to have retained a belief in the soul’s immortality or at least to have transmuted it into a Romantic quest for the transcendent and absolute. One reason her mature religious views elude specification is that she took no interest in creedal or doctrinal definition. In this she was influenced by both the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mid-century tendencies of liberal Protestant orthodoxy. These influences pushed her toward a more symbolic understanding of religious truth and helped shape her vocation as poet.

Although Dickinson had begun composing verse by her late teens, few of her early poems are extant . Among them are two of the burlesque “Valentines”—the exuberantly inventive expressions of affection and esteem she sent to friends of her youth. Two other poems dating from the first half of the 1850s draw a contrast between the world as it is and a more peaceful alternative , variously eternity or a serene imaginative order. All her known juvenilia were sent to friends and engage in a striking play of visionary fancies, a direction in which she was encouraged by the popular, sentimental book of essays Reveries of a Bachelor: Or a Book of the Heart by Ik. Marvel (the pseudonym of Donald Grant Mitchell ). Dickinson’s acts of fancy and reverie, however, were more intricately social than those of Marvel’s bachelor, uniting the pleasures of solitary mental play, performance for an audience, and intimate communion with another. It may be because her writing began with a strong social impetus that her later solitude did not lead to a meaningless hermeticism.

Until Dickinson was in her mid-20s, her writing mostly took the form of letters, and a surprising number of those that she wrote from age 11 onward have been preserved. Sent to her brother, Austin, or to friends of her own sex, especially Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Gilbert (who would marry Austin), these generous communications overflow with humour, anecdote , invention, and sombre reflection. In general, Dickinson seems to have given and demanded more from her correspondents than she received. On occasion she interpreted her correspondents’ laxity in replying as evidence of neglect or even betrayal. Indeed, the loss of friends, whether through death or cooling interest, became a basic pattern for Dickinson. Much of her writing, both poetic and epistolary, seems premised on a feeling of abandonment and a matching effort to deny, overcome, or reflect on a sense of solitude.

Dickinson’s closest friendships usually had a literary flavour. She was introduced to the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson by one of her father’s law students, Benjamin F. Newton, and to that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Susan Gilbert and Henry Vaughan Emmons, a gifted college student. Two of Barrett Browning’s works, “ A Vision of Poets,” describing the pantheon of poets, and Aurora Leigh , on the development of a female poet, seem to have played a formative role for Dickinson, validating the idea of female greatness and stimulating her ambition. Though she also corresponded with Josiah G. Holland, a popular writer of the time, he counted for less with her than his appealing wife, Elizabeth, a lifelong friend and the recipient of many affectionate letters.

In 1855 Dickinson traveled to Washington, D.C. , with her sister and father, who was then ending his term as U.S. representative. On the return trip the sisters made an extended stay in Philadelphia , where it is thought the poet heard the preaching of Charles Wadsworth, a fascinating Presbyterian minister whose pulpit oratory suggested (as a colleague put it) “years of conflict and agony.” Seventy years later, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece, claimed that Emily had fallen in love with Wadsworth, who was married, and then grandly renounced him. The story is too highly coloured for its details to be credited; certainly, there is no evidence the minister returned the poet’s love. Yet it is true that a correspondence arose between the two and that Wadsworth visited her in Amherst about 1860 and again in 1880. After his death in 1882, Dickinson remembered him as “my Philadelphia,” “my dearest earthly friend,” and “my Shepherd from ‘Little Girl’hood.”

Always fastidious , Dickinson began to restrict her social activity in her early 20s, staying home from communal functions and cultivating intense epistolary relationships with a reduced number of correspondents. In 1855, leaving the large and much-loved house (since razed) in which she had lived for 15 years, the 25-year-old woman and her family moved back to the dwelling associated with her first decade: the Dickinson mansion on Main Street in Amherst. Her home for the rest of her life, this large brick house, still standing, has become a favourite destination for her admirers. She found the return profoundly disturbing, and when her mother became incapacitated by a mysterious illness that lasted from 1855 to 1859, both daughters were compelled to give more of themselves to domestic pursuits. Various events outside the home—a bitter Norcross family lawsuit, the financial collapse of the local railroad that had been promoted by the poet’s father, and a powerful religious revival that renewed the pressure to “convert”—made the years 1857 and 1858 deeply troubling for Dickinson and promoted her further withdrawal.

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Emily Dickinson

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Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as  Ralph Waldo Emerson ,  Henry David Thoreau , and  Walt Whitman , she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as  Charlotte Brontë  and  Elizabeth Barrett Browning , she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the 19th century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through 11 editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Dickinson is now known as one of the most important American poets, and her poetry is widely read among people of all ages and interests. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. At the time of her birth, Emily’s father was an ambitious young lawyer. Educated at Amherst and Yale, he returned to his hometown and joined the ailing law practice of his father, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. Edward also joined his father in the family home, the Homestead, built by Samuel Dickinson in 1813. Active in the Whig Party, Edward Dickinson was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature (1837-1839) and the Massachusetts State Senate (1842-1843). Between 1852 and 1855 he served a single term as a representative from Massachusetts to the U.S. Congress. In Amherst he presented himself as a model citizen and prided himself on his civic work—treasurer of Amherst College, supporter of Amherst Academy, secretary to the Fire Society, and chairman of the annual Cattle Show. Comparatively little is known of Emily’s mother, who is often represented as the passive wife of a domineering husband. Her few surviving letters suggest a different picture, as does the scant information about her early education at Monson Academy. Academy papers and records discovered by Martha Ackmann reveal a young woman dedicated to her studies, particularly in the sciences.

By the time of Emily’s early childhood, there were three children in the household. Her brother, William Austin Dickinson, had preceded her by a year and a half. Her sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, was born in 1833. All three children attended the one-room primary school in Amherst and then moved on to Amherst Academy, the school out of which Amherst College had grown. The brother and sisters’ education was soon divided. Austin was sent to Williston Seminary in 1842; Emily and Vinnie continued at Amherst Academy. By Emily Dickinson’s account, she delighted in all aspects of the school—the curriculum, the teachers, the students. The school prided itself on its connection with Amherst College, offering students regular attendance at college lectures in all the principal subjects— astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, natural history, natural philosophy, and zoology. As this list suggests, the curriculum reflected the 19th-century emphasis on science. That emphasis reappeared in Dickinson’s poems and letters through her fascination with naming, her skilled observation and cultivation of flowers, her carefully wrought descriptions of plants, and her interest in “chemic force.” Those interests, however, rarely celebrated science in the same spirit as the teachers advocated. In an early poem, she chastised science for its prying interests. Its system interfered with the observer’s preferences; its study took the life out of living things. In “‘Arcturus’ is his other name” she writes, “I pull a flower from the woods - / A monster with a glass / Computes the stamens in a breath - / And has her in a ‘class!’” At the same time, Dickinson’s study of botany was clearly a source of delight. She encouraged her friend Abiah Root to join her in a school assignment: “Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will, if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you.” She herself took that assignment seriously, keeping the herbarium generated by her botany textbook for the rest of her life. Behind her school botanical studies lay a popular text in common use at female seminaries. Written by Almira H. Lincoln,  Familiar Lectures on Botany  (1829) featured a particular kind of natural history, emphasizing the religious nature of scientific study. Lincoln was one of many early 19th-century writers who forwarded the “argument from design.” She assured her students that study of the natural world invariably revealed God. Its impeccably ordered systems showed the Creator’s hand at work. Lincoln’s assessment accorded well with the local Amherst authority in natural philosophy. Edward Hitchcock, president of Amherst College, devoted his life to maintaining the unbroken connection between the natural world and its divine Creator. He was a frequent lecturer at the college, and Emily had many opportunities to hear him speak. His emphasis was clear from the titles of his books, like Religious Truth Illustrated from Science  (1857). Dickinson found the conventional religious wisdom the least compelling part of these arguments. From what she read and what she heard at Amherst Academy, scientific observation proved its excellence in powerful description. The writer who could say what he saw was invariably the writer who opened the greatest meaning to his readers. While this definition fit well with the science practiced by natural historians such as Hitchcock and Lincoln, it also articulates the poetic theory then being formed by a writer with whom Dickinson’s name was often later linked. In 1838 Emerson told his Harvard audience, “Always the seer is a sayer.” Acknowledging the human penchant for classification, he approached this phenomenon with a different intent. Less interested than some in using the natural world to prove a supernatural one, he called his listeners and readers’ attention to the creative power of definition. The individual who could say what  is  was the individual for whom words were power. While the strength of Amherst Academy lay in its emphasis on science, it also contributed to Dickinson’s development as a poet. The seven years at the academy provided her with her first “Master,” Leonard Humphrey, who served as principal of the academy from 1846 to 1848. Although Dickinson undoubtedly esteemed him while she was a student, her response to his unexpected death in 1850 clearly suggests her growing poetic interest. She wrote Abiah Root that her only tribute was her tears, and she lingered over them in her description. She will not brush them away, she says, for their presence is her expression. So, of course, is her language, which is in keeping with the memorial verses expected of 19th-century mourners. Humphrey’s designation as “Master” parallels the other relationships Emily was cultivating at school. At the academy she developed a group of close friends within and against whom she defined her self and its written expression. Among these were Abiah Root, Abby Wood, and Emily Fowler. Other girls from Amherst were among her friends—particularly Jane Humphrey, who had lived with the Dickinsons while attending Amherst Academy. As was common for young women of the middle class, the scant formal schooling they received in the academies for “young ladies” provided them with a momentary autonomy. As students, they were invited to take their intellectual work seriously. Many of the schools, like Amherst Academy, required full-day attendance, and thus domestic duties were subordinated to academic ones. The curriculum was often the same as that for a young man’s education. At their “School for Young Ladies,” William and Waldo Emerson, for example, recycled their Harvard assignments for their students. When asked for advice about future study, they offered the reading list expected of young men. Thus, the time at school was a time of intellectual challenge and relative freedom for girls, especially in an academy such as Amherst, which prided itself on its progressive understanding of education. The students looked to each other for their discussions, grew accustomed to thinking in terms of their identity as scholars, and faced a marked change when they left school. Dickinson’s last term at Amherst Academy, however, did not mark the end of her formal schooling. As was common, Dickinson left the academy at the age of 15 in order to pursue a higher, and for women, final, level of education. In the fall of 1847 Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Under the guidance of Mary Lyon, the school was known for its religious predilection. Part and parcel of the curriculum were weekly sessions with Lyon in which religious questions were examined and the state of the students’ faith assessed. The young women were divided into three categories: those who were “established Christians,” those who “expressed hope,” and those who were “without hope.” Much has been made of Emily’s place in this latter category and of the widely circulated story that she was the only member of that group. Years later fellow student Clara Newman Turner remembered the moment when Mary Lyon “asked all those who wanted to be Christians to rise.” Emily remained seated. No one else did. Turner reports Emily’s comment to her: “‘They thought it queer I didn’t rise’—adding with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I thought a lie would be queerer.’“ Written in 1894, shortly after the publication of the first two volumes of Dickinson’s poetry and the initial publication of her letters, Turner’s reminiscences carry the burden of the 50 intervening years as well as the reviewers and readers’ delight in the apparent strangeness of the newly published Dickinson. The solitary rebel may well have been the only one sitting at that meeting, but the school records indicate that Dickinson was not alone in the “without hope” category. In fact, 30 students finished the school year with that designation. The brevity of Emily’s stay at Mount Holyoke—a single year—has given rise to much speculation as to the nature of her departure. Some have argued that the beginning of her so-called reclusiveness can be seen in her frequent mentions of homesickness in her letters, but in no case do the letters suggest that her regular activities were disrupted. She did not make the same kind of close friends as she had at Amherst Academy, but her reports on the daily routine suggest that she was fully a part of the activities of the school. Additional questions are raised by the uncertainty over who made the decision that she not return for a second year. Dickinson attributed the decision to her father, but she said nothing further about his reasoning. Edward Dickinson’s reputation as a domineering individual in private and public affairs suggests that his decision may have stemmed from his desire to keep this particular daughter at home. Dickinson’s comments occasionally substantiate such speculation. She frequently represents herself as essential to her father’s contentment. But in other places her description of her father is quite different (the individual too busy with his law practice to notice what occurred at home). The least sensational explanation has been offered by biographer Richard Sewall. Looking over the Mount Holyoke curriculum and seeing how many of the texts duplicated those Dickinson had already studied at Amherst, he concludes that Mount Holyoke had little new to offer her. Whatever the reason, when it came Vinnie’s turn to attend a female seminary, she was sent to Ipswich. Dickinson’s departure from Mount Holyoke marked the end of her formal schooling. It also prompted the dissatisfaction common among young women in the early 19th century. Upon their return, unmarried daughters were indeed expected to demonstrate their dutiful nature by setting aside their own interests in order to meet the needs of the home. For Dickinson the change was hardly welcome. Her letters from the early 1850s register dislike of domestic work and frustration with the time constraints created by the work that was never done. “God keep me from what they call  households ,” she exclaimed in a letter to Root in 1850.

Particularly annoying were the number of calls expected of the women in the Homestead. Edward Dickinson’s prominence meant a tacit support within the private sphere. The daily rounds of receiving and paying visits were deemed essential to social standing. Not only were visitors to the college welcome at all times in the home, but also members of the Whig Party or the legislators with whom Edward Dickinson worked. Emily Norcross Dickinson’s retreat into poor health in the 1850s may well be understood as one response to such a routine. For Dickinson, the pace of such visits was mind-numbing, and she began limiting the number of visits she made or received. She baked bread and tended the garden, but she would neither dust nor visit. There was one other duty she gladly took on. As the elder of Austin’s two sisters, she slotted herself into the expected role of counselor and confidante. In the 19th century the sister was expected to act as moral guide to her brother; Dickinson rose to that requirement—but on her own terms. Known at school as a “wit,” she put a sharp edge on her sweetest remarks. In her early letters to Austin, she represented the eldest child as the rising hope of the family. From Dickinson’s perspective, Austin’s safe passage to adulthood depended on two aspects of his character. With the first she was in firm agreement with the wisdom of the century: the young man should emerge from his education with a firm loyalty to home. The second was Dickinson’s own invention: Austin’s success depended on a ruthless intellectual honesty. If he borrowed his ideas, he failed her test of character. There were to be no pieties between them, and when she detected his own reliance on conventional wisdom, she used her language to challenge what he had left unquestioned. In her letters to Austin in the early 1850s, while he was teaching and in the mid 1850s during his three years as a law student at Harvard, she presented herself as a keen critic, using extravagant praise to invite him to question the worth of his own perceptions. She positioned herself as a spur to his ambition, readily reminding him of her own work when she wondered about the extent of his. Dickinson’s 1850s letters to Austin are marked by an intensity that did not outlast the decade. As Austin faced his own future, most of his choices defined an increasing separation between his sister’s world and his. Initially lured by the prospect of going West, he decided to settle in Amherst, apparently at his father’s urging. Not only did he return to his hometown, but he also joined his father in his law practice. Austin Dickinson gradually took over his father’s role: He too became the citizen of Amherst, treasurer of the College, and chairman of the Cattle Show. In only one case, and an increasingly controversial one, Austin Dickinson’s decision offered Dickinson the intensity she desired. His marriage to Susan Gilbert brought a new “sister” into the family, one with whom Dickinson felt she had much in common. That Gilbert’s intensity was of a different order Dickinson would learn over time, but in the early 1850s, as her relationship with Austin was waning, her relationship with Gilbert was growing. Gilbert would figure powerfully in Dickinson’s life as a beloved comrade, critic, and alter ego. Born just nine days after Dickinson, Susan Gilbert entered a profoundly different world from the one she would one day share with her sister-in-law. The daughter of a tavern keeper, Sue was born at the margins of Amherst society. Her father’s work defined her world as clearly as Edward Dickinson’s did that of his daughters. Had her father lived, Sue might never have moved from the world of the working class to the world of educated lawyers. Sue’s mother died in 1837; her father, in 1841. After her mother’s death, she and her sister Martha were sent to live with their aunt in Geneva, New York. They returned periodically to Amherst to visit their older married sister, Harriet Gilbert Cutler. Sue, however, returned to Amherst to live and attend school in 1847. Enrolled at Amherst Academy while Dickinson was at Mount Holyoke, Sue was gradually included in the Dickinson circle of friends by way of her sister Martha. The end of Sue’s schooling signaled the beginning of work outside the home. She took a teaching position in Baltimore in 1851. On the eve of her departure, Amherst was in the midst of a religious revival. The community was galvanized by the strong preaching of both its regular and its visiting ministers. The Dickinson household was memorably affected. Emily Norcross Dickinson’s church membership dated from 1831, a few months after Emily’s birth. By the end of the revival, two more of the family members counted themselves among the saved: Edward Dickinson joined the church on August 11, 1850, the day as Susan Gilbert. Vinnie Dickinson delayed some months longer, until November. Austin Dickinson waited several more years, joining the church in 1856, the year of his marriage. The other daughter never made that profession of faith. As Dickinson wrote to her friend Jane Humphrey in 1850, “I am standing alone in rebellion.” To gauge the extent of Dickinson’s rebellion, consideration must be taken of the nature of church membership at the time as well as the attitudes toward revivalist fervor. As shown by Edward Dickinson’s and Susan Gilbert’s decisions to join the church in 1850, church membership was not tied to any particular stage of a person’s life. To be enrolled as a member was not a matter of age but of “conviction.” The individuals had first to be convinced of a true conversion experience, had to believe themselves chosen by God, of his “elect.” In keeping with the old-style Calvinism, the world was divided among the regenerate, the unregenerate, and those in between. The categories Mary Lyon used at Mount Holyoke (“established Christians,” “without hope,” and “with hope”) were the standard of the revivalist. But unlike their Puritan predecessors, the members of this generation moved with greater freedom between the latter two categories. Those “without hope” might well see a different possibility for themselves after a season of intense religious focus. The 19th-century Christians of Calvinist persuasion continued to maintain the absolute power of God’s election. His omnipotence could not be compromised by an individual’s effort; however, the individual’s unquestioning search for a true faith was an unalterable part of the salvific equation. While God would not simply choose those who chose themselves, he also would only make his choice from those present and accounted for—thus, the importance of church attendance as well as the centrality of religious self-examination. Revivals guaranteed that both would be inescapable. As Dickinson wrote in a poem dated to 1875, “Escape is such a thankful Word.” In fact, her references to “escape” occur primarily in reference to the soul. In her scheme of redemption, salvation depended upon freedom. The poem ends with praise for the “trusty word” of escape. Contrasting a vision of “the savior” with the condition of being “saved,” Dickinson says there is clearly one choice: “And that is why I lay my Head / Opon this trusty word -” She invites the reader to compare one incarnation with another. Upending the Christian language about the “word,” Dickinson substitutes her own agency for the incarnate savior. She will choose “escape.” A decade earlier, the choice had been as apparent. In the poems from 1862 Dickinson describes the soul’s defining experiences. Figuring these “events” in terms of moments, she passes from the soul’s “Bandaged moments” of suspect thought to the soul’s freedom. In these “moments of escape,” the soul will not be confined; nor will its explosive power be contained: “The soul has moments of escape - / When bursting all the doors - / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings opon the Hours,” Like the soul of her description, Dickinson refused to be confined by the elements expected of her. The demands of her father’s, her mother’s, and her dear friends’ religion invariably prompted such “moments of escape.” During the period of the 1850 revival in Amherst, Dickinson reported her own assessment of the circumstances. Far from using the language of “renewal” associated with revivalist vocabulary, she described a landscape of desolation darkened by an affliction of the spirit. In her “rebellion” letter to Humphrey, she wrote, “How lonely this world is growing, something so desolate creeps over the spirit and we don’t know its name, and it won’t go away, either Heaven is seeming greater, or Earth a great deal more small, or God is more ‘Our Father,’ and we feel our need increased. Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless. Abby, Mary, Jane, and farthest of all my Vinnie have been seeking, and they all believe they have found; I can’t tell you  what  they have found, but  they  think it is something precious. I wonder if it  is ?” Dickinson’s question frames the decade. Within those 10 years she defined what was incontrovertibly precious to her. Not religion, but poetry; not the vehicle reduced to its tenor, but the process of making metaphor and watching the meaning emerge. As early as 1850 her letters suggest that her mind was turning over the possibility of her own work. Extending the contrast between herself and her friends, she described but did not specify an “aim” to her life. She announced its novelty (“I have dared to do strange things—bold things”), asserted her independence (“and have asked no advice from any”), and couched it in the language of temptation (“I have heeded beautiful tempters”). She described the winter as one long dream from which she had not yet awakened. That winter began with the gift of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s  Poems  for New Year’s. Her letters of the period are frequent and long. Their heightened language provided working space for herself as writer. In these passionate letters to her female friends, she tried out different voices. At times she sounded like the female protagonist from a contemporary novel; at times, she was the narrator who chastises her characters for their failure to see beyond complicated circumstances. She played the wit and sounded the divine, exploring the possibility of the new converts’ religious faith only to come up short against its distinct unreality in her own experience. And finally, she confronted the difference imposed by that challenging change of state from daughter/sister to wife. Lacking the letters written to Dickinson, readers cannot know whether the language of her friends matched her own, but the freedom with which Dickinson wrote to Humphrey and to Fowler suggests that their own responses encouraged hers. Perhaps this sense of encouragement was nowhere stronger than with Gilbert. Although little is known of their early relations, the letters written to Gilbert while she was teaching at Baltimore speak with a kind of hope for a shared perspective, if not a shared vocation. Recent critics have speculated that Gilbert, like Dickinson, thought of herself as a poet. Several of Dickinson’s letters stand behind this speculation, as does one of the few pieces of surviving correspondence with Gilbert from 1861—their discussion and disagreement over the second stanza of Dickinson’s “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” Writing to Gilbert in 1851, Dickinson imagined that their books would one day keep company with the poets. They will not be ignominiously jumbled together with grammars and dictionaries (the fate assigned to  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ’s in the local stationer’s). Sue and Emily, she reports, are “the only poets.” Whatever Gilbert’s poetic aspirations were, Dickinson clearly looked to Gilbert as one of her most important readers, if not the most important. She sent Gilbert more than 270 of her poems. Gilbert may well have read most of the poems that Dickinson wrote. In many cases the poems were written for her. They functioned as letters, with perhaps an additional line of greeting or closing. Gilbert’s involvement, however, did not satisfy Dickinson. In 1850-1851 there had been some minor argument, perhaps about religion. In the mid 1850s a more serious break occurred, one that was healed, yet one that marked a change in the nature of the relationship. In a letter dated to 1854 Dickinson begins bluntly, “Sue—you can go or stay—There is but one alternative—We differ often lately, and this must be the last.” The nature of the difference remains unknown. Critics have speculated about its connection with religion, with Austin Dickinson, with poetry, with their own love for each other. The nature of that love has been much debated: What did Dickinson’s passionate language signify? Her words are the declarations of a lover, but such language is not unique to the letters to Gilbert. It appears in the correspondence with Fowler and Humphrey. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has illustrated in  Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America  (1985), female friendships in the 19th century were often passionate. But modern categories of sexual relations do not fit neatly with the verbal record of the 19th century. “The love that dare not speak its name” may well have been a kind of common parlance among mid-19th-century women. Dickinson’s own ambivalence toward marriage—an ambivalence so common as to be ubiquitous in the journals of young women—was clearly grounded in her perception of what the role of “wife” required. From her own housework as dutiful daughter, she had seen how secondary her own work became. In her observation of married women, her mother not excluded, she saw the failing health, the unmet demands, the absenting of self that was part of the husband-wife relationship. The “wife” poems of the 1860s reflect this ambivalence. The gold wears away; “amplitude” and “awe” are absent for the woman who meets the requirements of wife. The loss remains unspoken, but, like the irritating grain in the oyster’s shell, it leaves behind ample evidence.

She rose to His Requirement – dropt The Playthings of Her Life To take the honorable Work Of Woman, and of Wife - If ought She missed in Her new Day, Of Amplitude, or Awe - Or first Prospective - Or the Gold In using, wear away, It lay unmentioned - as the Sea Develope Pearl, and Weed, But only to Himself - be known The Fathoms they abide -

Little wonder that the words of another poem bound the woman’s life by the wedding. In one line the woman is “Born—Bridalled—Shrouded.” Such thoughts did not belong to the poems alone. Writing to Gilbert in the midst of Gilbert’s courtship with Austin Dickinson, only four years before their marriage, Dickinson painted a haunting picture. She began with a discussion of “union” but implied that its conventional connection with marriage was not her meaning. She wrote, “Those unions, my dear Susie, by which two lives are one, this sweet and strange adoption wherein we can but look, and are not yet admitted, how it can fill the heart, and make it gang wildly beating, how it will take  us  one day, and make us all it’s own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy!” The use evokes the conventional association with marriage, but as Dickinson continued her reflection, she distinguished between the imagined happiness of “union” and the parched life of the married woman. She commented, “How dull our lives must seem to the bride, and the plighted maiden, whose days are fed with gold, and who gathers pearls every evening; but to the  wife,  Susie, sometimes the  wife forgotten , our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning,  satisfied  with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun.” The bride for whom the gold has not yet worn away, who gathers pearls without knowing what lies at their core, cannot fathom the value of the unmarried woman’s life. That remains to be discovered—too late—by the wife. Her wilted noon is hardly the happiness associated with Dickinson’s first mention of union. Rather, that bond belongs to another relationship, one that clearly she broached with Gilbert. Defined by an illuminating aim, it is particular to its holder, yet shared deeply with another. Dickinson represents her own position, and in turn asks Gilbert whether such a perspective is not also hers: “I have always hoped to know if you had no dear fancy, illumining all your life, no one of whom you murmured in the faithful ear of night—and at whose side in fancy, you walked the livelong day.” Dickinson’s “dear fancy” of becoming poet would indeed illumine her life. What remained less dependable was Gilbert’s accompaniment. That Susan Dickinson would not join Dickinson in the “walk” became increasingly clear as she turned her attention to the social duties befitting the wife of a rising lawyer. Between hosting distinguished visitors (Emerson among them), presiding over various dinners, and mothering three children, Susan Dickinson’s “dear fancy” was far from Dickinson’s. As Dickinson had predicted, their paths diverged, but the letters and poems continued. The letters grow more cryptic, aphorism defining the distance between them. Dickinson began to divide her attention between Susan Dickinson and Susan’s children. In the last decade of Dickinson’s life, she apparently facilitated the extramarital affair between her brother and Mabel Loomis Todd. Regardless of outward behavior, however, Susan Dickinson remained a center to Dickinson’s circumference.

As the relationship with Susan Dickinson wavered, other aspects in Dickinson’s life were just coming to the fore. The 1850s marked a shift in her friendships. As her school friends married, she sought new companions. Defined by the written word, they divided between the known correspondent and the admired author. No new source of companionship for Dickinson, her books were primary voices behind her own writing. Regardless of the reading endorsed by the master in the academy or the father in the house, Dickinson read widely among the contemporary authors on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the British were the Romantic poets, the Brontë sisters, the Brownings, and  George Eliot . On the American side was the unlikely company of Longfellow, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson. With a knowledge-bound sentence that suggested she knew more than she revealed, she claimed not to have read Whitman. She read  Thomas Carlyle , Charles Darwin, and  Matthew Arnold . Her contemporaries gave Dickinson a kind of currency for her own writing, but commanding equal ground were the Bible and  Shakespeare . While the authors were here defined by their inaccessibility, the allusions in Dickinson’s letters and poems suggest just how vividly she imagined her words in conversation with others. Included in these epistolary conversations were her actual correspondents. Their number was growing. In two cases, the individuals were editors; later generations have wondered whether Dickinson saw Samuel Bowles and Josiah Holland as men who were likely to help her poetry into print. Bowles was chief editor of the  Springfield Republican;  Holland joined him in those duties in 1850. With both men Dickinson forwarded a lively correspondence. To each she sent many poems, and seven of those poems were printed in the paper—“Sic transit gloria mundi,” “Nobody knows this little rose,” “I Taste a liquor never brewed,” “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” “Flowers – Well – if anybody,” “Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,” and “A narrow fellow in the grass.” The language in Dickinson’s letters to Bowles is similar to the passionate language of her letters to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. She readily declared her love to him; yet, as readily declared that love to his wife, Mary. In each she hoped to find an answering spirit, and from each she settled on different conclusions. Josiah Holland never elicited declarations of love. When she wrote to him, she wrote primarily to his wife. In contrast to the friends who married, Mary Holland became a sister she did not have to forfeit. These friendships were in their early moments in 1853 when Edward Dickinson took up residence in Washington as he entered what he hoped would be the first of many terms in Congress. With their father’s absence, Vinnie and Emily Dickinson spent more time visiting—staying with the Hollands in Springfield or heading to Washington. In 1855 after one such visit, the sisters stopped in Philadelphia on their return to Amherst. Staying with their Amherst friend Eliza Coleman, they likely attended church with her. The minister in the pulpit was Charles Wadsworth, renowned for his preaching and pastoral care. Dickinson found herself interested in both. She eventually deemed Wadsworth one of her “Masters.” No letters from Dickinson to Wadsworth are extant, and yet the correspondence with Mary Holland indicates that Holland forwarded many letters from Dickinson to Wadsworth. The content of those letters is unknown. That Dickinson felt the need to send them under the covering hand of Holland suggests an intimacy critics have long puzzled over. As with Susan Dickinson, the question of relationship seems irreducible to familiar terms. While many have assumed a “love affair”—and in certain cases, assumption extends to a consummation in more than words—there is little evidence to support a sensationalized version. The only surviving letter written by Wadsworth to Dickinson dates from 1862. It speaks of the pastor’s concern for one of his flock: “I am distressed beyond measure at your note, received this moment, —I can only imagine the affliction which has befallen, or is now befalling you. Believe me, be what it may, you have all my sympathy, and my constant, earnest prayers.” Whether her letter to him has in fact survived is not clear. There are three letters addressed to an unnamed “Master”—the so-called “Master Letters”—but they are silent on the question of whether or not the letters were sent and if so, to whom. The second letter in particular speaks of “affliction” through sharply expressed pain. This language may have prompted Wadsworth’s response, but there is no conclusive evidence. Edward Dickinson did not win reelection and thus turned his attention to his Amherst residence after his defeat in November 1855. At this time Edward’s law partnership with his son became a daily reality. He also returned his family to the Homestead. Emily Dickinson had been born in that house; the Dickinsons had resided there for the first 10 years of her life. She had also spent time at the Homestead with her cousin John Graves and with Susan Dickinson during Edward Dickinson’s term in Washington. It became the center of Dickinson’s daily world from which she sent her mind “out upon Circumference,” writing hundreds of poems and letters in the rooms she had known for most of her life. It was not, however, a solitary house but increasingly became defined by its proximity to the house next door. Austin Dickinson and Susan Gilbert married in July 1856. They settled in the Evergreens, the house newly built down the path from the Homestead. For Dickinson, the next years were both powerful and difficult. Her letters reflect the centrality of friendship in her life. As she commented to Bowles in 1858, “My friends are my ‘estate.’ Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.” By this time in her life, there were significant losses to that “estate” through death—her first “Master,” Leonard Humphrey, in 1850; the second, Benjamin Newton, in 1853. There were also the losses through marriage and the mirror of loss, departure from Amherst. Whether comforting Mary Bowles on a stillbirth, remembering the death of a friend’s wife, or consoling her cousins Frances and Louise Norcross after their mother’s death, her words sought to accomplish the impossible. “Split lives—never ‘get well,’” she commented; yet, in her letters she wrote into that divide, offering images to hold these lives together. Her approach forged a particular kind of connection. In these years, she turned increasingly to the cryptic style that came to define her writing. The letters are rich in aphorism and dense with allusion. She asks her reader to complete the connection her words only imply—to round out the context from which the allusion is taken, to take the part and imagine a whole. Through her letters, Dickinson reminds her correspondents that their broken worlds are not a mere chaos of fragments. Behind the seeming fragments of her short statements lies the invitation to remember the world in which each correspondent shares a certain and rich knowledge with the other. They alone know the extent of their connections; the friendship has given them the experiences peculiar to the relation. At the same time that Dickinson was celebrating friendship, she was also limiting the amount of daily time she spent with other people. By 1858, when she solicited a visit from her cousin Louise Norcross, Dickinson reminded Norcross that she was “one of the ones from whom I do not run away.” Much, and in all likelihood too much, has been made of Dickinson’s decision to restrict her visits with other people. She has been termed “recluse” and “hermit.” Both terms sensationalize a decision that has come to be seen as eminently practical. As Dickinson’s experience taught her, household duties were anathema to other activities. The visiting alone was so time-consuming as to be prohibitive in itself. As she turned her attention to writing, she gradually eased out of the countless rounds of social calls. Sometime in 1858 she began organizing her poems into distinct groupings. These “fascicles,” as Mabel Loomis Todd, Dickinson’s first editor, termed them, comprised fair copies of the poems, several written on a page, the pages sewn together. By 1860 Dickinson had written more than 150 poems. At the same time, she pursued an active correspondence with many individuals. For Dickinson, letter writing was “visiting” at its best. It was focused and uninterrupted. Other callers would not intrude. It winnowed out “polite conversation.” The correspondents could speak their minds outside the formulas of parlor conversation. Foremost, it meant an active engagement in the art of writing. If Dickinson began her letters as a kind of literary apprenticeship, using them to hone her skills of expression, she turned practice into performance. The genre offered ample opportunity for the play of meaning. By the late 1850s the poems as well as the letters begin to speak with their own distinct voice. They shift from the early lush language of the 1850s valentines to their signature economy of expression. The poems dated to 1858 already carry the familiar metric pattern of the hymn. The alternating four-beat/three-beat lines are marked by a brevity in turn reinforced by Dickinson’s syntax. Her poems followed both the cadence and the rhythm of the hymn form she adopted. This form was fertile ground for her poetic exploration. Through its faithful predictability, she could play content off against form. While certain lines accord with their place in the hymn—either leading the reader to the next line or drawing a thought to its conclusion—the poems are as likely to upend the structure so that the expected moment of cadence includes the words that speak the greatest ambiguity. In the following poem, the hymn meter is respected until the last line. A poem built from biblical quotations, it undermines their certainty through both rhythm and image. In the first stanza Dickinson breaks lines one and three with her asides to the implied listener. The poem is figured as a conversation about who enters Heaven. It begins with biblical references, then uses the story of the rich man’s difficulty as the governing image for the rest of the poem. Unlike Christ’s counsel to the young man, however, Dickinson’s images turn decidedly secular. She places the reader in a world of commodity with its brokers and discounts, its dividends and costs. The neat financial transaction ends on a note of incompleteness created by rhythm, sound, and definition. The final line is truncated to a single iamb, the final word ends with an open double  s  sound, and the word itself describes uncertainty:

You’re right – “the way  is  narrow” And “difficult the Gate” - And “few there be” - Correct again - That “enter in - thereat” -  ’Tis  Costly - so are  purples! ’ Tis just the price of  Breath - With but the “Discount” of  the   Grave - Termed by the  Brokers – “Death”!   And after  that -  there’s Heaven - The  Good  man’s – “ Dividend ” - And  Bad  men – “go to Jail” - I guess –

The late 1850s marked the beginning of Dickinson’s greatest poetic period. By 1865 she had written nearly 1,100 poems. Bounded on one side by Austin and Susan Dickinson’s marriage and on the other by severe difficulty with her eyesight, the years between held an explosion of expression in both poems and letters. Her own stated ambitions are cryptic and contradictory. Later critics have read the epistolary comments about her own “wickedness” as a tacit acknowledgment of her poetic ambition. In contrast to joining the church, she joined the ranks of the writers, a potentially suspect group. Distrust, however, extended only to certain types. If Dickinson associated herself with the Wattses and the Cowpers, she occupied respected literary ground; if she aspired toward Pope or Shakespeare, she crossed into the ranks of the “libertine.” Dickinson’s poems themselves suggest she made no such distinctions—she blended the form of Watts with the content of Shakespeare. She described personae of her poems as disobedient children and youthful “debauchees.” The place she envisioned for her writing is far from clear. Did she pursue the friendships with Bowles and Holland in the hope that these editors would help her poetry into print? Did she identify her poems as apt candidates for inclusion in the “Portfolio” pages of newspapers, or did she always imagine a different kind of circulation for her writing? Dickinson apologized for the public appearance of her poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” claiming that it had been stolen from her, but her own complicity in such theft remains unknown. Her April 1862 letter to the well-known literary figure Thomas Wentworth Higginson certainly suggests a particular answer. Written as a response to his  Atlantic Monthly  article “Letter to a Young Contributor” –the lead article in the April issue—her intention seems unmistakable. She sent him four poems, one of which she had worked over several times. With this gesture she placed herself in the ranks of “young contributor,” offering him a sample of her work, hoping for its acceptance. Her accompanying letter, however, does not speak the language of publication. It decidedly asks for his estimate; yet, at the same time it couches the request in terms far different from the vocabulary of the literary marketplace:

Mr. Higginson,

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask—

Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—

If I make the mistake—that you dared to tell me—would give me sincerer honor—toward you—

I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since Honor is it’s own pawn—

Higginson’s response is not extant. It can only be gleaned from Dickinson’s subsequent letters. In them she makes clear that Higginson’s response was far from an enthusiastic endorsement. She speaks of the “surgery” he performed; she asks him if the subsequent poems that she has sent are “more orderly.” Higginson himself was intrigued but not impressed. His first recorded comments about Dickinson’s poetry are dismissive. In a letter to  Atlantic Monthly  editor James T. Fields, Higginson complained about the response to his article: “I foresee that ‘Young Contributors’ will send me worse things than ever now. Two such specimens of verse as came yesterday & day before—fortunately  not  to be forwarded for publication!” He had received Dickinson’s poems the day before he wrote this letter. While Dickinson’s letters clearly piqued his curiosity, he did not readily envision a published poet emerging from this poetry, which he found poorly structured. As is made clear by one of Dickinson’s responses, he counseled her to work longer and harder on her poetry before she attempted its publication. Her reply, in turn, piques the later reader’s curiosity. She wrote, “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.” What lay behind this comment? The brave cover of profound disappointment? The accurate rendering of her own ambition? Sometime in 1863 she wrote her often-quoted poem about publication with its disparaging remarks about reducing expression to a market value. At a time when slave auctions were palpably rendered for a Northern audience, she offered another example of the corrupting force of the merchant’s world. The poem begins, “Publication - is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man” and ends by returning its reader to the image of the opening: “But reduce no Human Spirit / To Disgrace of Price -.” While Dickinson spoke strongly against publication once Higginson had suggested its inadvisability, her earlier remarks tell a different story. In the same letter to Higginson in which she eschews publication, she also asserts her identity as a poet. “My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet.” In all likelihood the tutor is Ben Newton, the lawyer who had given her Emerson’s  Poems.  His death in 1853 suggests how early Dickinson was beginning to think of herself as a poet, but unexplained is Dickinson’s view on the relationship between being a poet and being published. When she was working over her poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” one of the poems included with the first letter to Higginson, she suggested that the distance between firmament and fin was not as far as it first appeared. As she reworked the second stanza again, and yet again, she indicated a future that did not preclude publication. She wrote to Sue, “Could I make you and Austin—proud—sometime—a great way off—’twould give me taller feet.” Written sometime in 1861, the letter predates her exchange with Higginson. Again, the frame of reference is omitted. One can only conjecture what circumstance would lead to Austin and Susan Dickinson’s pride. That such pride is in direct relation to Dickinson’s poetry is unquestioned; that it means publication is not. Given her penchant for double meanings, her anticipation of “taller feet” might well signal a change of poetic form. Her ambition lay in moving from brevity to expanse, but this movement again is the later reader’s speculation. The only evidence is the few poems published in the 1850s and 1860s and a single poem published in the 1870s. This minimal publication, however, was not a retreat to a completely private expression. Her poems circulated widely among her friends, and this audience was part and parcel of women’s literary culture in the 19th century. She sent poems to nearly all her correspondents; they in turn may well have read those poems with their friends. Dickinson’s poems were rarely restricted to her eyes alone. She continued to collect her poems into distinct packets. The practice has been seen as her own trope on domestic work: she sewed the pages together. Poetry was by no means foreign to women’s daily tasks—mending, sewing, stitching together the material to clothe the person. Unremarked, however, is its other kinship. Her work was also the minister’s. Preachers stitched together the pages of their sermons, a task they apparently undertook themselves. Dickinson’s comments on herself as poet invariably implied a widespread audience. As she commented to Higginson in 1862, “My Business is Circumference.” She adapted that phrase to two other endings, both of which reinforced the expansiveness she envisioned for her work. To the Hollands she wrote, “ My  business is to love. …  My  Business is to  Sing. ” In all versions of that phrase, the guiding image evokes boundlessness. In song the sound of the voice extends across space, and the ear cannot accurately measure its dissipating tones. Love is idealized as a condition without end. Even the “circumference”—the image that Dickinson returned to many times in her poetry—is a boundary that suggests boundlessness. As Emerson’s essay “Circles” may well have taught Dickinson, another circle can always be drawn around any circumference. When, in Dickinson’s terms, individuals go “out upon Circumference,” they stand on the edge of an unbounded space. Dickinson’s use of the image refers directly to the project central to her poetic work. It appears in the structure of her declaration to Higginson; it is integral to the structure and subjects of the poems themselves. The key rests in the small word  is.  In her poetry Dickinson set herself the double-edged task of definition. Her poems frequently identify themselves as definitions: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” “Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue,” “Remorse—is Memory—awake,” or “Eden is that old fashioned House.” As these examples illustrate, Dickinsonian definition is inseparable from metaphor. The statement that says “is” is invariably the statement that articulates a comparison. “We see—Comparatively,” Dickinson wrote, and her poems demonstrate that assertion. In the world of her poetry, definition proceeds via comparison. One cannot say directly what is; essence remains unnamed and unnameable. In its place the poet articulates connections created out of correspondence. In some cases the abstract noun is matched with a concrete object—hope figures as a bird, its appearances and disappearances signaled by the defining element of flight. In other cases, one abstract concept is connected with another, remorse described as wakeful memory; renunciation, as the “piercing virtue.” Comparison becomes a reciprocal process. Dickinson’s metaphors observe no firm distinction between tenor and vehicle. Defining one concept in terms of another produces a new layer of meaning in which both terms are changed. Neither hope nor birds are seen in the same way by the end of Dickinson’s poem. Dickinson frequently builds her poems around this trope of change. Her vocabulary circles around transformation, often ending before change is completed. The final lines of her poems might well be defined by their inconclusiveness: the “I guess” of “You’re right - ’the way  is  narrow’“; a direct statement of slippage—”and then - it doesn’t stay”—in “I prayed, at first, a little Girl.” Dickinson’s endings are frequently open. In this world of comparison, extremes are powerful. There are many negative definitions and sharp contrasts. While the emphasis on the outer limits of emotion may well be the most familiar form of the Dickinsonian extreme, it is not the only one. Dickinson’s use of synecdoche is yet another version. The part that is taken for the whole functions by way of contrast. The specific detail speaks for the thing itself, but in its speaking, it reminds the reader of the difference between the minute particular and what it represents. Opposition frames the system of meaning in Dickinson’s poetry: the reader knows what is, by what is not. In an early poem, “ There’s a certain Slant of light, (320) ” Dickinson located meaning in a geography of “internal difference.” Her 1862 poem “ It was not Death, for I stood up, (355) ” picks up on this important thread in her career. 

Emily Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886. After her death her family members found her hand-sewn books, or “fascicles.” These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems. Though Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson published the first selection of her poems in 1890, a complete volume did not appear until 1955. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, the poems still bore the editorial hand of Todd and Higginson. It was not until R.W. Franklin’s version of Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1998 that her order, unusual punctuation and spelling choices were completely restored.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)

All overgrown by cunning moss, (146), banish air from air - (963).

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Bibliography

Before i got my eye put out – (336), a bird, came down the walk - (359), the bustle in a house (1108), come slowly – eden (205), crumbling is not an instant's act (1010), “faith” is a fine invention (202), fame is a bee. (1788), fame is a fickle food (1702), fame is the one that does not stay — (1507), forever – is composed of nows – (690), glass was the street - in tinsel peril (1518), “hope” is the thing with feathers, how many times these low feet staggered (238), i dwell in possibility – (466), i felt a funeral, in my brain, (340), i have never seen "volcanoes" — (175), i heard a fly buzz - when i died - (591), i know that he exists. (365), i like to see it lap the miles - (383), i never hear that one is dead (1325), i never hear the word “escape” (144), i started early – took my dog – (656), i would not paint — a picture — (348), in this short life that only lasts an hour (1292), it sifts from leaden sieves - (291), it was not death, for i stood up, (355), let me not thirst with this hock at my lip, mine - by the right of the white election (411), the moon is distant from the sea – (387), the morns are meeker than they were - (32), much madness is divinest sense - (620), the mushroom is the elf of plants - (1350), my life had stood - a loaded gun (764), a narrow fellow in the grass (1096), a not admitting of the wound (1188), now i knew i lost her — (1274), of glory not a beam is left (1685), the poets light but lamps — (930), the props assist the house (729), publication – is the auction (788), a route of evanescence, (1489), safe in their alabaster chambers (124), snow flakes. (45), some keep the sabbath going to church – (236), the soul has bandaged moments - (360), success is counted sweetest (112), surgeons must be very careful (156), tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263), there is no frigate like a book (1286), there's a certain slant of light, (320), they shut me up in prose – (445), this world is not conclusion (373), to fight aloud is very brave - (138), wild nights - wild nights (269), you left me – sire – two legacies – (713), studies in scale.

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• Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson Roberts (Boston, MA), 1890; Osgood, McIlvaine (London) 1891.
• Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series, edited by Higginson and Todd Roberts, 1891.
• Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Todd, 2 volumes, Roberts, 1894; enlarged edition, Harper (New York, NY), 1931.
• Poems by Emily Dickinson, Third Series, edited by Todd, Roberts, 1896.
• The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1914.
• Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, Little, Brown, 1929; Secker (London), 1929.
• Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Bianchi and Hampson Little, Brown, 1935.
• Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, Harper, 1945; Cape (London), 1946.
• Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland, edited by Theodora Van Wagenen Ward, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1951.
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 volumes, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Harvard University Press, 1955.
• The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 volumes, edited by Johnson and Ward, Harvard University Press, 1958.
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Johnson, Little, Brown, 1962.
• The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 2 volumes, edited by R. W. Franklin, Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios, edited by Marta L. Werner, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1995.
• Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Sue, edited by Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, Paris Press (Ashfield, MA), 1998.
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, 3 volumes, edited by Franklin, Harvard University Press, 1998.
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition, edited by Franklin, Harvard University Press, 1999.

*Letters volumes are listed because they include poems. LETTERS

• Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, 2 volumes, Roberts, 1894; enlarged edition, Harper, 1931.
• Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland, edited by Theodora Van Wagenen Ward Harvard University Press, 1951.
• The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 volumes, edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Ward, Harvard University Press, 1958.
• The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, Amherst College Press (Amherst, MA), 1986.
• Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Sue, edited by Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart Paris Press, 1998.

DIGITAL EDITIONS

• Dickinson Electronic Archives,  edited by Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, and Marta Werner, http://www.emilydickinson.org

Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts are located in two primary collections: the Amherst College Library and the Houghton Library of Harvard University. The poems that were in Mabel Loomis Todd’s possession are at Amherst; those that remained within the Dickinson households are at the Houghton Library.    

Further Readings

Bibliographies:

• Willis Buckingham, Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Bibliography: Writings, Scholarship, Criticism and Analysis, 1850-1968 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970).
• Annual bibliographies in Dickinson Studies (1978-1993).
• Joseph Duchac, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English, 1890-1977 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979).
• Joel Myerson, Emily Dickinson: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).
• Karen Dandurand, Dickinson Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography, 1969-1985 (New York: Garland, 1988).
• Duchac, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English, 1978-1989 (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993).
• Myerson, "Supplement to Emily Dickinson: A Descriptive Bibliography, " Emily Dickinson Journal, 4, no. 2 (1995): 87-128.

Biographies:

• George Whicher, This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (New York: Scribners, 1938).
• Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955).
• Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 2 volumes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960).
• John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
• Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 volumes (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974).
• Barbara Mossberg, Emily Dickinson: When a Writer Is a Daughter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
• Jerome Loving, Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson (New York: Knopf, 1986).
• Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001).

References:

• Charles Anderson, Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960).
• Annual review essays in American Literary Scholarship (1963-).
• Christopher Benfey, Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
• Paula Bennett, Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990).
• Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson (New York: Harper, 1945).
• Willis Buckingham, Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989).
• Buckingham, "Poetry Readers and Reading in the 1890s: Emily Dickinson's First Reception," in Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, edited by James L. Machor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 164-179.
• Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, eds., On Dickinson: The Best From American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).
• Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
• Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson's Reading, 1836-1886 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).
• Joanne Feit Diehl, Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
• Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
• Jane Donahue Eberwein, Dickinson, Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985).
• Eberwein, ed., An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998).
• The Emily Dickinson Journal (1992-).
• Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
• Paul Ferlazzo, ed., Critical Essays on Emily Dickinson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984).
• R. W. Franklin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).
• Albert J. Gelpi, Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
• Grabher Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, eds., The Emily Dickinson Handbook (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
• Jeanne Holland, "Scraps, Stamps, and Cutouts: Emily Dickinson's Domestic Technologies of Publication," in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image and the Body, edited by J. M. Ezell and Katherine O'Keeffe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 139-181.
• Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
• Susan Howe, "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values," in her The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993), pp. 131-153.
• Suzanne Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
• Juhasz, ed., Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
• Juhasz, Cristanne Miller, Martha Nell Smith, eds., Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
• Karl Keller, The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
• Benjamin Lease, Emily Dickinson's Readings of Men and Books: Sacred Soundings (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).
• Mary Loeffelholz, Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
• Wendy Martin, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
• Cynthia MacKenzie, Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2000).
• Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
• Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
• Domhnall Mitchell, Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
• Dorothy Oberhaus, Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method and Meaning (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).
• Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch, eds., Dickinson and Audience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
• Vivian Pollak, Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
• David Porter, Emily Dickinson, the Modern Idiom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
• Adrienne Rich, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson," in her On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 157-183.
• S. P. Rosenbaum, A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966).
• Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden: Re-Reading Emily Dickinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
• Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
• Robert Weisbuch, Emily Dickinson's Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
• Marta L. Werner, ed., Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
• Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice at War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
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Emily Dickinson

(1830-1886)

Who Was Emily Dickinson?

Emily Dickinson left school as a teenager, eventually living a reclusive life on the family homestead. There, she secretly created bundles of poetry and wrote hundreds of letters. Due to a discovery by sister Lavinia, Dickinson's remarkable work was published after her death — on May 15, 1886, in Amherst — and she is now considered one of the towering figures of American literature.

Early Life and Education

Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her family had deep roots in New England. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was well known as the founder of Amherst College. Her father worked at Amherst and served as a state legislator. He married Emily Norcross in 1828 and the couple had three children: William Austin, Emily and Lavinia Norcross.

An excellent student, Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy (now Amherst College) for seven years and then attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year. Though the precise reasons for Dickinson's final departure from the academy in 1848 are unknown; theories offered say that her fragile emotional state may have played a role and/or that her father decided to pull her from the school. Dickinson ultimately never joined a particular church or denomination, steadfastly going against the religious norms of the time.

Family Dynamics and Writing

Among her peers, Dickinson's closest friend and adviser was a woman named Susan Gilbert, who may have been an amorous interest of Dickinson's as well. In 1856, Gilbert married Dickinson's brother, William. The Dickinson family lived on a large home known as the Homestead in Amherst. After their marriage, William and Susan settled in a property next to the Homestead known as the Evergreens. Emily and sister Lavinia served as chief caregivers for their ailing mother until she passed away in 1882. Neither Emily nor her sister ever married and lived together at the Homestead until their respective deaths.

Dickinson's seclusion during her later years has been the object of much speculation. Scholars have thought that she suffered from conditions such as agoraphobia, depression and/or anxiety, or may have been sequestered due to her responsibilities as guardian of her sick mother. Dickinson was also treated for a painful ailment of her eyes. After the mid-1860s, she rarely left the confines of the Homestead. It was also around this time, from the late 1850s to mid-'60s, that Dickinson was most productive as a poet, creating small bundles of verse known as fascicles without any awareness on the part of her family members.

In her spare time, Dickinson studied botany and produced a vast herbarium. She also maintained correspondence with a variety of contacts. One of her friendships, with Judge Otis Phillips Lord, seems to have developed into a romance before Lord's death in 1884.

Death and Discovery

Dickinson died of heart failure in Amherst, Massachusetts, on May 15, 1886, at the age of 55. She was laid to rest in her family plot at West Cemetery. The Homestead, where Dickinson was born, is now a museum .

Little of Dickinson's work was published at the time of her death, and the few works that were published were edited and altered to adhere to conventional standards of the time. Unfortunately, much of the power of Dickinson's unusual use of syntax and form was lost in the alteration. After her sister's death, Lavinia discovered hundreds of poems that Dickinson had crafted over the years. The first volume of these works was published in 1890. A full compilation, The Poems of Emily Dickinson , wasn't published until 1955, though previous iterations had been released.

Dickinson's stature as a writer soared from the first publication of her poems in their intended form. She is known for her poignant and compressed verse, which profoundly influenced the direction of 20th-century poetry. The strength of her literary voice, as well as her reclusive and eccentric life, contributes to the sense of Dickinson as an indelible American character who continues to be discussed today.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Emily Dickinson
• Birth Year: 1830
• Birth date: December 10, 1830
• Birth State: Massachusetts
• Birth City: Amherst
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Emily Dickinson was a reclusive American poet. Unrecognized in her own time, Dickinson is known posthumously for her innovative use of form and syntax.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
• Amherst Academy (now Amherst College)
• Interesting Facts
• In addition to writing poetry, Emily Dickinson studied botany. She compiled a vast herbarium that is now owned by Harvard University.
• Death Year: 1886
• Death date: May 15, 1886
• Death State: Massachusetts
• Death City: Amherst
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Emily Dickinson Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/emily-dickinson
• Access Date:
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• Last Updated: May 7, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• 'Hope' is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tunes without the words - And never stops - at all -
• Dwell in possibility.
• The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind.
• Truth is so rare, it is delightful to tell it.
• If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire 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. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?
• Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne'er succeed./To comprehend a nectar/Requires sorest need.

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Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended law school and became an attorney, lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson’s younger sister, Lavinia, also lived at home, and she and Austin were intellectual companions for Dickinson during her lifetime.

Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning , as well as John Keats . Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumors of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or “fascicles,” as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her annotations. The current standard version of her poems replaces her dashes with an en-dash, which is a closer typographical approximation to her intention. The original order of the poems was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her intended order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures, and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

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Biography of Emily Dickinson, American Poet

Famously reclusive and experimental in poetic form

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Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) was an American poet best known for her eccentric personality and her frequent themes of death and mortality. Although she was a prolific writer, only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime. Despite being mostly unknown while she was alive, her poetry—nearly 1,800 poems altogether—has become a staple of the American literary canon, and scholars and readers alike have long held a fascination with her unusual life.

Fast Facts: Emily Dickinson

• Full Name:  Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
• Known For:  American poet
• Born:  December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts
• Died: May 15, 1886 in Amherst, Massachusetts
• Parents:  Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson
• Education:  Amherst Academy, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
• Published Works: Poems (1890), Poems: Second Series (1891), Poems: Third Series (1896)
• Notable Quote:  "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, a politician, and a trustee of Amherst College , of which his father, Samuel Dickinson, was a founder. He and his wife Emily (nee Norcross ) had three children; Emily Dickinson was the second child and eldest daughter, and she had an older brother, William Austin (who generally went by his middle name), and a younger sister, Lavinia. By all accounts, Dickinson was a pleasant, well-behaved child who particularly loved music.

Because Dickinson’s father was adamant that his children be well-educated, Dickinson received a more rigorous and more classical education than many other girls of her era. When she was ten, she and her sister began attending Amherst Academy, a former academy for boys that had just begun accepting female students two years earlier. Dickinson continued to excel at her studies, despite their rigorous and challenging nature, and studied literature, the sciences, history, philosophy, and Latin. Occasionally, she did have to take time off from school due to repeated illnesses.

Dickinson’s preoccupation with death began at this young age as well. At the age of fourteen, she suffered her first major loss when her friend and cousin Sophia Holland died of typhus . Holland’s death sent her into such a melancholy spiral that she was sent away to Boston to recover. Upon her recovery, she returned to Amherst, continuing her studies alongside some of the people who would be her lifelong friends, including her future sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.

After completing her education at Amherst Academy, Dickinson enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She spent less than a year there, but explanations for her early departure vary depending on the source: her family wanted her to return home, she disliked the intense, evangelical religious atmosphere, she was lonely, she didn’t like the teaching style. In any case, she returned home by the time she was 18 years old.

Reading, Loss, and Love

A family friend, a young attorney named Benjamin Franklin Newton, became a friend and mentor to Dickinson. It was most likely him who introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson , which later influenced and inspired her own poetry. Dickinson read extensively, helped by friends and family who brought her more books; among her most formative influences was the work of William Shakespeare , as well as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre .

Dickinson was in good spirits in the early 1850s, but it did not last. Once again, people near to her died, and she was devastated. Her friend and mentor Newton died of tuberculosis, writing to Dickinson before he died to say he wished he could live to see her achieve greatness. Another friend, the Amherst Academy principal Leonard Humphrey, died suddenly at only 25 years old in 1850. Her letters and writings at the time are filled with the depth of her melancholy moods.

During this time, Dickinson’s old friend Susan Gilbert was her closest confidante. Beginning in 1852, Gilbert was courted by Dickinson’s brother Austin, and they married in 1856, although it was a generally unhappy marriage. Gilbert was much closer to Dickinson, with whom she shared a passionate and intense correspondence and friendship. In the view of many contemporary scholars, the relationship between the two women was, very likely, a romantic one , and possibly the most important relationship of either of their lives. Aside from her personal role in Dickinson’s life, Gilbert also served as a quasi-editor and advisor to Dickinson during her writing career.

Dickinson did not travel much outside of Amherst, slowly developing the later reputation for being reclusive and eccentric. She cared for her mother, who was essentially homebound with chronic illnesses from the 1850s onward. As she became more and more cut off from the outside world, however, Dickinson leaned more into her inner world and thus into her creative output.

Conventional Poetry (1850s – 1861)

I'm nobody who are you (1891).

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you — Nobody — too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise — you know. How dreary — to be — Somebody! How public — like a Frog — To tell one's name — the livelong June — To an admiring Bog!

It’s unclear when, exactly, Dickinson began writing her poems, though it can be assumed that she was writing for some time before any of them were ever revealed to the public or published. Thomas H. Johnson, who was behind the collection The Poems of Emily Dickinson , was able to definitely date only five of Dickinson's poems to the period before 1858. In that early period, her poetry was marked by an adherence to the conventions of the time.

Two of her five earliest poems are actually satirical, done in the style of witty, “mock” valentine poems with deliberately flowery and overwrought language. Two more of them reflect the more melancholy tone she would be better known for. One of those is about her brother Austin and how much she missed him, while the other, known by its first line “I have a Bird in spring,” was written for Gilbert and was a lament about the grief of fearing the loss of friendship.

A few of Dickinson’s poems were published in the Springfield Republican between 1858 and 1868; she was friends with its editor, journalist Samuel Bowles, and his wife Mary. All of those poems were published anonymously, and they were heavily edited, removing much of Dickinson’s signature stylization, syntax, and punctuation. The first poem published, "Nobody knows this little rose,” may have actually been published without Dickinson’s permission. Another poem, “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” was retitled and published as “The Sleeping.” By 1858, Dickinson had begun organizing her poems, even as she wrote more of them. She reviewed and made fresh copies of her poetry, putting together manuscript books. Between 1858 and 1865, she produced 40 manuscripts, comprising just under 800 poems.

During this time period, Dickinson also drafted a trio of letters which were later referred to as the “Master Letters.” They were never sent and were discovered as drafts among her papers. Addressed to an unknown man she only calls “Master,” they’re poetic in a strange way that has eluded understanding even by the most educated of scholars. They may not have even been intended for a real person at all; they remain one of the major mysteries of Dickinson’s life and writings.

Prolific Poet (1861 – 1865)

“hope” is the thing with feathers (1891).

"Hope" is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all And sweetest in the Gale is heard And sore must be the storm — That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm — I've heard it in the chillest land — And on the strangest Sea — Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb — of Me.

Dickinson’s early 30s were by far the most prolific writing period of her life. For the most part, she withdrew almost completely from society and from interactions with locals and neighbors (though she still wrote many letters), and at the same time, she began writing more and more.

Her poems from this period were, eventually, the gold standard for her creative work. She developed her unique style of writing, with unusual and specific syntax , line breaks, and punctuation. It was during this time that the themes of mortality that she was best known for began to appear in her poems more often. While her earlier works had occasionally touched on themes of grief, fear, or loss, it wasn’t until this most prolific era that she fully leaned into the themes that would define her work and her legacy.

It is estimated that Dickinson wrote more than 700 poems between 1861 and 1865. She also corresponded with literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who became one of her close friends and lifelong correspondents. Dickinson’s writing from the time seemed to embrace a little bit of melodrama, alongside deeply felt and genuine sentiments and observations.

Later work (1866 – 1870s)

Because i could not stop for death (1890).

Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste, And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility— We passed the School, where Children strove At recess—in the ring— We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain— We passed the Setting Sun— Or rather—He passed Us— The Dews drew quivering and chill— For only Gossamer, my Gown— My Tippet—only Tulle— We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground— The Roof was scarcely visible— The Cornice—in the Ground— Since then—'tis centuries— and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity—

By 1866, Dickinson’s productivity began tapering off. She had suffered personal losses, including that of her beloved dog Carlo, and her trusted household servant got married and left her household in 1866. Most estimates suggest that she wrote about one third of her body of work after 1866.

Around 1867, Dickinson’s reclusive tendencies became more and more extreme. She began refusing to see visitors, only speaking to them from the other side of a door, and rarely went out in public. On the rare occasions she did leave the house, she always wore white, gaining notoriety as “the woman in white.” Despite this avoidance of physical socialization, Dickinson was a lively correspondent; around two-thirds of her surviving correspondence was written between 1866 and her death, 20 years later.

Dickinson’s personal life during this time was complicated as well. She lost her father to a stroke in 1874, but she refused to come out of her self-imposed seclusion for his memorial or funeral services. She also may have briefly had a romantic correspondence with Otis Phillips Lord, a judge and a widower who was a longtime friend. Very little of their correspondence survives, but what does survive shows that they wrote to each other like clockwork, every Sunday, and their letters were full of literary references and quotations. Lord died in 1884, two years after Dickinson’s old mentor, Charles Wadsworth, had died after a long illness.

Literary Style and Themes

Even a cursory glance at Dickinson’s poetry reveals some of the hallmarks of her style. Dickinson embraced highly unconventional use of punctuation , capitalization, and line breaks, which she insisted were crucial to the meaning of the poems. When her early poems were edited for publication, she was seriously displeased, arguing the edits to the stylization had altered the whole meaning. Her use of meter is also somewhat unconventional, as she avoids the popular pentameter for tetrameter or trimeter, and even then is irregular in her use of meter within a poem. In other ways, however, her poems stuck to some conventions; she often used ballad stanza forms and ABCB rhyme schemes.

The themes of Dickinson’s poetry vary widely. She’s perhaps most well known for her preoccupation with mortality and death, as exemplified in one of her most famous poems, “Because I did not stop for Death.” In some cases, this also stretched to her heavily Christian themes, with poems tied into the Christian Gospels and the life of Jesus Christ. Although her poems dealing with death are sometimes quite spiritual in nature, she also has a surprisingly colorful array of descriptions of death by various, sometimes violent means.

On the other hand, Dickinson’s poetry often embraces humor and even satire and irony to make her point; she’s not the dreary figure she is often portrayed as because of her more morbid themes. Many of her poems use garden and floral imagery, reflecting her lifelong passion for meticulous gardening and often using the “ language of flowers ” to symbolize themes such as youth, prudence, or even poetry itself. The images of nature also occasionally showed up as living creatures, as in her famous poem “ Hope is the thing with feathers .”

Dickinson reportedly kept writing until nearly the end of her life, but her lack of energy showed through when she no longer edited or organized her poems. Her family life became more complicated as her brother’s marriage to her beloved Susan fell apart and Austin instead turned to a mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, who Dickinson never met. Her mother died in 1882, and her favorite nephew in 1883.

Through 1885, her health declined, and her family grew more concerned. Dickinson became extremely ill in May of 1886 and died on May 15, 1886. Her doctor declared the cause of death to be Bright’s disease, a disease of the kidneys . Susan Gilbert was asked to prepare her body for burial and to write her obituary, which she did with great care. Dickinson was buried in her family’s plot at West Cemetery in Amherst.

The great irony of Dickinson’s life is that she was largely unknown during her lifetime. In fact, she was probably better known as a talented gardener than as a poet. Fewer than a dozen of her poems were actually published for public consumption when she was alive. It wasn’t until after her death, when her sister Lavinia discovered her manuscripts of over 1,800 poems, that her work was published in bulk. Since that first publication, in 1890, Dickinson’s poetry has never been out of print.

At first, the non-traditional style of her poetry led to her posthumous publications getting somewhat mixed receptions. At the time, her experimentation with style and form led to criticism over her skill and education, but decades later, those same qualities were praised as signifying her creativity and daring. In the 20th century, there was a resurgence of interest and scholarship in Dickinson, particularly with regards to studying her as a female poet , not separating her gender from her work as earlier critics and scholars had.

While her eccentric nature and choice of a secluded life has occupied much of Dickinson’s image in popular culture, she is still regarded as a highly respected and highly influential American poet. Her work is consistently taught in high schools and colleges, is never out of print, and has served as the inspiration for countless artists, both in poetry and in other media. Feminist artists in particular have often found inspiration in Dickinson; both her life and her impressive body of work have provided inspiration to countless creative works.

• Habegger, Alfred.  My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson . New York: Random House, 2001.
• Johnson, Thomas H. (ed.).  The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson . Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960.
• Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson . New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974.
• Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson . New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
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Emily Dickinson’s Biography and Analysis of Poems Essay

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Interesting Facts

Works cited.

Emily Dickinson is considered by many to be among the most talented poets of all time. The prominent poet Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Massachusetts, United States. During her youth, Dickinson barely spent a year attending Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Amherst (Academy of American Poets). The poet died in her childhood home in Amherst in 1886 (Academy of American Poets). During her life, many classic poets served as an inspiration for Emily, and the specific field of literature that allured the woman was English poetry.

After her death, Dickinson’s poetry was printed in two volumes. The initial volume was released in 1890, and the final in 1955 (Academy of American Poets). There are currently only ten recognized publications of Emily Dickinson, while the estimated number of works during her lifetime is 1,800 (Academy of American Poets). The reason behind such a minuscule quantity of works is that while the poet sent her works in letters to her acquaintances, she ostensibly retained the majority for herself. As a result, she was not interested in publishing her poetry since she was committed to her own interests.

The poet was born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a wealthy family of a local politician, a Yale graduate, and a prominent lawyer. As a member of the Whig party, the woman’s father, Edward Dickinson, was a widely recognized attorney (Dickinson and Bianchi 36). Moreover, Emily Dickinson made the decision to limit her interpersonal contact from a young age. The woman made the decision in her late twenties to spend a significant part of her time in the family house rather than stepping outside (Dickinson and Bianchi 14). She did not do much traveling and valued her friends by how well they could respond to her letters. Lastly, the decision of Dickinson to stay with her family was not due to her close relationship with her parents. The woman characterized her mother as being heartless and frigid (Dickinson and Bianchi 68). Once her mother became bedridden later in life, the poet reportedly began to develop greater compassion for her. She appeared to connect better with her father, although he was rumored to be against female intellectuals (Dickinson and Bianchi 69). This may aid in understanding Dickinson’s decision to keep her extensive library of poems a secret.

Despite not having numerous published works, Emily Dickinson is a renowned poet due to the quality of her writings and her talent. There are several documentaries and films based on her life experience and poetic path. For example, among the recent films that the story of the poet inspired are A Quiet Passion and Wild Nights with Emily (Dickinson & Bianchi, 2021).

Success Is Counted Sweetest

The poem Success is counted sweetest is among the most popular works of Emily Dickinson, rich in literary devices and common literary features. When it comes to the plot, in the poem, Emily Dickinson ponders about success and what it takes to achieve it. The author argues that holding onto anything valuable for too long causes it to lose its worth. Additionally, later in the poem, the author states that for individuals who have never experienced victory or who have been forced to deal with disappointments throughout their existence, achievement represents the most valuable and greatest feeling.

In this sense, the main themes of such poetry are need, achievement, and failure. The author utilizes several instances to illustrate her points on accomplishment. Dickinson draws a parallel between success for different people, illuminating the preciousness of achievement for those who worked hard and those who cannot “tell the definition / So clear of victory” (Dickinson 8). Thus, individuals that encounter setbacks or disappointments in life respect and cherish them. The point of view in her poem, Emily Dickinson, makes the case that those who possess the least of it love it most. Prosperity is paradoxical in this way since the more accomplished someone is, the less they value it, and the reverse is additionally true. In this way, the poem has both an aspirational and depressing tone.

As for the literary devices, in the given poem, the first stanza shows the successful and evident use of metaphor. A metaphor employed in the stanza is a figure of speech that conveys a comparison of two items with dissimilar natures. For instance, sweet success is compared to nectar, and in this sense, the author argues that “To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need” (Dickinson 4). Nectar, in this context, refers to the pleasure of success and what it takes to achieve it. Another literary device used in the second stanza of the poem Success Is Counted Sweetest is imagery. For instance, in order to catch the attention of the audience, the poet narrates, “Not one of all the purple Host / Who took the Flag today,” illustrating the visual and tactile imagery, employing color and movement, respectively (Dickinson 6). Lastly, “The distant strains of triumph / Burst agonized and clear!” illustrates the use of auditory imagery, emphasizing the noise for the audience (Dickinson 12). Thus, the imagery was necessary for the author to help the audience understand concepts involving all sensory experiences.

Finally, Dickinson employed symbolism to allude to specific personas. The process of employing symbols to represent concepts and traits by assigning them with symbolic interpretations separate from the actual literal definitions is known as symbolism. For instance, in the second stanza, “the purple Host” alludes to the royal army and royalty (Dickinson 5). The purple host symbolizes the royal army, which additionally stands for the Northern troops and individuals who view winning as an easy task. Additionally, nectar in the first stanza might allude to not only triumph and success but opulence as well.

“ Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers

“Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers is another poem by Emily Dickinson that serves as an inspiring and calming piece. In the plot, Dickinson likens hope to a brave and independent bird that performs its music in any condition. This creature, similar to a quiet friend, keeps encouraging the heart to keep faith in the face of challenges. Its melody aids the recovery of perceptions in souls in despair. Dickinson conveys the idea that faith is unfailing, unending, and brilliant. The author explains how hope acts as a shining beacon amid that storm by contrasting human tragedy with the weather conditions. At the end of the poem, Dickinson depicts her personal awful situation and resilience. The woman claims that having hope enabled her to go over her life’s challenges. Thus, resilience and the notion that there is a constant promise are among the piece’s central themes. There is always a ray of optimism, despite the hardest and saddest of circumstances. Everyone has a voice that is audible in any weather.

Moreover, the tone of the poem is quite gracious and grateful for both the challenges and strength to persevere. The author’s perspective toward the topic is optimistic, which she endeavors to project onto others. The narrator in this piece talks about how optimism “perches in the soul” and persists with singing, despite the enormous obstacles (Dickinson 2). Therefore, the point of view of the author is that no matter what difficulties the person faces, there should always be hope that will navigate the person.

As for the literary devices, the first method used is the application of metaphor. In the first stanza, the author claims that “Hope” is the thing with feathers – / That perches the soul – / And sings the tune without the words – / And never stops – at all.” (Dickinson 4). Here, the author successfully likened hope to a bird, illustrating how it sings and bolsters a man’s soul. From here, one can see another instance of the literary device, such as personification. It is the process of giving human traits or features to an inanimate item. In the first stanza, the bird can be perceived as a friend or a preacher who never quits teaching and supporting. In order to provide the men with inner strength, it whispers its quiet melody into their hearts. In this sense, Emily Dickinson humanized hope in her poetry.

Moreover, Emily Dickinson used imagery to fill the poem with the necessary details to allow the audience to relate to the piece and feel the implied emotions. The imagery was employed to aid in their ability to see the reported items in their minds. Among the examples of tactile imagery is the weather, which is illustrated in the last stanza through temperature: “I’ve heard it in the chilliest land” (Dickinson 10). Another instance of tactile imagery is “That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm.” Lastly, symbolism is the final literary device, where “the chillest land” represents challenges through difficult times during which there is yet hope (Dickinson 9). Thus, it was employed to highlight the enormous influence that hope has on people’s lives.

I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed

The last poem of Emily Dickinson is I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed, which emphasizes the connection between a human and nature. The plot of the poem revolves around the perceptions and elated mood of the author, who narrates about the insects who additionally become drunken by the summer days and alive nature. In this sense, nature is the primary topic of the poem, which is preceded by the imagery of booze and inebriation. Moreover, the tone of the poem is ecstatic since the work by Emily Dickinson is about becoming fully intoxicated, not with alcohol, but rather with life. The narrator of the verse envisions drinking so intensely and joyfully from humanity’s greatest beauty on a magnificent warmer months morning that many angels rush to their homes to see the author’s joyful actions. Therefore, with the setting in a rural area on a summer day, the author perceives life as joyful during warmer months.

As for the literary devices, the first one is a metaphor. The first metaphor is a comparison of happiness to drunken euphoria in nature, which is seen in the first line, “I taste a liquor never brewed,” which alludes that this is not real alcohol (Dickinson 1). Another example is when Dickinson draws a parallel between a flower and a pub inside this context “When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee / Out of the Foxglove’s door” (Dickinson 10). In this sense, the author additionally uses personification since she gives bees and butterflies human traits of being drunk and thrown out of the tavern.

Furthermore, Dickinson uses hyperbole throughout the entire poem. The main hyperbole is that the bees and butterflies are so addicted to nature and warmth that they become intoxicated, “When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” – I shall but drink the more” (Dickinson 12). Thus, hyperbole allows the audience to see how affected and thrilled they are by the environment.

Hence, Emily Dickinson can be perceived as a talented poet for many reasons due to her inspiring works. While examining and reading her poems of Dickinson attentively, I could not but admire her skillful use of literary devices that make the pieces sound sophisticated and full of life. I liked the poems of Emily Dickinson because she did not incorporate complicated language or verse forms. After millennia, the works of the famous poet can still be understood without a problem. Moreover, I noticed that the poems have overarching themes, such as resilience, aspirations, and appreciation. The poet implements similar approaches to her writing and strives to instill hope and happiness in the readers. While reading the verses of Dickinson, I felt inspired and grateful. However, the works of Emily Dickinson did not remind me of any other poet, and I perceive the poet’s writing as unique, which proves her pure talent. Emily Dickinson had the skill of writing simple poetry to which people could relate. While many poets of her time had quite pompous works that exuded a sense of grandeur, for the most part, they were merely sophisticated words. In the case of Dickinson’s works, they are filled with a wide array of true emotions, including hope, happiness, grief, sorrow, and others.

Academy of American Poets. Emily Dickinson . Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web.

Dickinson, Emily. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: Poems of Emily Dickinson . United States, Gibbs Smith, 2019.

Dickinson, Emily, and Bianchi, Martha Dickinson. Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson . United Kingdom, West Margin Press, 2021.

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Bibliography

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Emily Dickinson’s Enduring Legacy: a Reflection on American Poetry

This essay is about Emily Dickinson a prominent figure in American literature known for her introspective and profound poetry. It explores her unconventional style themes of death nature and identity and the deep personal and philosophical reflections in her work. Despite living a secluded life Dickinson’s poetry resonates with emotional depth and intellectual engagement making her a trailblazer whose work continues to inspire and provoke thought. The essay highlights her enduring legacy and significant impact on American literary history.

How it works

Emily Dickinson remains a high person in American literature celebrates for her introspective and profond poetry. In vexation from advancement secluded life she empty works deeply in themes so as for example death rate nature equality and expert abandons indelible mark on readers and erudite identically.

Only from one appoint characteristic poetry Dickinson is his unconventional account. She often hires puffs illegal habitant capitalization and the compressed lines creates a rhythm and accent that draw readers in her the distinctive contemplative world.

For example in that “that is why that I it no can stop he for death” use puffs strategic removal sign walk with death distinguishes inexorable défile time and inevitability death rate. This poem among much from other without sewing connects general daily reviews with deep images offers research mysteries life and death deeply personal.

Themes Dickinson deeply interlace with her personal experience and philosophical discussions. She poetry often contrasts he concept death no so as scrap and so as moving despite other state existence. In “me covers a felt funerals in my brain” she uses absolute imagery to pretend to be disintegration intellectual inclinations metaphorically likening it despite a train. This inclination image underscores Dickinson articulate emotions and existential questions cause the complex of inferiority with a clarity and rapid sharpness.

Nature serves other leit-motif elegant in a poetry Dickinson. She often hires natural imagery to investigate emotions and human cléricales penetrating. Despite a “bird flattens he walk” Dickinson meticulously looks after a relation bird captivates both his beauty so and violence private nature. A poem is laid out from a general clear review despite a staggering moment when a bird consumes a worm illustrates realities life and bicycle existence hard. This high attention to go into detail and research decorate deep nature observant habits Dickinson and she inclination to find profond in importance moments ?? aspect ordinary high.

Dickinson’s poetry also reflects her profound introspection and exploration of identity. Living a largely secluded life allowed her to delve deeply into her inner world resulting in poetry that resonates with a keen awareness of self and societal norms. In “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” she challenges conventional notions of fame and recognition embracing the idea of anonymity and outsider status. This poem like many others highlights Dickinson’s defiance of societal expectations and her celebration of individuality.

Despite her relative isolation Dickinson was intellectually engaged with the literary and philosophical currents of her time. She drew inspiration from a wide range of sources including Shakespeare the Bible and contemporary poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her correspondence with friends and mentors provided her with intellectual stimulation and validation even though her poems were not widely published during her lifetime. This rich tapestry of influences and her introspective nature converged to create poetry that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

The reception of Dickinson’s work has evolved significantly over time. Initially misunderstood for her unconventional style and thematic preoccupations Dickinson’s poetry has come to be recognized for its innovation emotional depth and profound insights into the human condition. Today she is celebrated as a trailblazer in American literature whose poetry continues to inspire and provoke thought among readers and scholars alike.

In conclusion Emily Dickinson’s poetry stands as a testament to the power of introspection and the exploration of universal themes through a uniquely personal lens. Her distinctive style marked by its unconventional punctuation and succinct language creates a compelling and enduring voice that continues to captivate readers. Through her meditations on mortality nature and identity Dickinson offers profound insights into the complexities of existence. Her work once overlooked now holds a revered place in American literary canon demonstrating the timeless relevance of true artistic genius.

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Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson

Tags: 1 Volume 412 Pages Essays Offering Analysis by Top Literary Scholars Introductory Essay by the Editor Chronology of Author's Life Complete List of Author's Works Detailed Bio of the Editor General Bibliography Publication Dates of Works General Subject Index

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Looking for the Dickinson Electronic Archives with which you are familiar? All is still intact and accessible either from our main menu or at http://archive.emilydickinson.org .

Welcome to the  Dickinson Electronic Archives 2 . A creative and critical collaboratory for reading Dickinson's material bodies and for featuring new critical and theoretical work about Emily Dickinson's writings, biography, reception, and influence, the  Dickinson Electronic Archives 2  is a scholarly resource showcasing the possibility of interdisciplinary and collaborative research and exploring the potential of the digital environment to reveal new interpretive material, cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts. In doing so, the  DEA2  opens a space of knowledge exchange for a networked world of scholars, students, and readers by offering a series of exhibitions on subjects of keen interest to readers of Emily Dickinson. Each exhibition will offer spaces for commentary that are of different sorts. At present the DEA2 offers a discussion forum , a space like that patrons inhabit as they walk through and talk about an exhibition, a space like that moviegoers inhabit when they stop for a nightcap or late night snack and discuss the movie just viewed. The DEA2 also offers Essays and Other Writings for every exhibition.

The  DEA2 's goals are as follows:

• Foster a deepened focus on the material bodies of Dickinson’s writings and offer access to the significant printed representations of these bodies.
• Create a scholarly environment that showcases the possibility of interdisciplinary and collaborative research across genres.
• Explore the potential of the digital environment to reveal new interpretive contexts—material, cultural, historical, theoretical—for Dickinson’s work.  
• Open a space for a networked world of scholars, students, and readers to expand our methods of reading her writing practices, the genealogies of her reception, and transmissions of her materials.

The DEA2 is a hybrid forum for publication and other kinds of scholarly communication.  The DEA2 integrates features of the manuscript archive and the scholarly journal, and provides an experimental exhibition space, as well as a pedagogical forum. Doing so, we adhere to the following principles:

• Faithful reporting of what is seen on any manuscripts featured throughout the site. This reporting ranges from physical characteristics of the documents to what we know about their circulation and interpretations.
• Openness to a range of critical views, including those that may contradict what's been reported or that may conflict with one another.
• Concomitantly, commitment to engaging diverse scholarly/critical inquiries in depth.
• Generous civility in expression of critical differences. 
• Commitment to using nimble software in order to facilitate human interaction with scholarly materials and critical propositions.

We are pleased to announce that Amherst College has now made available their Dickinson Collection , including all of their Emily Dickinson manuscript holdings, through Amherst College Digital Collections (ACDC) . Hundreds upon hundreds of her manuscripts are available, as is much Dickinson-related material, and more and more materials will be regularly added. Enabling such access will facilitate research in ways heretofore impossible. The Houghton Library, working with Harvard University Press, is also making Emily Dickinson manuscripts available in an Emily Dickinson Archive . At present much contextual material is available through their Emily Dickinson Collection , which is also being constantly updated.

The DEA2  is being produced on a customized Drupal platform with applications enabling high quality representation of the documents for perusal by all readers; dynamic renderings of the documents that allow complex visualizations of potential relations among them while resisting the static order determined by codex formats; and deep and broad searchability.

The materials available in the DEA2 grow with each volume. With the completion of each new volume, the materials of the previous volumes are distributed across the DEA2’ s collection of manuscripts, transcripts, critical editions, critical engagements, and virtual classrooms.

In collaboration with an editorial board comprised of Dickinson scholars, textual scholars, social and cultural historians, poets, and artists, the DEA2 produces a volume or exhibition a year.  The focus of each of these volumes will be a set of Dickinson documents or other Dickinson-related materials (such as the new photograph, possibly of a 29 year old Emily Dickinson) selected by the editor(s) for critical engagement.  The editor for each volume will solicit and curate a selection of peer-reviewed essays and/or exhibitions in response to the documents.  In addition to the curated space, each DEA2 volume will offer open space for critical and creative commentaries by readers.

Readers have various options of recording their experience of the documents. They may contribute their reflections and questions in the form of formal meditations, add contextualizing materials and links, produce tag clouds, or use some other appropriate means to respond critically to the materials featured in the DEA2 . In these ways, the virtual itineraries made by readers in their passage across the documents will begin to be preserved.

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Marta Werner 

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George Bornstein, Ryan Cordell, Joseph Donahue, Ed Folsom, Susan Howe, Virginia Jackson, Katie King, Marilee Lindemann, Mary Loeffelholz, Jerome McGann, Julie Meloni, Barbara Mossberg, Alicia Ostriker, Seth Perlow, Eliza Richards, Alexandra Socarides, Marcy Tanter, John Unsworth, Lara Vetter

Aaron Dinin (2012-present): Project Manager, Text Encoding, Programming.

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Rebecca Mooney Franz (2007-present): Site project manager, staff supervision, text encoding (html/xml), web archive maintenance. 2006-2007, intern/text-encoding.

Jarom McDonald: Technical Editor (2005-present), Site Project Manager (2001-2005).

Andrew Abell (F18), Elle Bachkosky (S22), Dan Banks (S10), Isa Baker (S22), Emily Bertot (F15), Maura Beste (F19), Marguerite Bianchet (S12), Rachel Blazucki (F09), Erin Bode (S22), Klara Boger (S17), Emily Bokelman (F14), Megan Bolst (S15), David Bowman (S14), Lauren Brandon (F14), Jennifer Brewer (F03), Will Burch (S10), Heather Carpenter (S10), Soumini Chatterjee (F19), Erin Cheslow (F14), Julia Cowley (F18, S19), Kayla Culbreath (F16), Elissa Dallimore (S22), Iain Davis (S15), Dolapo Demuren (S13), Elizabeth Desrochers (S11), Chloe Donaldson (F10), Emily Duckworth (S08), Lauren Fetsch (F14), Allison Gibealy (S11), Maria Graham (F19), Paige Goodwin (F15), Codi Gugliuzza (F13), Idalia Hodge (F19, S20), Therese Holland (S13), Sophia Iem (F08), Alec Jaensch (S17), Jaymes Jones (F10), Rebecca Kates (S15, F15), Michelle Kim (F11), Christine Kirchner (S18), Stephanie Knauff (F11), Jessie Kwon (S18), Percy Langston (S21), Morgan Lehr (F02), Christopher Lewis (S10), Eleanor Linafelt (2018), John Little (S13), Lindsey Lloyd (F09), Elena Macias (S15), James Marchant (S15), Alyssa Mariano (S17), Rachel Mendoza (F11), Nicole Menton (F03), Ana Meyer (F02), Alexa Minesinger (F11), Maya Motayne (S15), Rebecca Mooney (S06), Marc-Keegan Murphy (S10), Dilmar Murzagaliyeva (F14), Stacia Odenwald (F13, S14), Montoya O'Neal (F18, S19), Wahidullah Osman (S08), Hannah Parker (F20), E. M. Patterson (S19), Jacqueline Pearce (F03), Flo Petite (S22), Olga Petrovskikh (S20), Cayce Phillips (F08), Jaime Rehbein (F09), Maya Reid (F16), Madeline Rihn (S21), Miriam Roth (S10), Mikala Schantz (S14, F14), Holly Schemm (F09), Rebecca Shin (S12), Kenton Stalder (F09), Deanna Stephen (S19), Eldis Sula (F10), Anna Thormann (F20), Maya Thompson (S21), Taryn Trazkovich (F10), Sara Wagner (S12), Katie Worden (S22), Olivia Wallick (S16), Abby Wilson (S18), Elena Yeatts-Lonske (S22)

FORMER STAFF

Elana Boteach. 2001-2002. OCR, text encoding (html).

Melissa Boteach. 2002. OCR, digital imaging, text encoding (html).

Tanya Clement, 2005-2007. Site project manager. Staff supervision, training, outreach, text encoding (html/xml), databases, digital imaging, web archive maintenance.

A. Cowen. 1996-1997. Early design, html.

Betty Day. 1994-1996. Early design, html.

Tom Goldstein. 2002-2004. Text encoding (xml), proofreading.

Kevin Hawkins. 2001-2002. Research, documentation, text encoding (xml).

Laura Elyn Lauth. 1998-2001. Digital imaging, text encoding (html).

Jennifer Moore. 2000. Digital imaging, html, proofreading.

Jacques Plante (2015-2017): Site Project Manager, User Experience

Hillary Roegelein (2017-2018): Associate Site Project and Exhibition Manager, Content updates for  Writings by Susan Dickinson .

Lisa Antonille Rhody. 2000. Digital imaging, html, training.

Geoffrey Saunders Schramm. 1998-2001. early FIPSE design, digital imaging, text encoding (html).

Jeannette Schollaert. 2019-2022. Site Project and Exhibition Manager. Co-editor The Ghosts of Emily Dickinson .

Christina Sfekas. 2000-2001. Digital imaging, html, audio transcription, proofreading.

Matt Stokes. 2002-2003. Text encoding (xml), proofreading.

Lara Vetter. 1996-2001. Former project manager. Staff supervision, training, outreach, text encoding (html/xml), current site design, digital imaging, web archive maintenance. Coordinator for project to encode Dickinson manuscript and secondary resources with TEI-conformant XML. Co-editor  Writings by Susan Dickinson , Editor  Edward (Ned) Dickinson's Correspondence and Notebook

Kristen Waters. 2001-2004. OCR, database management, text encoding (html/xml).

Setsuko Yokoyama. 2014-2020. Site Project and Exhibition Manager, Content updates for  Writings by Susan Dickinson .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Amherst College Special Collections and the Houghton Library, Harvard University , where the two primary repositories of Dickinson papers reside have offered invaluable advice and assistance over the years. Our special thanks go to John Lancaster and Daria D'Arienzo, former heads of Amherst College Special Collections, as well as to current head Michael Kelly and Margaret (Mimi) R. Dakin, Archives and Special Collections Specialist at Amherst. Also, special thanks go to Leslie Morris, curator and head of the Houghton Library, as well as to the wonderful Houghton staff. We also want to extend special thanks to the staff of the  John Hay Library, Brown University , where the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Collection of papers are held. 

Since 1994, the  Dickinson Electronic Archives has been supported by a Networked Associate Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. Over the years, support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) , the Fund for the Improvement for Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) , and the University of Maryland Graduate School have supported different productions of the  DEA .

We are especially grateful to the Department of English, University of Maryland , for ongoing support of personnel who help sustain and update the DEA . 

Our deepest gratitude to Shayne Brandon, Systems Administrator, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), University of Virginia

Recent Exhibitions

The dea1: 1994 - 2012.

The original Dickinson Electronic Archives was launched in 1994 and was regularly updated until 2012. We invite visitors to explore the DEA in its original form, where they can discover nearly 18 years worth of digital Dickinson archival and scholarly work.   Visit the DEA1

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Emily Dickinson — Emily Dickinson’s biography 

Emily Dickinson's Biography 

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Published: Jul 17, 2018

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Works Cited:

• Death Penalty Information Center. (2021, September). Cost. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/costs-studies
• Gross, S. R., Jacoby, K., Matheson, D. J., Montgomery, N., & Paternoster, R. (2014). A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973–1995. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 104(3), 435–496.
• National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. (2021, September). Innocence.
• National Institute of Mental Health. (2021, September). Mental Illness. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/mental-illness/index.shtml
• Robinson, B. A. (2017, January 1). Capital Punishment Controversies. ReligiousTolerance.org.
• Sarat, A., & Vidmar, N. (Eds.). (2002). Public opinion and the death penalty: A qualitative approach. Cambridge University Press.
• Shepherd, J. (2018). Introduction to Policing: The Pillar of Democracy. Routledge.
• Sunstein, C. R., Vermeule, A., & Posner, E. A. (2019). Capital punishment: A reader. Routledge.
• United States Department of Justice. (2021, September). Capital Punishment. https://www.justice.gov/usao/justice-101/capital-punishment

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Biography of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson’s life has always fascinated people, even before she was famous for her poetry. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small farming village, on December 10, 1830, to Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. Edward Dickinson was a well-respected lawyer and politician, descended from a prominent Amherst family; his father was a founder of Amherst College, where Edward was treasurer.

Emily was the middle child, and was very close to her brother, Austin, and sister, Lavinia. Emily spent almost all of her life in her parents’ home in Amherst, with the exception of the year she spent in boarding school—she left ostensibly because of illness, although it is more likely that it was homesickness. Emily was encouraged to get a good education, although Edward Dickinson had conservative views on the place of women, and did not want her to appear too literary.

When Emily returned from boarding school, she was very active socially, and was considered well-liked and attractive. In her late twenties, though, she suddenly cut herself all from all society, never leaving her family’s home, and started ferociously writing poetry. Although there is a long-standing myth that the catalyst for this was her falling in love with a man who rejected her, it is more likely that it was a combination of several factors.

Austin Dickinson married Emily’s very close friend, Susan Gilbert, but the marriage soon became an unhappy one, and Emily’s friendship with Susan eventually dissolved because of it. In addition, in late 1855, Emily’s mother fell ill with an undiagnosed illness, and from then until her death in 1882, she was essentially bedridden, and Emily and Lavinia had to devote a great deal of time to caring for her. This was especially taxing on Emily, who found all domestic chores stifling, and who was not very close to her mother. Finally, between 1851 and 1854, as many as thirty-three young acquaintances of Emily’s died, including her good friend and cousin, Emily Lavinia Norcross.

Emily began to dress only in white, and would see no one but her family, meeting visitors only through screens or behind doors. She wrote prolifically, writing almost 1800 poems, but her genius was never recognized during her lifetime. She published only seven poems while alive, all anonymously, and all heavily edited. Only after her death from kidney disease in 1886 did her sister find her poems. Recognizing their genius, she convinced her brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, to help her publish them. The first book was published in 1890, and met with great success.

Study Guides on Works by Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – emily dickinson.

“After great pain…” is one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous and widely read poems, and one that has inspired a good deal of critical commentary and controversy. Because of Dickinson's notoriously private and reclusive nature, the poem’s apparent...

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As imperceptibly as Grief Emily Dickinson

"As imperceptibly as Grief" is a poem by Emily Dickinson about the end of summer, the subtlety of the passage of time, and the loss that these changes create. It was written in 1865 and published in 1891. The poem deals with many of Dickinson's...

A Bird, came down the Walk Emily Dickinson

"A Bird, came down the Walk" is a poem by Emily Dickinson, in which the speaker carefully observes a crow as it eats, drinks, and then flies away when she offers a crumb. It was written in 1862 and first published in 1891 as part of the second...

Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson wrote close to 1800 poems in her lifetime. Her poems are often extremely short, waste no words, and subvert the traditional forms of the day. She is also fond of the dash as a tool to signify a pause or provide emphasis. Her poems,...

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Hope is the Thing with Feathers Emily Dickinson

Originally published in 1891, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" is a poem by Emily Dickinson. In her lifetime, Dickinson was mostly known as something of recluse, rarely leaving her town or home. Her work was only published after her death in...

I could bring You Jewels—had I a mind to— Emily Dickinson

"I could bring You Jewels – had I a mind to" is a short poem by the American poet Emily Dickinson. Published posthumously, it was written during the early 1860s. Like much of Dickinson's work, it is brief and deceptively simple in form and...

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain Emily Dickinson

Written during 1861—the first year of what is considered one of her most creative periods—“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain…” is both one of Emily Dickinson’s more well-known poems, and reflective of the themes of death, pain, and psychic...

I Started Early — Took My Dog — Emily Dickinson

"I started Early – Took my Dog" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1862 and published in 1891, as part of her second posthumous collection, Poems: Second Series . Dickinson's poems were rescued from obscurity, following her death, by her...

I taste a liquor never brewed Emily Dickinson

"I taste a liquor never brewed" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1860 and first published in 1861. It appeared, anonymously and with major alterations, in the Springfield Republican and was one of the few poems published in Dickinson's...

A Murmur in the Trees—to note— Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, the renowned American poet, is widely celebrated as one of the most important literary figures of all time. Among her many masterpieces is "A Murmur in the Trees—to note—," a poem likely written in 1862, but not published until...

A narrow Fellow in the Grass Emily Dickinson

"A narrow Fellow in the Grass" is a poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1865 and first published in 1866. It is one of the few poems that was published, anonymously, in Dickinson's lifetime by a contemporary literary magazine. Born in 1830,...

This Is My Letter to the World Emily Dickinson

"This Is My Letter to the World" is a poem by American poet Emily Dickinson, dealing with themes of isolation, nature, and social judgment. It was written in 1862 and published in 1890. Dickinson's poetry was not widely known during her lifetime....

Wild Nights — Wild Nights! Emily Dickinson

"Wild nights - Wild nights!" is a three-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, composed in 1861 and published in 1891 as part of the second posthumous collection of her writing. Dickinson never titled her poems, so they are commonly referred to by their...

10 Emily Dickinson Facts

1. her family home is a museum.

Samuel Dickinson, Emily Dickinson's grandfather, had the family home built in the 19th century. It was a large mansion in the center of Amherst that became the Dickinson family home for over a century before it was sold. In 1965 Amherst College bought the homestead. In 2003 it formally became the Emily Dickinson Museum along with the home next door that belonged to Emily's niece.

2. Her father was a United States Senator.

Emily Dickinson was born into a privileged life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Edward Dickinson was a well-regarded lawyer from the Whig party. After graduating from Yale and then the Northampton Law School he served as the treasurer of Amherst College. He served four non-consecutive terms on both the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the Massachusetts Senate, and the United States Congress.

3. Only ten of her poems were published during her lifetime.

Emily Dickinson kept the majority of her work to herself. Only after her death did her sister discover collections of poetry that Dickinson had compiled and refined during her lifetime. She shared her poetry during her life in written correspondence with friends, and occasionally asked for guidance from literary advisors such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Poems that were published during her lifetime were mainly done so anonymously or without her consent.

4. The Dickinson family were devout Calvinists.

The essence of evangelical Calvinism is that humans are born as sinners and must be saved with conversion. The poet never underwent a Calvinist conversion, but seems to have been significantly influenced by the tenants of the faith. While she was drawn to Protestant dogma and Transcendentalism Dickinson never stopped believing in the immortal soul.

5. Botany was a passion in her early years.

While at the Amherst Academy Dickinson's teachers recognized her talent for composition, but were also impressed with her assemblage of a large herbarium. Dickinson excelled in Latin and created a meticulous collection of of pressed plants that were identified by their accurate Latin names.

6. She was incredibly reclusive.

From an early age Emily Dickinson chose to restrict her social engagements. In her late twenties she chose to stay within her family home for the vast majority of the time instead of venturing out into the world around her. She rarely travelled and based her perceptions of her friends on their ability to write a letter back to her.

7. Several mysterious love affairs may have taken place.

Despite her reclusive lifestyle Dickinson is believed to have had some love affairs. These affairs appear to have been brief but extremely impactful. For example, Dickinson was once seen sitting on the lap of her father's friend Judge Otis Lord. Little more is known about the duration of their physical experiences together, but she carried on letter writing correspondence with him until his death many years later.

8. She had a strained relationship with both of her parents.

Dickinson chose never to move out of her family home, but it wasn't because she got along so well with her parents. She described her mother as cold and unloving. Later in her life when her mother fell ill Dickinson apparently did begin to feel more affection for her. She seemed more amicable with her father, but he was said to have been unsupportive of female scholars. This might explain why Dickinson chose never to reveal her large collection of poetry.

9. Her work was initially criticized for its unique take on grammar.

Dickinson truly invented a unique style with her poetry that disregarded many common literary rules. She experimented with capitalization and allowed sentences to run on. Her work was inspired by the rhythmic devices of religious psalms, but she commonly interspersed her own creative pauses within the stanzas. Despite her cavalier approach to grammar Dickinson's poems have gone on to become regarded as unique literary masterpieces.

10. She suffered from unspecified health problems.

Emily Dickinson's reclusive behavior makes it difficult to determine what exactly she suffered from. Historians have wondered if she might have had epilepsy like one of her nephews. She certainly was affected by depression and anxiety disorders which made her prefer to stay indoors and away from society. Later in her life Dickinson began to suffer from pain in her eyes and sensitivity to light. She died at just 55 due to a stroke.

Emily Dickinson’s Love Life

“wild nights – wild nights were i with thee wild nights should be our luxury”  – from fr269.

E mily Dickinson never married, but because her canon includes magnificent love poems, questions concerning her love life have intrigued readers since her first publication in the 1890s. Speculation about whom she may have loved has filled and continues to fill volumes.  Her girlhood relationships, her “Master Letters,” and her correspondence with Judge Otis Lord form the backbone of these discussions.

A draft of a letter from Emily to the mysterious “Master”

Dickinson’s school days and young adulthood included several significant male friends, among them Benjamin Newton, a law student in her father’s office; Henry Vaughn Emmons, an Amherst College student; and George Gould, an Amherst College classmate of the poet’s brother Austin.  Early Dickinson biographers identified Gould as a suitor who may have been briefly engaged to the poet in the 1850s, and recent scholarship has shed new light on the theory (Andrews, pp. 334-335).  Her female friendships, notably with schoolmate and later sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert and with mutual friend Catherine Scott Turner Anthon, have also interested Dickinson biographers, who argue whether these friendships represent typical nineteenth-century girlhood friendships or more intensely sexual and romantic relationships.

Found among Emily Dickinson’s papers shortly after her death, drafts of three letters to an unidentified “Master” provide a source of intrigue, although there is no evidence to confirm that finished versions of the letters were ever sent.  Written during the poet’s most productive period, the letters reveal passionate yet changing feelings toward the recipient.  The first, dated to spring 1858, begins “Dear Master / I am ill”; the second, dated to early 1861, starts with “Oh, did I offend it”; and the third, dated to summer 1861, opens with “Master / If you saw a bullet hit a bird” (date attributions made by R.W. Franklin).

While the letters are remarkable examples of Dickinson’s exceptional power with words, they are studied as much to attempt identification of the intended recipient as for their literary mastery.  The lengthy list of proposed candidates includes Samuel Bowles, family friend, newspaper editor and publisher; William Smith Clark, a scientist and educator based in Amherst; Charles Wadsworth, a minister whom Dickinson heard preach in Philadelphia; as well as George Gould and Susan Dickinson.  Others have posited that the letters are simply literary exercises or that the author is attempting to resolve an internal crisis.  So much about Dickinson’s life remains unknown that an entirely different or as-yet unknown candidate may yet be revealed. Unless a contemporary account is discovered that clearly identifies the “Master,” the poet’s public will remain in suspense.

Judge Otis Phillips Lord, a Dickinson love interest

A romantic relationship late in the poet’s life with Judge Otis Phillips Lord is supported in Dickinson’s correspondence with him as well as in family references.  Lord (1812-1884) was a close friend of Edward Dickinson , the poet’s father, with whom he shared conservative political views.  Lord and his wife Elizabeth were familiar guests in the Dickinson household.  In 1859 Lord was appointed to the Massachusetts Superior Court and later served on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (1875-1882).  His relationship with the poet developed after the death of Elizabeth Lord in 1877.  Only fifteen manuscripts in Dickinson’s hand survive from their correspondence, most in draft or fragmentary form.  Some passages seem to suggest that Dickinson and Lord contemplated marrying.  The question of whether the reclusive poet would have consented to move to Lord’s home in Salem, Massachusetts, was mooted by Lord’s decline in health.  He died in 1884, two years before Emily Dickinson.

Whatever the reality of Dickinson’s personal experiences, her poetry explores the complexities and passions of human relationships with language that is as evocative and compelling as her writings on spirituality, death, and nature.

Further Reading:

For a complete text of the Master letters, see  The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson , ed.R.W. Franklin (Amherst, Mass.:  Amherst College Press, 1986).

For an account of the discovery of Dickinson’s letters to Judge Lord, see Millicent Todd Bingham’s  Emily Dickinson:  A Revelation ( New York: Harper and Bros, 1954)

Most biographies discuss the “Master” letters and Lord relationship in some detail.  Significant discussions of the Master letters include those in Richard B. Sewall’s  The Life of Emily Dickinson ( New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1974); Cynthia G. Wolff’s  Emily Dickinson ( New York: Knopf, 1986); and Alfred Habegger’s  My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson ( New York: Random House, 2001).

In addition, several works address more directly specific individuals and their qualifications for “Master.”  Among them are

• Andrews, Carol Damon. “Thinking Musically, Writing Expectantly:  New Biographical Information about Emily Dickinson.”  The New England Quarterly , Vol. LXXXI, no. 2 (June 2008) 330-340.  Reintroduces the possibility of George Gould as the “Master” candidate.
• Jones, Ruth Owen. “’Neighbor – and friend – and Bridegroom –‘” William Smith Clark as Emily Dickinson’s Master Figure.”  The Emily Dickinson Journal  11.2 (2002) 48-85.
• Mamunes, George.    “So has a Daisy vanished”:  Emily Dickinson and Tuberculosis.  McFarland, 2007.  Proposes Benjamin Franklin Newton as Master.
• Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson . Ed. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. Paris Press, 1998.   Addresses the poet’s relationship with Susan Dickinson.
• Patterson, Rebecca.  The Riddle of Emily Dickinson .  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.  Posits Kate Anthon as a love interest.

For Dickinson’s thoughts on marriage, Judith Farr’s “Emily Dickinson and Marriage: ‘the Etruscan Experiment'” in Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters: Critical Essays (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2009).

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