Emily Dickinson
Poet (1830 – 1886)

Emily Dickinson’s gift to us is more than just literary.  By refusing to let her voice be dictated by others, writing instead from the depths of her own perceptions, she gave us a model for the originality each of us has the potential to express.  She lived by a principle that Thomas Merton would later articulate:  “It is a compelling necessity for me to be free to embrace the necessity of my own nature.”   She lived as she needed to live, in a solitude no one but she could fully understand, candidly acknowledging the disillusion and despair which the worst in human nature evoke and yet the daring hope which comes from a living encounter with Eternity.
- Patricia Campbell Carlson

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts.  She briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, but returned home after only one year, perhaps put off by the strong atmosphere of evangelical revival.  Many members of her family, including her father, a distinguished figure in Amherst, were caught up in this spiritual renewal.  But Emily herself seems to have resisted the impulse.  In one of her poems she described her reasons for avoiding church services:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long.
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

Though in her youth Emily made a number of trips to Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, at a certain point she effectively withdrew to her home an adopted the life of a recluse, hermit, or stationary pilgrim, depending on one’s point of view.  To her neighbors she was simply an eccentric, famous for dressing only in white and for her passion for seclusion.  She described herself in these terms:  “small, like the wren; and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves.”

Many theories have been offered for her withdrawal:  disappointed love; a feminist protest against the constraints on women; the necessary solitude for her vocation as a writer; or simple agoraphobia.  There is no easy way of resolving this mystery.  While she maintained a lively correspondence and counted many friends, she enjoyed little personal contact beyond her family.  During her final illness she permitted a doctor to “examine” her only from the hall.

How did she spend her time?  After her death in 1886 her family discovered in her drawers a collection of poems – 1,775 in all – carefully written by hand and organized in notebooks.  She had shared her poems with only a few friends and published only a handful in her life, though all the while writing with furious concentration.  The first selections were published four years after her death; the complete edition in 1955.  This work secured her reputation as one of the most significant figures in American literature.

Dickinson’s poems were deceptively simple, many following the cheerful rhythms of popular hymns.  But they reflected a complex and deeply personal approach to the world.  A great number of them addressed her effort to define her relationship with God – not according to the doctrines of Puritan religion, but on her own terms, wavering frequently between doubt and faith.

She was a great poet of nature.  Her careful observations about bees, birds, and flowers of every kind showed her capacity to see the universe in a grain of sand.  For Dickinson, these details of the natural order served as a harbor, opening up to speculative musings on eternity.  But it was the subject of death – the border between the individual and infinity – that seems to have captured her imagination most of all.  Throughout her poems, death appears as a friend and guide, a source of pain but also the conductor to new life.  Death is “the supple Suitor / That wins at last.”  As she wrote in one of her most famous poems,

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just ourselves –
And immortality…

The loss of many friends and family members, the separation from those she loved, the vast bloody backdrop of the Civil War, all provided a sweeping panorama, carefully surveyed from the seclusion of her room.  The written word was her point of contact:  “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote back to Me.”  Of poetry she wrote, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever 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.”

Few in Dickinson’s life ever suspected the fire that warmed her heart.  But in measuring the meaning of a life, she adopted the long view:

Each life converges to some centre
Expressed or still –
Exists in every human nature
A goal –

Admitted scarcely to itself, it may be –
Too fair
For credibility’s temerity
To dare…

Ungained, it may be, by life’s low venture,
But then –
Eternity enables the endeavoring
Again.

On May 14, 1886, she wrote to friends, “Little Cousins, – Called  back.  Emily.”  She died the next day.

Additional Resources
See:  The Selected Poems & Letters of Emily Dickinson (Garden City, N.Y.:  Doubleday, 1959).

Visit the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives.