A
Quick Overview
Emily Dickinson was born on Dec. 10, 1830, at Amherst, Mass.,
U.S. and. died on May 15, 1886, also at Amherst. Her full name was EMILY ELIZABETH DICKINSON, American lyric poet who
has been called "the New England mystic" and who experimented with poetic
rhythms and rhymes. Almost all her poetry was published posthumously.
"Dickinson, Emily" Encyclopædia
Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=30830&sctn=1>
[Accessed July 2 1999].
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Dickinson,
Emily - Society
International forum for all those interested in Emily Dickinson, American
poetry, and women's literature. With announcements and a calendar.
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Dickinson,
Emily - Reading Room
Gives 100 samples of Dickinson's short, but powerful verse. Searchable
by keyword.
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Dickinson,
Emily
Check out biographical info, excerpts from the reclusive poet's works,
and a critical interpretation of Dickinson's "I've Seen a Dying Eye."
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Dickinson,
Emily
University of Maryland presents 100 of Dickinson's poems online, including
"her final summer" and other classics.
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Dickinson,
Emily
Guided tour around Dickinson's Amherst home and gardens, registered
as a National Historic Landmark.
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Dickinson,
Emily - Complete Works
Project to post all of Dickinson's poetry has managed to post a great
deal of her 1,775 poems.
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Dickinson,
Emily - Erin's Page
Contains a biography, various magazine and journal articles about the
poet, and texts of some of this site author's favorite Dickinson poems.
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Emily
Dickinson Journal, The
Provides an examination of Dickinson and her relation to the tradition
of American poetry and women's literature.
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Dickinson,
Emily
- Sappho
Provides three of
Dickinson's
poems and a profile of her life and loves.
From
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Dickinson,
Emily
- Selections
Groups together
Dickinson's
poems on life, love, nature, and time and eternity.
From
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Dickinson,
Emily
Connections to reviews
and criticism, along with more than 350 of her poems, biographical notes,
and mailing list.
From
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Dickinson,
Emily
- Selections
Find many of the
poems by the woman who, along with Whitman, invented quality American poetry.
From
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Dickinson,
Emily
- Poems
Reprints the entire
1896 edition of "Poems," a collection of her work.
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Dickinson,
Emily
- Selection
Get a quick fix
of the New England bard with this handful of her poems.
From
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Dickinson,
Emily
Resource page gives
brief biography of the poet, selected e-texts, and places to look for further
study.
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EmilyDickinson
School
Contains a mission
statement and a staff directory. Member of the Bozeman Public School District.
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EmMail
Webpage
Join a large friendly
email discussion group on poet Emily Dickinson. FAQ, news
about a forged manuscript and more Emily Dickinson pages.
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Robert
F Lucas, Antiquarian Books
Antiquarian and
out-of-print books, autographs, manuscripts and ephemera relating to EmilyDickinson,
Henry Thoreau and 19th-century Americana.
From
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Emily Dickinson lived much of her life as a recluse, and only 10 of
her 1700+ poems were published in her lifetime. Today, her poetry is read
and loved throughout the world.
http://www.zinezone.com/
Emily Dickinson, t-shirt, beautiful, printed front/back, many poems, quotations. Lovely artwork, decorated by flowers. Shirt filled with lovely poetry~by America's favorite beauty poet. http://www.a1.com/
Select a Volume & Year - - Volume 7, 1998 Volume 8, 1999 Select
above first - - Select a Section - - Copyright Info Editorial Info Current
Pricing Indexing/Abstracting Advertising Info Booksellers Terms Submission
Guideline
http://muse.jhu.edu/
Unique, collectible Emily Dickinson busts. Links to other Emily Dickinson
WWW page
http://www.greatamericanwomen.com/
AITLC Guide to Emily Dickinson
ACCESS INDIANA Teaching & Learning Center Guide to Emily Dickinso
http://tlc.ai.org/
Yahoo! Arts:Humanities:Literature:Poetry:Poets:Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)
Personalize Help - Check Email Home > Arts > Humanities > Literature > Poetry > Poets > Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886) all of Yahoo! just this category Yahoo! Shopping: Books - one stop Internet shopping. 100 Selected Poems [University of Maryland.. http://dir.yahoo.com/
Meet the Editorial Board Search the Emily Dickinson Journal Tables of Contents Specific issues: 1992 Volume I, Number 1 1992 Volume I, Number 2 1993 Volume II, Number 1 1993 Volume II, Number 2 - Special Conference Issue 1994 Volume III, Number 1..http://www.colorado.edu/
Emily
Dickinson
Paul
E. Black / Brigham Young University
Comprehensive
user-friendly guide to links providing information about Dickinson. Covers
biographies, photographs, and the texts of over 400 of her poems. Includes
a discussion group and FAQ.
Emily
Dickinson
The
Academy of American Poets
Biography
and selected bibliography of the poet. Includes links to related sites.
Emily
Dickinson
Information
about the poet. Includes a biography and bibliography. Features her poems
I heard a Fly buzz and Because I could not stop for Death.
Emily
Dickinson (Un)discovered
Toby
Lester / The Atlantic Monthly Company
Brief
essay describing Dickinson's affiliation with The Atlantic Monthly.
Includes an article (1891) by Dickinson's mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
about her letters plus an essay (1912) documenting the literary world's
recognition of Dickinson.
Emily
Dickinson International Society
University
of Colorado at Boulder
Organization
devoted to the study of the American poet. Features a journal, a bulletin,
announcements, discussion lists, membership and subscription information,
and a photo gallery.
Emily
Dickinson Journal
University
of Colorado at Boulder
Articles
and essays from past issues of this semiannual journal devoted to the American
bard. Includes membership information for the Emily Dickinson International
Society.
Emily Dickinson was the second of three children. The three
remained close throughout their adult lives: her younger sister,
Lavinia, stayed in the family home and did not marry, and her older
brother, Austin, lived in the house next door after his marriage to a
friend of Emily's. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, had
been one of the founders of Amherst College, and her father,
Edward Dickinson, served as treasurer of the college from 1835 to
1872. A lawyer who served one term (1853-55) in Congress,
Edward Dickinson was an austere and somewhat remote father,
but not an unkind one. Emily's mother, too, was not close to her
children.Emily was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke
Female Seminary. Mount Holyoke, which she attended from 1847
to 1848, insisted on religious as well as intellectual growth, and
Emily was under considerable pressure to become a professing
Christian. She resisted, however, and although many of her poems
deal with God, she remained all her life a skeptic. Despite her
doubts, she was subject to strong religious feelings, a conflict that
lent tension to her writings.Emily began to write verse about 1850, apparently while under the
spell of the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Brontë and
under the tutelage of Benjamin F. Newton, a young man studying
law in her father's office. Only a handful of her poems can be dated
before 1858, when she began to collect them into small, handsewn
booklets. Her letters of the 1850s reveal a vivacious, humorous,
somewhat shy young woman. In 1855 Emily went to Washington,
D.C., with her sister to visit their father, who was serving in
Congress. During the trip they stopped off at Philadelphia, where
she heard the preaching of the noted clergyman, the Reverend
Charles Wadsworth, who was to become her "dearest earthly
friend." He was something of a romantic figure: a man said to have
known great sorrow, whose eloquence in the pulpit contrasted with
his solitary broodings. He and Emily exchanged letters on spiritual
matters, his Calvinist orthodoxy perhaps serving as a useful foil for
her own speculative reasoning. She may also have found in his stern,
rigorous beliefs a welcome corrective to the easy assumption of a
benign universe made by Emerson and the other Transcendentalists.In the 1850s Emily began two of her significant
correspondences--with Dr. and Mrs. Josiah G. Holland and with
Samuel Bowles. The two men were editors of the Springfield
(Massachusetts) Republican, a paper that took an interest in literary
matters and even published verse. The correspondence continued
over the years, although in the case of the Hollands most of the
letters after the 1850s went to Mrs. Holland, a woman intelligent
enough to comprehend Emily's subtleties and witticisms. Emily
tried to interest Bowles in her poetry, and it was a crushing blow to
her that he, a man of quick mind but conventional literary tastes,
failed to appreciate it.By the late 1850s, when she was writing poems at a steadily
increasing pace, Emily Dickinson loved a man whom she called
"Master" in three drafts of letters. "Master" does not exactly
resemble any of Emily's known friends but may have been Bowles
or Wadsworth. This love shines forth in several lines from her
poems: "I'm ceded--I've stopped being Theirs," "'Tis so much joy!
'Tis so much joy," and "Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?" to
name only a few. Other poems reveal the frustration of this love and
its gradual sublimation into a love for Christ and a celestial marriage
to him.The poems of the 1850s are fairly conventional in sentiment and
form, but beginning about 1860 they become experimental both in
language and prosody, though they owe much to the metres of the
English hymn writer Isaac Watts and to Shakespeare and the King
James Version of the Bible. Emily's prevailing poetic form was the
quatrain of three iambic feet, a type described in one of the books
by Watts in the family library. She used many other forms as well,
and to even the simpler hymnbook measures she gave complexity
by constantly altering the metrical beat to fit her thought: now slow,
now fast, now hesitant. She broke new ground in her wide use of
off-rhymes, varying from the true in a variety of ways that also
helped to convey her thought and its tensions. In striving for an
epigrammatic conciseness, she stripped her language of superfluous
words and saw to it that those that remained were vivid and exact.
She tampered freely with syntax and liked to place a familiar word
in an extraordinary context, shocking the reader to attention and
discovery.On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote a letter, enclosing four
poems, to a literary man, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking
whether her poems were "alive." Higginson, although he advised
Emily not to publish, recognized the originality of her poems and
remained her "preceptor" for the rest of her life. After 1862 Emily
Dickinson resisted all efforts by her friends to put her poems
before the public. As a result, only seven poems were published
during her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican. (See
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Storrow.)The years of Emily Dickinson's greatest poetic output, about 800
poems, coincide with the Civil War. Although she looked inward
and not to the war for the substance of her poetry, the tense
atmosphere of the war years may have contributed to the urgency of
her writing. The year of greatest stress was 1862, when distance
and danger threatened Emily's friends--Samuel Bowles, in Europe
for his health; Charles Wadsworth, who had moved to a new
pastorate at the Calvary Church in San Francisco; and T.W.
Higginson, serving as an officer in the Union Army. Emily also had
persistent eye trouble, which led her, in 1864 and 1865, to spend
several months in Cambridge, Mass., for treatment. Once back in
Amherst she never travelled again and after the late 1860s never left
the boundaries of the family's property.After the Civil War, Emily Dickinson's poetic tide ebbed, but she
sought increasingly to regulate her life by the rules of art. Her letters,
some of them equal in artistry to her poems, classicize daily
experience in an epigrammatic style. For example, when a friend
affronted Emily by sending a letter jointly to her and her sister, she
replied: "A Mutual plum is not a plum. I was too respectful to take
the pulp and do not like a stone." By 1870 Emily Dickinson
dressed only in white and saw few of the callers who came to the
homestead; her seclusion was fiercely guarded by her devoted
sister. In August 1870 Higginson visited Amherst and described
Emily as "a little plain woman" with reddish hair, dressed in white,
bringing him flowers as her "introduction" and speaking in a "soft
frightened breathless childlike voice." (See letter.)Her later years were marked with sorrow at the deaths of many
people she loved. The most prostrating of these were the deaths of
her father in 1874 and her eight-year-old nephew Gilbert in 1883,
which occasioned some of her finest letters. She also mourned the
loss of Bowles in 1878, Holland in 1881, Charles Wadsworth and
her mother in 1882, Otis P. Lord in 1884, and Helen Hunt Jackson
in 1885. Lord, a judge from Salem, Mass., with whom Emily fell in
love about 1878, had been the closest friend of Emily's father.
Emily's drafts of letters to Lord reveal a tender, mature love, which
Lord returned. Jackson, a poet and popular novelist, discerned the
greatness of Emily's poetry and tried unsuccessfully to get her to
publish it.Soon after her death her sister Lavinia determined to have Emily's
poems published. In 1890 Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by
T.W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, appeared. Other
volumes of Dickinson poems, edited chiefly by Mabel Loomis
Todd, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Emily's niece), and Millicent
Todd Bingham, were published between 1891 and 1957, and in
1955 Thomas H. Johnson edited all the surviving poems and their
variant versions.The subjects of Emily Dickinson's poems, expressed in intimate,
domestic figures of speech, include love, death, and nature. The
contrast between her quiet, secluded life in the house in which she
was born and died, and the depth and intensity of her terse poems,
has provoked much speculation about her personality and personal
relationships. Her 1,775 poems and her letters, which survive in
almost as great a number, reveal a passionate, witty woman and a
scrupulous craftsman who made an art not only of her poetry but
also of her correspondence and her life.
(D.J.M.H.)
Major Works
No collection of poems by Emily Dickinson was published in her
lifetime. The first selection, Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890),
was followed by Poems: Second Series (1891), and Poems: Third
Series (1896). Additional poems were included in Letters of Emily
Dickinson, 2 vol. (1894). Later volumes of poems were: The
Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (1914), Further Poems of
Emily Dickinson: Withheld from Publication by Her Sister
Lavinia (1929), Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson
(1935), and Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson
(1945).Bibliography
S.T. Clendenning, Emily Dickinson: A Bibliography, 1850-1966
(1968), is the most recent and most comprehensive bibliography.
The great majority of Dickinson manuscripts, both poems and
letters, are in the libraries of Harvard University and Amherst
College. Emily Dickinson's home, the property of Amherst
College, contains some memorabilia. The basic text of the poems is
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Including Variant Readings
Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts, 3 vol., ed. by
T.H. Johnson (1955); Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems
(1962), 2 vol. ed. by Johnson. Acts of Light (1980), a selection of
poems with paintings by Ekholm Burket and an appreciation by
Jane Langton, marked the Dickinson 150th anniversary. The most
complete edition of the letters is The Letters of Emily Dickinson,
3 vol., ed. by T.H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (1958). There is
as yet no definitive biography of Emily Dickinson. Biographical
studies include: M.T. Bingham, Emily Dickinson's Home: Letters
of Edward Dickinson and His Family (1955), the best account to
date of Emily Dickinson's early years; T.H. Johnson, Emily
Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (1955), an extended
critical biography; Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily
Dickinson, 2 vol. (1960), a day-by-day guidebook to the life of
Emily Dickinson; and Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily
Dickinson, 2 vol. (1974), portrays the relation of her life and her
work. Critical studies of the poems are C.R. Anderson, Emily
Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (1960); G.F Whicher,
This Was a Poet (1938), although no longer wholly reliable as
biography, is critically excellent; Jean McClure Mudge, Emily
Dickinson and the Image of Home (1975), combines criticism
and biography.
"Dickinson, Emily" Encyclopædia
Britannica Online.
