Emily Dickinson

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From: Literature Of The Western World: Volume II Neoclassicism Through The Modern Period.. Third Edition Brian Wilkie/James Hurt; Ed. D. Anthony English. 1992 Macmillan Publishing Co., NY, NY

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Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)

The two greatest poets of nineteenth-century America are, arguably, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Their contemporaries would have been Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and a handful of lesser names seemed the best for time’s palm. Whitman until late in his life, was known as a faintly obscure bohemian with a barbaric yawp and nobody had heard of Emily Dickinson at all. Two poets could not, at least superficially, be less similar. Whitman is a poet of expansiveness, Dickinson of compression; Whitman’s poetic persona is that of a boisterous outdoorsman, Dickinson that of a painfully self-conscious recluse; Whitman is a aggressively male rooster, Dickinson a little white hen. But they were parallel I on respect, which perhaps put the steel in their poetry: they were both outside the paralyzing genteelism of the public culture. Whitman through his defiance of dominant codes of taste and restraint, Dickinson through her withdrawal into an intensely private world.

Dickinson was born in 1830 I Amherst, Massachusetts. The family constellation is crucial, since family and home constituted almost her entire poetic world. There was her strong, upright father, a prominent lawyer and the treasurer of Amherst College; Dickinson adored and feared him, and his image lies just beneath the surface of many of her poems, including ones about God. Her fragile mother was a chronic invalid who required long periods of nursing by he daughters. Dickinson was very close to her sister Lavinia, a competent, loving friend, and her brother Austin, a lawyer like his father. Dickinson seems to have been normally lively and outgoing as a young girl, but during her teens, despite a brief period away from home at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she began a gradual withdrawal from the outside world back into the family home. By the time she was twenty-three, she could write, “I do not go from home,” and she did not, except for brief, rare trips to Boston or Philadelphia in the early years of her seclusion, for the rest of her life. Her fellow villagers in Amherst came to think of her as a village eccentric, who always dressed in white and was seldom seen, even when they came to call, when she sometimes listened to music or conversation from behind a door left ajar. They called her “the myth.” Within the house, Dickinson carried on a regular domestic routine, supervising the gardening, tending the greenhouse, and, especially, baking bread, which her father regarded as her special talent. She also carried on a extensive correspondence with a small circle of friends, read voluminously, and wrote her poetry. Although she showed her poems occasionally to others throughout her life, apparently not even her family suspected the extent and the quality of her writing.

A personal crisis of some sort occurred between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-four, peaking in 1862, when Dickinson was thirty-two. Early romantic biographers attributed this crisis, quite evident in her poems, to a love affair, and it is true that her emotional turbulence of 1862 was apparently triggered by the departure, for California, of Charles Wadsworth, a Philadelphia minister with whom she seems to have been in love, although probably concealing the fact from him and everyone else. She had a similarly ambiguous relationship with Benjamin Newton, a student in her father’s law office, and with the distinguished critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, both of whom she regarded, overtly at least, as mentors or “preceptors.” But the 1862 breakdown, if it was that, now seems to have had much more complex causes than a disappointment in love, and certainly the poems which allude to this crisis, such as “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” suggest a very serious and deep-seated mental disturbance The crisis passed, however, and Dickinson resumed the even tenor of her quite life. Her father died suddenly in 1873, and her mother was paralyzed by a stroke a year later; Emily and Lavinia nursed her for seven years, until her death. Dickinson survived her for only four years, dying in 1886.

After her death, a box was found containing about nine hundred poems. Higginson assisted the family I editing a selection of them, published as Poems by Emily Dickinson in 1890; two more collections appeared in 1891 and 1896. Her reputation spread and more editions of her work appeared beginning in 1914 and culminating in Thomas Johnson’s definitive edition of her complete poems - totaling 1775 – in 1955. Dickinson did not title her poems or, of course, prepare them for publication by providing conventional capitalization and punctuation…. You can read some samples here; please note, dash usage in most of the poems posted here may not appear as in the printed versions. If you would like to comment, please post your favorite poem; all other comments will be deleted - no offense but we're trying to see if collectively all her poems will make it onto this page.

207

Tho' I get home how late — how late —
So I get home — 'twill compensate —
Better will be the Ectasy
That they have done expecting me —
When Night —descending — dumb — and dark —
They hear my unexpected knock —
Transporting must the moment be —
Brewed from decades of Agony!

To think just how the fire will burn —
Just how long-cheated eyes will turn —
To wonder what myself will say,
And what itself, will say to me —
Beguiles the Cednturies of way!
(c.1860)

1450

The Road was lit with Moon and star —
The Trees were bright and still —
Descried I — by the distant Light
A Traveller on a Hill —
To magic Perpendiculars
Ascending, through Terrene —
Unknown his shimmering ultimate —
But he indorsed the sheen
(c.1878)

708

I sometimes drop it, for a Quick —
The Thought to be alive -
Anonymous Delight to know -
And Madder - to conceive -

Consoles a Woe so Monstrous
That sis it tear all Day,
Without an instant's Respite -
'Twould look too far - to Die -

Delirium - diverts the Wretch
Fort Whom the Scaffold neighs -
The Hammock's Motion lulls the Heads
So close on Paradise -

A Reef - crawled easy from the Sea
Eats off the Brittle Line -
The Sailor doesn't know the Stroke -
Until He's past the Pain -
(c.1863)

208

The Rose did caper on her cheek -
Her Bodice rose and fell -
Her pretty speech - like drunken men -
Did stager pitiful -

Her fingers fumbled at her work -
Her needle would not go -
What ailed so smart a little Maid -
It puzzled me to know -

Till opposite - I spied a cheek
Than bore another Rose -
Just opposite - Another speech
That like the Drunkard goes -

A Vest that like her Bodice, danced -
To the immortal tune -
Till those two trpubled - little Clocks Ticked softly into one.
(c.1860)

1149

I noticed People disappeared
When but a little child —
Supposed they visited remote
Or settled Regions wild —
Now know I — They both visited
And settled Regions wild
But did because they died
A Fact withheld the little child —
(c.1869)

258

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —
None may teach it — Any —
'Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —

When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —
(c.1861)

1062

He scanned it - staggered -
Dropped the Loop
To Past or Period -
Caught helpless at a sense as if
His Mind were going blind -

Groped up, to see if God was there -
Groped backward at Himself
Caressed a Trigger absebtly
And wandered out of Life
(c. 1865)

1199

Are Friends Delight or Pain?
Could Bounty but remain
Riches were good -
But if they only stay
Ampler to fly away
Riches are sad.
(c. 1871)

435

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discering Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightaway dangerous -
And handled with a Chian -
(c.1862)