Early Life.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, where she died in 1886. Edward Dickinson, her father, was a lawyer and Treasurer of Amherst College. Given this background, which included an education more extensive than usual for young women of that period - two years at Amherst Academy and one aat Mount Holyoke Female Seminary - we can assume that the intellectual and social life of the Amherst College community was available to Emily Dickinson. Schoolgirl recollections of her picture a young woman who was shy but fun-loving, not beautiful but somewhat striking and very neat in dress. For whatever reasons - and modern commentators have been more and more cautious in assigning "reasons," such as the disappointment of unrequited love - she began to lead a rather solitary life about 1853, when she was twenty-three. A letter of that year remarks, "I do not go from home." Her solitude does not seem to have taken a morbid turn, however, until the death of her father in 1874. The fact remains, nevertheless, that from age thirty on, her life was essentially withdrawn from society; and after 1874 she practically never left the family house.

 "Love Affairs"

 About Emily Dickinson's private life a few facts are known, but most of the emotional overtones so indispensable to a full picture must be deduced from her poems and letters. It cannot be said too quickly or too often that her poetry is her personality; yet it must be added that in her written expressions we cannot be at all sure of proofs of her emotional life. Indeed, an enigmatic quality, a secretiveness, is one of the essentials of her poetry. There are several men, however, who may be safely mentioned as having influenced her, if we are correct in connecting fact with the inferences in her poetry and letters. During her school years two young men encouraged her interest in books: Leonard Humphrey, principal of Amherst Academy, and Benjamin F. Newton, a law student in her father's office. Newton also displayed an interest in her poetry. It seems likely that these two men, who died young, are referred to in the lines:

 Charles Wadsworth

 The "love of Emily Dickinson's life," however, is generally assumed to have been a Philadelphia minister with whom she came in contact early in 1854: Charles Wadsworth, 41 years old, married, with a family. Conjectures on young Emily's passion for Wadsworth are based on drafts of three letters to him (although no letters, if there were any, have remained from the Rev. Wadsworth himself) and on the "love poems" which followed in the early 1860s. Wadsworth did call on her in 1860, while visiting in nearby Northampton, and it seems likely that she was aware in 1861 of his intention to move to San Francisco. (Her poems of this period, for example, speak of fears and a sense of loss - "I had a terror since September, I could tell to none. . . .") There is no real evidence, though, for assuming that this unfulfilled love affair was the sole or sufficient motive behind her gradual withdrawal from society; it is more realistic to conclude that such an experience might have encouraged what was already a tendency toward solitariness and introversion in her.

 Judge Otis Lord

 Although her last years amounted to a rigid retreat from the world, especially after 1874, letters again indicate-surviving drafts of 15 letters written between 1878 and 1883 -that she came to care for Judge Otis P. Lord of Salem, a widower and an old family friend, to the extent that she even considered marriage.

 Thomas Wentworth Higginson

 The other name of significance to Emily Dickinson's personal and professional life is that of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a rising young literary man in 1862 when the young woman sent him some poems to examine. (Higginson was writing for Atlantic Monthly at the time.) Their correspondence and an interview survive, although Higginson actually saw her only twice. It can be said, then that Higginson's essay on her, however meager, is the only one we have from a literary figure of the period. The essay appeared in Atlantic Monthly five years after her death. It quoted some of her letters and poems and described his impressions of her. It is a most interesting document in its reproduction of excerpts of Miss Dickinson's letters to Higginson over the years. The correspondence which began with her need for a mentor is pathetically illuminated in the first line of her first letter to him - "Mr. Higginson, - Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?" Indications are that Higginson, busy and urbane essayist and academician, whose replies were less frequent than hers, found her poetry quaint, puzzling and of course "insubordinate" with respect to the traditional rules of poetry. To his continuing gentle reproach of "waywardness" in her poetry, Emily replied in the following manner, at once apologetic and unmoved: "You think my gait 'spasmodic.' I am in danger, sir. You think me 'uncontrolled.' I have no tribunal." In another letter she asks Higginson (addressing him usually as "Dear Friend"): "Are these more orderly? I thank you for the truth. I had no monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself; and when I try to organize, my little force explodes and leaves me bare and charred."

 A Family Monarch: Emily Dickinson's Father

 It may be that there was a "monarch" in Emily Dickinson's life, though: her stern Calvinist father. Again, this is illuminated in her correspondence, especially in remarks to Higginson, and in what is known of the family relationship. Neither Emily nor her only sister married, and it is generally assumed that Mr. Dickinson dominated the household of mother, two daughters and a son. He did so with less harshness than we might assume, although he stressed Bible-reading over other books which, Emily reports to Higginson, he feared would "joggle the mind." When Higginson visited her, and she told him of much of her early life, "her father was always the chief figure," he records. He was a "man who had from childhood inspired her with such awe, that she never learned to tell time by the clock till she was fifteen, simply because he had tried to explain it to her when she was a little child, and she had been afraid to tell him that she did not understand, and also afraid to ask anyone else lest he should hear of it." There is no need, however, to distort this picture into a warped relationship between father and daughter; it was not the free exchange which we would like to think characterizes the 20th century, yet it certainly was not unnatural for the time. But perhaps Emily Dickinson herself has spoken most accurately of her father, in a letter to Higginson after Mr. Dickinson's death in 1874. It is a touching letter, expressing a tender and awesome regard for the father, and a pathetically "lost" feeling which reaches out to her friend Higginson. It is of course also "poetic," since it contains the same quaintness and elaborate conciseness of her poetry. Instead of stating conventionally, "I would rather have died before he did," she says, "I am glad there is immortality, but would have tested it myself, before entrusting him." To her friend she speaks starkly, out of a terrible loneliness, "I have wished for you, since my father died, and had you an hour unengrossed, it would be almost priceless. Thank you for each kindness. . . ." And of her father she speaks almost in epitaph: "His heart was pure and terrible, and I think no other like it exists."

 Emily Dickinson's Seclusion

 That Emily Dickinson chose to live a secluded life is obvious, but the reasons for this choice are not clear; since her death and the expanding publication of her poems, her editors and biographers have been at pains to point out that neither a love disappointment nor invalidism can be counted as valid causes for her solitariness. Higginson writes, "A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems." Her famous seclusion seems to be a matter of "personality," and the keys to that personality lie in such phrases as "habitually concealed her mind" and "a very few friends"; for her poetry and her letters suggest (a) an inveterate secretiveness, and (b) an idealism of human relations probably easily disappointed.

Concealment Of Self

Concealment of personal facts and private thoughts is the very framework of her poetry, coupled with a paradoxical desire to reveal the very things she obscures in the telling. These are the descriptive terms most often applied by critics (and the validity of these terms will be evidenced in the analyses which follow): epigrammatic, terse, puzzling. Some of her poems almost appear as riddles as we attempt to decipher from them: "I never lost as much but twice" and: My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me. . . .

[See Closed Twice: My life closed twice before its close.]

 Whether it is sheer human loss or personal loss Emily Dickinson so frequently recounts, we can never be sure. Her so-called love poems address a "you" with an intensity that cannot help but arouse the reader's curiosity. For example, there is the poem which begins:

Or to illustrate pure childish efforts of concealment (and both loneliness and mistrust of one's fellows), there is the description of how she reads a letter, the first two stanzas of which read:

 Her Idealism

 A second possible reason for her seclusion is that she was an idealist in human relations, expecting too much of people - and of God and religion, for that matter. Her poetry indicates a disenchantment both with present life and with the promise of heaven, doubts which were startling for the period in which she lived. The following poem supports this possibility:

 The reference might be to family, a friend, or to the Calvinist religion she had been conditioned to; but it is clear that something or somebody has failed to live up to her expectations. The lines "for entertaining plated wares/ Upon my silver shelf" speak of value which fell below her standards. Or we can turn to that poem well-known among the numerous poems which seem to refer to her seclusion. The first stanza reads:

The soul selects her own society,

Then shuts the door;

On her divine majority

Obtrude no more.

And the poem closes thus:

I've known her from an ample nation

Choose one;

Then close the valves of her attention

Like stone.

Is it, then, unrequited love which the poet speaks of here? And if it is, what questions must be posed about the personality of such a poet, whose ideal will permit no substitutes to "obtrude"?

Emily Dickinson And The Calvinist Religion Of Her Day

Emily Dickinson's most powerful poetry, as will be seen in the poetic analyses, dwells upon the subject of permanence and decay; or put another way, on time, death, eternity. We must then assume that the religion of her particular background and era exerted a strong influence on her thinking. The result of this religion, however, was to place her in a limbo between faith and doubt. Her father is often referred to as an oldrank Puritan (the terms Puritan and Calvinist are used interchangeably here, and indicate sterness and narrowness), and her family life was undoubtedly filled with typical Calvinist stern observances. Bible reading, prayer meetings, strict keeping of the Sabbath, convictions of eternal damnation or future paradise, suspicions that pleasure was sinful, were the backbone of her father's religion. Yet it is obvious from her poetry that Emily Dickinson developed into a mixture of Puritan and freethinker, and that she was troubled enough by doubts about traditional Calvinist doctrine to treat God and religion from time to time in a poetically flippant fashion. A choice example of such an attitude is also one which illustrates her directness and ironic wit:

On the other hand, some of her most beautiful, successful, and often most popular poems are affirmations of faith. We have the following examples (referred to by first lines, which is the customary manner of indexing her untitled poems; these poems will be discussed more fully below); "Because I could not stop for Death"; "I died for beauty"; "As imperceptibly as grief";

"There is a certain slant of light"; and the well-known "I never saw a moor."

 Late Questions

 Late in her life, however, her questionings about death and immortality became somewhat morbid, as evidenced in the tone her poetry took and in the almost grotesque little notes of condolence she sometimes wrote to friends. There is one poem, for instance, which is rather literal in its insistent inquiry:

 Other questions the poet wants answered are, "To know if he was patient, part content,/ Was dying as he thought, or different," or "Was he afraid, or tranquil?" This increasing preoccupation with and curiosity about death betrays a growing conflict in her mind between faith and doubt. Then of course there are the anecdotes about her notes of condolence, one of which suffices to indicate her turn of mind during this late period of life. She wrote to a friend whose father had died on her wedding-day: "Few daughters have the immortality of a father for a bridal gift." Here again one must in honesty ask a number of questions: is this genuine sympathy, is it simply poor taste, is it selfishness which puts one's thoughts about a subject - and the frank expression of them-before consideration for the bereaved friend? However these questions are answered on this and similar occasions, especially as she grew older and more isolated from the outside world, Emily Dickinson inevitably wrote from herself, and not from any contact with realities, either of poetry or of people.

 Emily Dickinson As Paradox

 The foregoing comments suggest that Emily Dickinson's poetry (along with her letters) is her personality, but further, that the personality is a paradox, an apparent contradiction reflected in poetry. In other words, she manages often to represent opposite extremes. Her perverse secretiveness is at the same time what Conrad Aiken has termed an "unhealthy vanity." As Aiken points out, "It is permissible to suggest that her extreme self-seclusion and secrecy was both a protest and a display -a kind of vanity masquerading as modesty. She became increasingly precious of her person as of her thought. Vanity is in her letters - at the last an unhealthy vanity. She was certainly deprived of such close human relationships as marrying, having her own children, and being in intimate contact with many people. Perhaps this isolation came through a combination of circumstances beginning with her own personality, and was molded in the household of a shrinking mother and a dominating father. At the same time she seems to have been a perfectionist (a quality very much encouraged by the tenets of Calvinism, which assumes that man is born sinful and must forever attempt to perfect himself), inclined to reject people whom she could not understand or communicate with. Indeed, that poem which is so often used to preface anthologies of her poetry is quite characteristic of a familiar quality she reveals, a rather tongue-in-cheek yet injured attitude toward the world. It begins, "This is my letter to the world, / That never wrote to me, . . ." She is communicating with the world, but without answer.

Contradictions

We have seen that her attitudes toward traditional religion were somewhat schizophrenic - she both believed and disbelieved, which of course is an attitude more natural than unnatural for the inquiring, sensitive mind of any century. Even her poetry must be regarded as contradictory; she can be mystical or trivial, profound or childish. Her techniques have been termed "irresponsible" and "barbarous" by the same critics who praise her power and sometimes frightening insight; she is sometimes original, sometimes commonplace and trite; she has been lauded for preciseness and concision, yet she is often redundant, repeating in the second stanza what was already said in the first. Perhaps these contradictions can be reconciled for the moment in the words of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, writing after her death for a volume of her poems which he helped select. No longer inclined to quarrel with her strange grammar, he put his finger on what is of permanent value in her poetry, saying, "After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence."

The Published Poems

The first small volume of Emily Dickinson's poems was brought out in 1890. It was put together by Mable Loomis Todd, wife of an Amherst professor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Two more volumes, and two volumes of letters as well, soon followed. More poems were published in 1914, and in the twenties. An edition in 1929, titled Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, is indicative of how much the texts of her poems have been tampered with. The scholar Theodore Spencer bluntly labelled this volume as incompetent. He complained: "Disregarding the most obvious indications of meter and rhyme, they have distorted nearly every poem into an arbitrary shape of their own invention; what should plainly be one line is printed as two, what should be two is printed as one, until we have an exasperating hybrid which is neither quatrain nor free verse." And unfortunately, in the rush of recognition of Emily Dickinson's worth in the twenties and thereafter, far too many of her poor poems have come into print along with the good. She is a great poet, but any poet who produced 1,775 poems solitarily and without outside criticism cannot be uniformly great. Furthermore, as another of her more recent editors, Robert N. Linscott, observes, there are a number of problems in editing her work: the poems are undated; most of them exist in her handwriting and in fact are usually arranged chronologically according to the striking changes in her script from year to year; she was given to erratic and uncommon punctuation and extensive use of capital letters; and of course her poems were untitled - where we find titles they have come from editors.

 Harvard Edition

 In 1950 Harvard University bought all available manuscripts and the publishing rights, and issued in 1955 what can be regarded as the definitive (authoritative) edition of her poems and letters in three volumes (sometimes combined into one large volume). This edition by Thomas H. Johnson is often referred to by critics. The most usual and useful method of arrangement in the smaller and handier anthologies is indexing by first lines, as in Robert N. Linscott's Anchor collection, Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson, New York, 1959, where the poems also fall into a roughly chronological order. Another method is the grouping of poems under themes such as Life, Nature, Love, Time and Eternity, as in Conrad Aiken's Modern Library anthology, where identification of each poem is by number, a less functional method. In the analyses below, the poems are considered in a roughly thematic fashion, as in Aiken's anthology; but these groupings are quite arbitrary and over lapping, since a poem on "Nature" may also deal with "immortality," or a presumed "love-poem" may speak of loss by death. The categories that follow are: "Love, Loss, Pain, Despair"; "Time, Death, Immortality"; "Nature"' and "Life, Society."

 If you have a particular Emily Dickinson poem that you want help in analyzing, please E-mail me.