Emily Dickinson: Facts and Information

Emily Dickinson is recognized as among the pioneers of American poetry. Extremely prolific, she was not recognized in her lifetime. Her recognition as a poet came with the first volume of her collection published posthumously in 1890 and reprinted in 1955, but she did not receive her well-deserved acclaim more than she does today.

Early Years

• Born December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson spent her entire life in the family estate called “The Homestead” built in 1813 by her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson who founded the Amherst Academy in 1814 and Amherst College in 1821. Her home served as a center of the Amherst society and the site of annual Amherst College commencement receptions.
• After graduating from Amherst Academy, Emily studied at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary between 1847 and 1848, where she developed a notoriety as a student who never publicly acknowledged her Christian roots. She did not return after her first year, prompting speculations that she suffered religious discrimination. However, it was customary for women at that time not to pursue college on their 2^nd year due to societal values that de-emphasized higher education for women.

“Queen of Recluse”

• Emily led a closeted lifestyle, seldom leaving home and entertaining only a few visitors. A close confidant Samuel Bowles referred to Emily as “the Queen Recluse” in an 1863 note to her brother Austin.
• Emily worked best in seclusion with her productive writing peaking in 1858. Emily sent several of her poems to literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson whose article in the The Atlantic Monthly, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” inspired Emily to pursue her poetic writing.
• While Emily shut herself from public view, she continued corresponding with friends and associates, including well-known literary icons like Helen Hunt Jackson.

Unrequited Love

• The few people Emily had contact with made significant impact on her poetry. One of them was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth known to have last visited her in 1860. After that, Emily’s poems elicited a heart-broken sadness that hinted at some unrequited romantic relationship. Most critics suspected it was due to Charles whom she called “my closest earthly friend.”
• Unrequited love started to figure prominently as a theme in many of Emily’s poems. There were other men rumoured to have left several romantic failures such as Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, and Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court judge.

Literary Influences

• The Dickinson family tradition had prepared Emily for a life of political activity and public service, but denied her because of her sex. Nevertheless, her exposure to politics and public service may have strongly shaped her creative artistry in the poems that expressed her sentiments and insightful poetic skill across a diaspora of human emotions.
• It was in her teens when Emily discovered her passion for poetry through the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Wordsworth.
• Emily admired the poetry of John Keats and Walt Whitman, as well as Elizabeth and Robert  Barrett Browning. Emily and Walt are now regarded as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice.
• Her poetry was heavily influenced by the metaphysical poets of 17^th century England, her reading of the Book of Revelation, and a Puritanical New England town with a mix of Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative attitudes to Christianity.

Poetic Style

• While Emily frequently applied the common ballad meter used in hymnody, she crafted her poems like a jazz artist deftly harnessing rhythm to shape readers’ perceptions of her poetic themes.
• She was known to defy literary and social norms, as well as patriarchal authority, exuding a revolutionary attitude that attracted feminist advocates who placed Dickinson alongside major writers as Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Bradstreet, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
• Emily used unique punctuations and lineation that scholars say create a novel way to read and interpret her works. They advocate that Emily’s poems should be printed preserving her chorography that can influence the way her poems are understood.

Tragedies and Death

• Emily underwent several surgeries starting in the mid-1860s at a Boston hospital and further withdrew into seclusion, becoming known as the “Woman in White” due to her preference for all-white attire when seen rarely in public.
• Her father died suddenly in 1874 and while his wake was held at the Homestead, Emily did not attend.
• Her mother suffered paralysis and mental impairment from a stroke in 1875. Emily’s writing progressively gave way to tending to her mother since then.
• Her beloved pastor, Charles Wadsworth, passed away in 1882, just 5 months before her mother died.
• Her youngest brother and friend Austin died in 1883.
• Another close friend, Otis Taylor Lord, died in 1884 after a lingering illness
• Emily’s health declined from here on, and died from Bright’s disease on May 15, 1886.

 Posthumous Recognition

• Emily never publicised her work during her lifetime, though she published a few anonymously. The magnitude of her literary genius surfaced only after her death when the family found 40 hand-bound volumes containing almost 1,800 handwritten poems.
• In addition, her sister Lavinia discovered some 1,147 far copies of poems, 833 of which bound in individual packets known as the fascicles. These were the poems Emily attached to or written on letters addressed to friends.
• Her long-time friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson organized and published her works in 1890.

It was not until the next the century that Emily became famous. Thomas H. Johnson published a reprint of her 1,775 poems in his 1955 variorum edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, which gained a following from the literati who suddenly found a poet of stylistic profundity and thematic depth with an opus that defied categorization. In 1958, the world came to appreciate the 1,147 poems in her letters published in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, as edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. A large collection of her original manuscripts are archived at the Jones Library at Amherst and the Houghton Library of Harvard University.