Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems, but only eleven were published during her lifetime. One biographer, Cynthia Griffin Wolff observed that at a time when readers were more than a little interested in their authors, expecting them to lead varied and adventuresome lives, Emily Dickinson's life began, was lived, and ended in a single house.
Dickinson's Work
The remarkable force and intensity of her voice could not be explained by the simplicity of her ordinary life. Wolff says that this is an indication that "some dynamic of Dickinson's interior life...infuses her poetry with power...How to 'be' was the strenuous and informing concern of her life..."
Wolff further compares Dickinson's life to the subject of a Robert Frost poem "Oven Bird" published many years after her death. "Frost's verse celebrates a courageous songster who can make music even as it acknowledges the fading transcendence of the world. Emily Dickinson was America's Oven Bird confronting the unthinkable dilemma: 'what to make of a diminished thing.'"
Dickinson's Poetic Voice
In mid-nineteenth century America, and Amherst, Massachusetts in particular, a woman's opportunities to count herself successful centered around her marriage and children. At this time, women had neither the right to own property or to vote. Wolff quotes poet Adrienne Rich on Emily:
"The terms she had been handed by society - Calvinist Protestantism, Romanticism, the nineteenth-century corseting of women's bodies, choices, and sexuality - could spell insanity to a woman genius. What this one had to do was retranslate her own unorthodox, subversive, sometimes volcanic propensity into a dialect called metaphor: her native tongue."
Rich sees "neither quaint, nor eccentric" qualities affecting Dickinson's withdrawal into a private life. They are more a series of decisions based partly on illness and death which occurred in the mid 1860's and '70's'.
For a time, Emily had cared for her ill mother which allowed her to withdraw somewhat from many of her associations and social obligations, and to write. As she began devoting more of her time to her poetry, she was able to be selective about her correspondents and visitors. Wolff writes, "'Self and 'life' were siphoned out of the time-bound parochial world of Amherst and poured into her work...it was in her poetry, and not in the world that Emily Dickinson deliberately decided to 'live'."
Dickinson's Life Choice
On April 15, 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson received an unsolicited letter from a then 31-year-old Emily containing four poems. Higginson himself was an essayist and lecturer on reforms and had published an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled Letters to a Young Contributor. His article encouraged young efforts to be "charged with life."
Emily was ready to have a liberal-minded person critique and validate her efforts. Among the poems she sent were: Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (216), I'll tell you how the Sun rose (318), The nearest Dream recedes - unrealized (319), and We play at Paste (320). She wanted to find out if her verses "breathed."
Thomas H. Johnson, who assembled all her work in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, writes that Higginson was at a loss as to how her work should be categorized, and while recognizing the talent, never believed that what she was writing was poetry. "He was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry."
Higginson's comments to a friend that the work was "remarkable...though odd...too delicate-not strong enough to publish" must have come through in his exchanged correspondence with Emily. For while she continued to exchange letters and send her work, she never expected him to more than thank her for her "beautiful thoughts and words."
Despite nearly doubling the volume of work in the following year, Emily Dickinson seems to have resigned herself to what her work would accomplish in her lifetime. In a subsequent letter she writes to Higginson, "I smile when you suggest that I delay 'to publish' - that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin...My Barefoot-Rank is better."
Dickinson Published Posthumously
After Dickinson's death at 55, it was her sister, Lavinia who discovered the stash of poems, "sixty little volumes tied together with twine," and set out to have them published. Because of the abundance of verses - 1,775 poems of varying lengths - they were published over the course of several decades in slim volumes until the collection of complete poems. None of the verses have titles and are arranged in chronological order. They are indexed by both first line and an astonishing number of subject headings.
Much of Emily Dickinson's work remains unfamiliar to the public, in part because of the length of the poems and their complex phrasing. But who has not heard the lines, "Because I could not stop for death - He kindly stopped for me -" or "Now I lay thee down to sleep?"
Dickinson's ability to capture complex and even divine meditations in brief lines are illustrated by:
1494
The competitions of the sky
corrodeless ply.
1639
A Letter is a joy of Earth -
It is denied the Gods -
1637
The pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee -
A Clover anytime, to him,
Is Aristocracy
Dickinson Ellegiac
Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes, "Occassionally, the intensely felt, essential concerns of one individual's life coincide with the overriding concerns of an epoch and a nation. It is difficult to estimate how often this happens, for when the conjunction occurs, none save the individual in question can know of it unless the personal flows into some larger, public role. However, in those extraordinary cases when the public and the private do intersect in significant ways and the individual is willing to accept the burden of a role that will translate the private into meaningful communal terms, such a person stands above the ordinary run of humankind...Emily Dickinson has become the lense through which Americans can read their fate as men and women whose national identity was born out of an errand into the wilderness."
Some summarizing comments on Dickinson's life and work include these of Thomas H. Johnson, "The startling originality of [Emily Dickinson's] style doomed her poetry to obscurity during her lifetime, but her bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations have since won her international recognition as a poet of the highest order."
Sources:
Johnson, Thomas H., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Little, Brown and Company, 1960.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, Emily Dickinson, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Related reading:
Dickinson's The only news I know
Dickinson's Two Butterflies went out at Noon
Emily Dickinson Museum Landscape Renovation
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