Emily Dickinson Biography and List of Works

"Dying is a wild night and a new road."

American lyrical poet, an obsessively private writer - only seven of her some 1800 poems were published during her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican. Dickinson withdrew from social contact at the age of 23 and devoted herself in secret into writing.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College, and also served in Congress. She was educated at Amherst Academy (1834-47) and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847-48). Around 1850 Dickinson started to write poems, first in fairly conventional style, but after ten years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the metre of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language in transferring the feelings of ecstasy and terror into written text. From c. 1858 she assembled many of her poems in packets of 'fascicles', which she bound herself with needle and thread. A selection of these poems appeared in 1890.

In 1862 Dickinson started her life long correspondence and friendship with writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson. On of the four poems he received from Dickinson was the famous 'Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.'

Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.

Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence -
Ah, what sagacity perished here!

Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

Although Higginson was astounded by her originality, he advised her not to publish, and encouraged otherwise her literary aspirations. Dickinson's decision to follow the advice was influenced by her ambivalent attitude toward the conventions of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and her desire to shape more intimate relations with chosen contemporaries.

After the Civil War Dickinson restricted her contacts outside Amherst to exchange of letters, dressed only in white and saw few of the visitors who came to meet her. In fact, most of her time she spent in her room. Although she lived secluded life, her letters reveal knowledge of the writings of John Keats, John Ruskin, and Sir Thomas Browne. Dickinson's emotional life remains mysterious, despite much speculation about a possible disappointed love affair. Two candidates have been presented: Reverend Charles Wadsworth, with whom she corresponded, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she addressed many poems.

After Dickinson's death her poems were brought out by her sister Lavinia, who amazed at the bulk of Emily's poetry. She co-edited three volumes from 1891 to 1896. Despite its editorial imperfections, the first volume became popular. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's niece, transcribed and published more poems, and in 1945 BOLTS OF MELODY essentially completed the task of bringing Dickinson's poems to the public.

The publication of Thomas H. Johnson's edition of Emily Dickinson's poems finally gave readers a complete and accurate text. Johson's work was not made easier that the author had left alternative versions of words, lines and sometimes whole poems. Johnson found a valuable assistant in Theodora Ward, who was then completing an edition of Dickinson's letters to her grandparents.

Dickinson's works have had considerable influence on modern poetry. Her frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, off rhymes, broken metres, unconventional metaphors have contributed her reputation as one of the most innovative poets of 19th-century American literature.

Later feminist critic have challenged the popular conception of the poet as reclusive, eccentric figure, and underlined her intellectual and artistic sophistication. Dickinson's imagery reflects an intense and painful struggle over many years, her verse is full of allusions to volcanoes, shipwrecks, funerals, and other manifestations of natural and human violence, which she hides in her writings. Scholars have explored her relationship with her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert, her admiration for the English poet Elisabeth Barren Browning's (1806-1861) work and her affection for US writer Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885).

Hope is the thing with feathers

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.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), writer and reformer, commanded during the Civil War the first troop of African-American soldiers, published Army Life in a Black Regiment in 1870.

For further reading: The Editing of Emily Dickinson by R.W. Franklin (1967); The Poetry of Emily Dickinson by Ruth Miller (1968); A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by S.P. Rosenbaum (1964); The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard Benson Sewall (1974, paperback 1994); Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, ed. by Suzanne Juhasz (1983); Undiscovered Continent by Suzanne Juhasz (1983); Emily Dickinson by Paul J. Ferlazzo (1984); The Dickinson Sublime by Gary Lee Stonum (1990); Emily Dickinson, ed. by Harold Bloom (1990); Emily Dickinson by Victoria Olsen, Martina S. Horner (1990); The Passion of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr (1992); The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English, 1978-1989 by Joseph Duchac (1993); Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Judith Farr (1995); Emily Dickinson's Fascicles by Dorothy Huff Oberhaus (1995); Emily Dickinson's Gothic by Daneen Wardrop (1996); Dickinson and Audience, ed. by Martin Orzeck (1996); The Essential Dickinson, ed. by Joyce Carol Oates (1996); Emily Dickinson, ed. by Helen McNeil (1997); A Critical Study of Emily Dickinson's Letters by Robert Graham Lambert (1997); Emily Dickinson's Visions by James R. Guthrie (1998); Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885 by Elizabeth A. Petrino (1998); An Emily Dickinson Encyclopeadia, ed. by Jane Donahue (1998); The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed. by Gudrun Grabher (1999) - Note: As editor of Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems (1924), Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) was largely responsible for establishing that poet's posthumous literary reputation. - See also: Stephen Crane

POEMS: SECOND SERIES, (1891)
POEMS: THIRD SERIES, (1896)
POEMS OF A LIFETIME, (1914)
SELECTED POEMS, (1924)
THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, (1955)
THE LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON, (1958)
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, (1960)
THE MANUSCRIPT BOOKS OF EMILY DICKINSON, (1981)
NEW POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, (1993)
OPEN ME CAREFULLY: EMILY DICKINSON'S INTIMATE LETTERS TO SUSAN HUNTINGTON DICKINSON, (1998)