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Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended law school and became an attorney, lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson’s younger sister, Lavinia, also lived at home, and she and Austin were intellectual companions for Dickinson during her lifetime.

Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning , as well as John Keats . Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumors of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or “fascicles,” as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her annotations. The current standard version of her poems replaces her dashes with an en-dash, which is a closer typographical approximation to her intention. The original order of the poems was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her intended order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures, and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

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The Civil War

A Smithsonian magazine special report

AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Walt whitman, emily dickinson and the war that changed poetry, forever.

The two titans of American poetry chronicled the death and destruction of the Civil War in their poems

David C. Ward

Part of Emily Dickinson’s traditional mystique derives from her supposed isolation from the world. The image persists of her as a reclusive genius, living in her big house in the sleepy little western Massachusetts town of tending to her garden, and writing out her hundreds of enigmatic little poems on scraps of paper.

Her writing seems to have come from nowhere and her verse was like nothing else both in her own time and in American literature. Yet despite her apparent physical and cultural isolation, careful study has found the tracings of the wider society threaded through her mysterious and elliptical poems. Questions of faith and salvation predominate, but current events pop up as well, none more than the Civil War.

Dickinson started writing in the late 1850s and there is a sense of a hush in many of her poems as the impending crisis turned into a full-blown war; studies have linked her writing to the effects achieved in landscape painting by the “luminists” and their sense of a foreboding, American sublime. Later her verse would reflect the battle being joined—she saw the dead and casualties being returned to her town; she may have seen illustrations of the battlefield—and then the awful aftermath. In the first stanza of one poem, she laid bare how the reality of war exposed the hollowness of the rhetoric that was used to instigate and justify it:

My Triumph lasted till the Drums Had left the Dead alone And then I dropped my Victory And chastened stole along To where the finished Faces Conclusion turned on me And then I hated Glory And wished myself were They.

Dickinson may have intended her poem to quietly turn upside down the emotional tone of Walt Whitman’s frenetic “Beat! beat! drums! –Blow! bugles! blow!/Through the windows–through doors–burst like a ruthless force.” Whitman concludes with the dead as well, but only to point out how they are ignored when the ferocious war music sweeps us along, out of ourselves.

Dickinson shows us the aftermath and the regret not only for the loss of life but of what war does to the living. Dickinson and Whitman show us two ways of working through the problem of how to mourn and how to gauge the effect that the war was having on Americans. Their point of view—Dickinson distant, Whitman near the front in Washington—inflected their writing, as did other factors such as gender: Dickinson’s is a more private grief; Whitman’s is a poem about propaganda. But both small poems reflect how, to adapt Lincoln’s words , “the war came” to American poetry.

Literary historian Edmund Wilson's influential 1962 book, Patriotic Gore, shows how the war shaped American literature. He writes, in particular, about how the war, in the need for orders to be terse, concise and clear, had an impact on the writing style that would characterize American modernism. To stretch a point, you can trace Ernest Hemingway’s famously terse, descriptive style back to the orders written by generals like Grant or Sherman. But things were still in balance during the war itself as new ways of thinking and writing—the “modern,” if you will—contested with older styles and habits of feeling—the Victorian and sentimental. Yet the boundaries were not clearly drawn at the time. Dickinson inhabited a world of Victorian sentimentality, but infused its musty conventions with the vigor of her idiosyncratic point of view and elliptical style. “My triumph. . .” in lesser hands could have been overwrought and bathetic instead of the carefully calibrated gauge of morality with which Dickinson infused it. Similarly, Whitman, supposedly the preeminent harbinger of modern sensibilities, oscillated between the old and newer cultures. Famously, he wrote two mourning poems for his hero, Abraham Lincoln and they are very different. “ O Captain, My Captain ” is a fine piece of Victorian melodrama and sentimentality, much anthologized and recited on patriotic public occasions, but read the lines of This Dust was Once the Man:

This dust was once the Man, Gentle, plain, just and resolute—under whose cautious hand, Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, Was saved the Union of These States.

Whitman would recite the poem at the conclusion of his public lecture “ The Death of Lincoln, ” and he grew weary of it. If “O Captain, My Captain” was rooted in the poetic vocabulary of mid-19th-century conventionality, Whitman’s second Lincoln poem, “ When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, ” vaulted American poetry toward the future, creating a decisive break, both linguistically and in its cast of mind, with the time in which he wrote. It is a hallucinatory work that is as close as an American poet has ever gotten to Dante’s journey into the Underworld:

Passing the visions, passing the night; Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands; Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song, As low and wailing yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night . . .

Dickinson and Whitman were two of the most sensitive intelligences in the making of American poetry. That they were conflicted and pulled between the past and the future, only indicates the complexities that were in flux due to the war. Among other writers, from established authors to Americans who turned to poetry as a form of solace in a time of need, older patterns of expression continued to predominate. The over-stuffed furnishings of Victorian literature was a recourse and a comfort to people in great need. Later, Mark Twain, among others, would lampoon that culture and kill it dead in the 1884 " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." (The wreck of the steamboat Sir Walter Scott in the novel is Twain's pointed comment on the end of the sugar-spun world of the romance.)

The violence of the war sloughed off all the over wrought, emotionally dramatic Victorian proprieties that evaded the immediate impact of the thing itself. As Americans recoiled from the reality of war, there was a sense of taking stock that in our literature and poetry would result in a more chastened and realistic language, one better suited to assess and describe the world that the War had created.

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David C. Ward | READ MORE

David C. Ward is senior historian emeritus at the National Portrait Gallery, and curator of the upcoming exhibition “The Sweat of their Face: Portraying American Workers."

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A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson

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One of America’s most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson’s life and work, however, remain in important ways mysterious. This collection of essays, all of them previously unpublished, represent the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way toward exciting new directions for the future. The volume includes a biographical essay that covers some of the major turning points in the poet’s life, especially those emphasized by her letters. Other essays discuss Dickinson’s religious beliefs, her response to the Civil War, her class-based politics, her place in a tradition of American women’s poetry, and the editing of her manuscripts. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson concludes with a rich bibliographical essay describing the controversial history of Dickinson’s life in print, together with a substantial bibliography of relevant sources.

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Dickinson, emily.

• Molly McQuade
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.680
• Published online: 26 July 2017

A clear sign of literary malady: The experienced reader begins to take Emily Dickinson for granted, failing to feel the insoluble, salutary shock of her poetry. And the cure for this malady: try paraphrasing any poem by Dickinson. If you do, you'll quickly learn that you will probably never be able to satisfactorily summarize—or maybe even fully understand—Dickinson's recondite, elated originality. The writing will faithfully resist any effort to possess it completely; her poetry belongs to Dickinson only. Marvelously, though, many readers have been able to borrow it, admire it, and glean wisdom from the lapidary brio of the author. Although writing in literary seclusion in western Massachusetts during the mid to late nineteenth century , Dickinson invented a poetry both unprecedented in form and long-lasting in impact. She wrote as if to bid farewell to the Victorians and to urge on the modernists.

A Daughter and Her Precursors

Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, a part of the New England region that often witnessed “the blazing up of the lunatic fringe of the Puritan coal,” as the contemporary American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich has commented (McQuade, p. 33). Emily Dickinson's father, Edward , was the eldest son of Samuel Fowler Dickinson , a “flaming zealot for education and religion” (Bianchi, pp. 76–77) who wished with outstanding ardor for “the conversion of the whole world” (Bianchi, pp. 76–77). In his dedication to higher learning and the Protestant faith, Samuel Dickinson, lawyer and businessman, reflected the preoccupations of his neighbors in Amherst, a Puritan stronghold subject to periodic evangelical revivals.

His granddaughter Emily, although she did not profess the faith with his unbounded zeal, often concerned herself in her poems with the spiritual life. The following example delicately considers a supplicant's potential claims and merits before a singular and all-sufficient judge. (All quotations in this article are taken from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson , edited by Thomas H. Johnson , 1951 .)

Few, yet enough, Enough is One— To that etherial throng Have not each one of us the right To stealthily belong?

The uncanny unity of Dickinson's five lines embodies, with a selflessly ghostly reverence, both the divine unity of a god and the solitary, helpless unity of the lone congregant of one. In its absolute compression of form, the poem also supports its own claim of spiritual sufficiency.

Although Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather served instrumentally in founding Amherst College, Samuel Fowler Dickinson did so at great cost to himself, neglecting his other affairs to his own financial injury and embarrassment: While still engaged in seeking funds for Amherst, he mortgaged all his property and then was unable to pay off the mortgages. As his firstborn son, Edward Dickinson was naturally compelled to make amends for his disgraced father, particularly after Samuel left Amherst in 1833 following foreclosure on his mortgages. The early burden of financial responsibility may have affected adversely the development of her father's character.

Edward Dickinson was for Emily, her older brother, Austin , and her younger sister, Lavinia , a distant though powerful figure whose law practice, various investments, political ambitions, and devotion to community service often combined to keep him from home during extended forays to Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Thanks to Edward's drive to succeed, the Dickinson home in Amherst was handsomely appointed, the children were well provided for, and their father's presence on Sundays could be counted on. Merely by reading aloud to his family regularly from the Bible, he may have helped to assure his elder daughter's fascination with richly aphoristic language in particular and with rhetoric in general—with the full, roving scope of it, from scrupling understatement to rumbling hyperbole.

A Tacit Mother

Yet Edward's many absences also threw the younger Dickinsons into a greater dependency on their mother than might have been true otherwise. His growing distance from the family also isolated Emily Norcross Dickinson , his wife and their mother. Her steadfast resilience was demanded and perhaps not rewarded.

Regardless, Emily Norcross Dickinson would have been unlikely to provide perfect resilience under any circumstances, partly by dint of her innate temperament and partly due to her recurrent illnesses, which crimped her domestic role and abilities. Biographers have characterized Mrs. Dickinson as an uncommunicative, narrowly conventional farmer's daughter who did not receive from her husband the love or the support at home that a woman like herself would have needed.

If paternal absences and maternal silences, differently inflected, were facts of her home life from her earliest years, then perhaps Emily Dickinson learned the value, as well as the hardship, of tacit intimacy as a main bequest of the family. Tacit intimacy would rely on the listener's cultivated talent to interpret the unspoken—to “read” a silence, whether loving or troubled, intermittent or ongoing. The same interpretive talent also serves well a reader of Dickinson's spectrally concise poetry. The poetry's currency is silence as much as it is words:

My Cocoon tightens—Colors teaze— I'm feeling for the Air— A dim capacity for Wings Demeans the Dress I wear— A power of Butterfly must be— The Aptitude to fly Meadows of Majesty concedes and easy Sweeps of Sky— So I must baffle at the Hint And cipher at the Sign And make much blunder, if at last I take the clue divine—

No. 1099 Physically and emotionally constrained by an unspecified distress, the narrator of the poem is unable to perceive or to speak. Even so, she feels compelled to “baffle” and to “cipher” at evidence of the divine—to interpret even when interpretation seems all but impossible.

An Improper Puritan

Apparently the infant Emily Dickinson was never baptized, although her mother underwent a conversion experience only seven months after her birth and although Edward's family prayed fervently for him to follow suit. (Their prayers were rewarded.) Her brother Austin was the last to convert, in 1855 ; Emily never did.

Still, beginning with her earliest schooling locally in Amherst at the age of five, Dickinson was surrounded by an intense and intimidating aura of Puritan devotion. She most likely learned by heart many of Isaac Watts 's Divine and Moral Songs for Children ( 1788 ), for example. Watts's iambic rhyming quatrains embedded themselves in the poet's ear, as suggested in poem after poem by Dickinson, notably:

No Rack can torture me— My Soul—at Liberty— Behind this mortal Bone There knits a bolder One— You Cannot prick with Saw— Nor pierce with Cimitar— Two Bodies—therefore be— Bind One—The Other fly— The Eagle of his Nest No easier divest— And gain the Sky Than mayest Thou— Except Thyself may be Thine Enemy— Captivity is Consciousness— So's Liberty.

No. 384 Describing the freeing of the soul, this poem paradoxically engulfs its very own words mainly in iambic rhythms, thus suggesting the serious limitations attached to any state of spiritual consciousness.

In 1840 Dickinson began attending Amherst Academy, only recently opened to girls, and continued there as a student for seven years. One of her teachers, Daniel T. Fiske , described Emily at twelve as “very bright, but rather delicate and frail looking.” She impressed him as “an excellent scholar: of exemplary deportment,” and yet “somewhat shy and nervous. Her compositions were strikingly original” (Habegger, p. 152).

Part of Dickinson's originality may have suggested itself early in her inability to experience conversion. The revival fevers regularly sweeping the region claimed many souls who were thus ready to regenerate their religious dedication. The discomfort felt by abstainers must have been considerable, and it was not merely social in temper: During an era when illness could easily cut life short, a public and official renewal of one's faith would ease the passage to eternal life. Failure to renew, especially over the long term, would therefore require a rare sort of self-reliance, however subject to doubt. Indeed, the ability both to invite and to withstand recurrent doubt during the decades of her youth and maturity may imply that Dickinson did affirm faith but of another kind and in another light. In her poetry she subtly broached her heterodox faith:

We pray—to Heaven— We prate—of Heaven— Relate—when Neighbors die— At what o'clock to Heaven—they fled— Who saw them—Wherefore fly? Is Heaven a Place—a Sky—a Tree? Location's narrow way is for Ourselves— Unto the Dead There's no Geography— But State—Endowal—Focus— Where—Omnipresence—fly?

No. 489 Dickinson here expresses heretical doubt about the need of humans to specify, literalize, and “prate” about an afterlife, when all too evidently the dead have “no Geography.” Her asperity serves, however, the purpose of an unconventional devotion perhaps too great for words.

When in 1847 Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as a student who boarded at the school in South Hadley, not far from her Amherst home, she might have hoped for a surcease of religious peer pressure, but she didn't get it. Here the pressure to renew her faith increased—and was less easy to escape from. During the Christmas season of 1847 , for instance, an audience of students was asked by Mary Lyon , headmistress of the school, to rise if they “wanted to be Christian” (Habegger, p. 201). According to an observer, Dickinson remained seated while everyone else stood. Moreover, her fellow students prepared written reports for inspection by authorities conceding Dickinson's continuing failure to conform in the faith (Habegger, pp. 202–203).

After School

When Dickinson left school for good in 1848 , she returned to live at home—with only a handful of interruptions or substantial excursions—for the rest of her life. Although for a time she continued to pursue a sometimes social existence in public, she gradually and famously withdrew until few outside the immediate family circle of her brother (and eventually his wife), her sister, her parents, and their servants regularly caught sight of her. Even esteemed guests might be turned away at her doorstep if the moment were not right; neighborhood children were well known to receive surreptitious baskets of her gingerbread, lowered from a window by the virtually invisible “Miss Emily.”

Although she was writing, at times furiously, from her twenties through her fifties— Dickinson died 15 May 1886 at age fifty-five—she chose voluntarily not to publish the poetry. Instead she circulated it selectively by inserting or weaving her poems into numerous informal notes and longer letters written and dispatched by mail or messenger to family and friends, whether distant or close at hand. (According to Victorian custom, she also bound her poems into stitched packets known as “fascicles” for the purposes of her own editing and revising.)

Any serious reader of Dickinson must thus contend, sooner or later, with the legend that surrounded and surrounds the writer as a self-anointed recluse without wings in the world. As her sister-in-law and confidant Susan Dickinson was to write in Dickinson's 1886 obituary, published in the Springfield Daily Republican : “Very few in the village, except among older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally, although the facts of her seclusion and her intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions.” Dickinson herself cultivated her legend, not only by withdrawing but by doing so with a cunning theatrical panache. Her studied effort at self-characterization, even after her secession, left potent word of her in her wake as the woman in white who tended flowers, baked bread, cosseted children, and fashioned words into unusual artifacts.

Her “Lonely” Wisdom

Actually, Dickinson may have chosen wisely to secede from conventional life. Conventional life in western Massachusetts during the later nineteenth century would inevitably have meant marriage, the mortally dangerous matter of childbirth, and domestic subjection for decades to come, were the wife and mother to survive that long (many did not, despite all possible care). Thus, for a writer who happened to be female, the conventional life would have decreed the end of her writing. We would not have Emily Dickinson to read now if she had chosen to pursue the lot of an average woman of her place, time, and class.

Beyond those patent social constrictions, the poet also struggled against the apparently less insuperable bonds bestowed in any upstanding New England hamlet even when a respectable lady of the nineteenth century remained unmarried. One of those bonds must have been purely linguistic: the language of social custom and daily behavior. To conduct one's days and hours according to those linguistic conventions might impose an extreme or even cruel demand on someone such as Dickinson, whose genius was to speak and write as she knew how to and not as most did or were expected to. To obey such linguistic habits of diction, syntax, grammar, and rhythm on a regular basis would have annulled, transfixed, or strangled the language of her very genius—Dickinson would have seen her language taken from her. The acceptance of female subordination, in language as in most things, would only have intensified her need for liberty concerning words—a liberty always conditional and qualified yet undoubtedly more available within her family circle than outside of it. By minimizing in her own life social entanglements that would have corrupted her poetic language, Dickinson was seeking to preserve herself along with her writing.

Part of her uncanny intelligence was to work out a solution, according to her own necessary terms, with a boldness that disputes or negates her reputation, earned over time, for fearful retreats and sidling evasions. Rather than talk her life away on trivial social niceties, she conserved her singular verbal resources and decanted part of that stock into the famous handwritten missives, which sounded (and still sound) like no one else's. To her friend Elizabeth Holland , after Holland's visit, Dickinson dispatched the message:

The Parting I tried to smuggle resulted in quite a Mob at last! The Fence is the only Sanctuary.That no one invades because no one suspects it.

A contemporary reader cannot fail to notice the heightened aphoristic quality of this note, however quickly improvised it was.

To Adelaide Hills of Amherst, who never met Dickinson face to face, the poet wrote:

To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is Heaven, and is this quite Earth?

Dickinson's rhetorical question provides an answer probably never foreseen or demanded by the recipient. She wrote to air her thoughts and secondarily to be heard.

To Sarah Tuckerman , another lady of Amherst never encountered in person, Dickinson mused at length:

I fear my congratulation, like repentance according to Calvin, is too late to be plausible, but might there not be an exception, were the delight or the penitence found to be durable?

Although the original context of the note is not known, Dickinson's words can be savored by any reader who appreciates extravagant and refined quibbling in a “routine” note of apology. By imposing on herself, and on others, the fastidious freedom to choose words, Dickinson surrounded herself with the art she most needed.

“A Susan of My Own”

Even while successfully negotiating the terms of her survival, however, the very private Dickinson was nonetheless confronted, as anyone would have been, by the commonplace calamities: illness and death, the wish for love, the denial of love, and the loss of love. Perhaps more than most people, she relied on intense friendships to help sustain her imaginatively, and yet she found them unreliable.

Because she lived in seclusion by choice, and because her poetry also steadfastly reflects the author's coveting of privacy, to read the life in the poetry is perilous, if not impossible. Likewise, to search the life for the origins of her poetry would be treacherous. It is more feasible to regard each arena, the life and the writing, separately. A survey of the leading people and events in Dickinson's adult life would fairly include the following.

A signal element until Dickinson's death was her long-term friendship with Susan Dickinson, who married her brother, Austin, in 1856 . She and Susan most likely met in Amherst during the late 1840s. The friendship was to mark her poetry decisively even when the two endured repeated fallings-out. Susan, an intelligent and sensitive woman close in age to Dickinson, shared with the poet a certain shrewdness and steeliness of temperament; she was also relatively tolerant of unconventional ideas and behavior. Susan was the intended audience and the frequent recipient of so many Dickinson letters and poems that even Susan must at times have felt overwhelmed or resentful. Also, as time passed and Susan bore several children, she found she had less time for the childless Emily and her seductively winning demands. Quarrels and estrangements disturbed them in 1854 and more protractedly in 1861 . Susan wrote Dickinson's obituary, however, and assisted with the posthumous editing and publication of her poetry.

To enjoy the full force of Dickinson's appeal to her friend, the evidence of the poet's letters and poems written for and to Susan is compelling. In the late 1870s, scholars estimate, Dickinson wrote this note to Susan in the form of a poem:

I must wait a few Days before seeing you—You are too momentous. But remember it is idolatry, not indifference. Emily. ( Open Me Carefully )

Dickinson charms by staging surprises meant to disarm and waylay the recipient.

On another occasion during the same era, she wrote to Susan:

To the faithful Absence is condensed presence. To others, but there are no others— ( Open Me Carefully )

Dickinson interrupted herself here in mid-sentence, precipitously dramatizing her deep regard for Susan.

And, with a renegade's childlike delight, Dickinson confessed:

To own a Susan of my own Is of itself a Bliss— Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord, continue me in this! ( Open Me Carefully )

What was the real nature of Susan and Emily Dickinson's long-lived mutual affinity? Suggests Adrienne Rich , “Obviously, Dickinson was attracted by and interested in men whose minds had something to offer her; she was, it is by now clear, equally attracted to and interested in women whose minds had something to offer her” (McQuade, p. 37). Rich elaborates: “Women [in the nineteenth century ] expressed their attachments to other women both physically and verbally; a marriage did not dilute the strength of a female friendship, in which two women often shared the same bed during long visits, and wrote letters articulate with both physical and emotional longing” (McQuade, p. 37).

In The Passion of Emily Dickinson , the Dickinson critic and scholar Judith Farr attributes ninety-four poems written by Dickinson as intended for Susan Dickinson, including numerous love poems. Like so much of Dickinson's private life, her relationship with Susan Dickinson remains enigmatic to us.

Letters to the Editor

In general, the 1850s were socially, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually momentous years for Dickinson, despite or perhaps partly because of her seclusion. In 1853 she met Josiah Holland , literary editor of the Springfield Daily Republican , then a well-regarded newspaper, along with his wife, Elizabeth. Their company was stimulating. In 1858 she first met Samuel Bowles , the editor in chief of the Springfield paper for which Holland worked. Bowles's liberal politics included feminist leanings, unlike Holland's, and as the redoubtably busy boss of the paper he was able to give Dickinson much-valued indirect access into the world of public affairs as well as an audience of one for her letters and poems. (Bowles was introduced to her, as were others, when he visited the home of Susan and Austin Dickinson.)

On the other hand, just as momentously, in 1855 Dickinson heard the inspiring Charles Wadsworth preach in Philadelphia. Wadsworth seems to have impressed her with a spiritual quality of tormented eloquence that touched her as a woman and as a writer. Some biographers feel that Dickinson was seriously smitten with him and may have written some of her most recklessly erotic love poetry with him in mind.

Mr. Higginson

For the poet, 1862 was also a highly significant year, for it was then that Dickinson began to read the essays of Thomas Wentworth Higginson , an editor and a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Emboldened partly by her enthusiasm for his observations of nature, she initiated a correspondence with him by sending him four of her poems. Higginson helped to fill the gap left in her spiritual and literary life after Wadsworth's 1862 departure for San Francisco and following her apparent quarrel with Bowles in the same year. Higginson's hidebound and conventional taste prevented him from savoring as he might have done Dickinson's achievement in poetry. Still, as a representative from the world of professional letters, such as it was, he eased her isolation.

Her father's death in 1874 was followed a year later by her mother's major stroke. As she had also done before during less threatening maternal illness, Dickinson offered primary care to her bedridden mother, although she was sharing their house with her sister, Lavinia. This added responsibility may partly account for the diminution of her writing from the fiendishly productive 1860s.

With one exception, all of Dickinson's suspected romantic interests (Wadsworth, for instance) led her to no tangible success. But in the early 1870s she became a friend of the prominent Judge Otis Lord while he was a guest of Austin and Susan . In the years after the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1877 , he began pursuing Dickinson and evidently sought to marry her. Although she shared his feelings, she decided against marriage.

She may have been wise to do so. The 1880s for the Dickinson family were parlous, for the long-married Austin Dickinson fell in love with Mabel Loomis Todd , the much younger wife, new in town, of a local professor. They carried on an active and long-lasting affair in his house and hers, to the grief of Susan and the supposed equanimity of the cuckolded husband. Although little known to Emily Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter Millicent Todd Bingham later competed with Susan Dickinson and her daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi , in trying to bring Dickinson's poetry and her letters to publication after the writer's 1886 death from Bright's disease. Although she wrote poetry in secret and asked that her letters be destroyed on her demise, Dickinson left an immense cache of fascicles behind her, surprising everyone.

All in all, hardly a life empty of significant action. However, Dickinson's most significant life was given to and conducted through her poetry. While it is impossible to do justice to the body of her work, numbering 1,789 poems and three volumes of letters, many critics have tried and are still trying—among them Helen Vendler , Sharon Cameron , Judith Farr, Richard B. Sewall , R. W. Franklin , Thomas H. Johnson , Denis Donoghue , and others.

As Richard B. Sewall , a preeminent Dickinson critic and biographer, put it in 1963 , “We still are not quite sure of her. We ask and ask.” Perhaps it is better to keep asking, even now.

Dickinson's Dash

One of the first questions a new reader of Emily Dickinson might justifiably ask is about the rate of speed pulsing through her generally very short poems. The staccato quickness of much Dickinson poetry is achieved partly by use of her iconoclastic punctuation, most notably by her multiple dashes. The dashes, introduced at the ends of lines or as a fleeting intersection at a line's midpoint, quicken some of the poems by bifurcating them, as if a gasp is being uttered as the poem goes on running.

Her dashes, while mandating fragmentation, also serve to unite a poem's various fragments—syntactic, rhythmic, metaphoric—into a composite fragment, a whole made up of undisguised parts. The dashes may also summon up for some readers the sensation of abridgment, curbing or cutting as they do the poem's approaches to a thought or thoughts. Dickinson's poems typically record the motion of her mind as she thinks in and through the words. Her dashes take fast steps forward that also exert a retractive pull, holding back when a poem seems impelled or poised to spill headlong out of itself.

The Wick and the Flame

Many of Dickinson's poems show her interest in speed as a verbal mode. One poem that does so with finely adumbrated irony is No. 233.

The Lamp burns sure—within— Tho' Serfs—supply the Oil— It matters not the busy Wick— At her phosphoric toil! The Slave—forgets—to fill— The Lamp—burns golden—on— Unconscious that the oil is out— As that the Slave—is gone.

The confident writer here contrives a richly simple scene that burgeons quietly into metaphor. The scene: A kerosene lamp, dependent upon oil as its fuel, continues to burn its wick (the source of the lamp's light) despite the gradual exhaustion of the oil, which the “slave” does not happen to refill.

As long as the oil exists in good supply, the wick “matters not,” for the oil will enable the flame to burn. But once the oil has vastly diminished, the wick takes precedence, persevering despite the lack of both oil and attendant “slave” to aid the flame. What Dickinson does not say directly: Only the wick can burn in a kerosene lamp, and so without the wick a lamp cannot shed any light. As physically the smallest and visually the most recondite element, the wick—typically just a bit of densely knitted fabric or thread—is nonetheless the most significant constituent of lamp and light, selflessly and singularly enabling our sight by which to read.

Like the wick she cites, Dickinson's insight about the wick and its flame lies submerged in the body of the poem, which is itself like a lamp radiating intelligence as a deceptively modest essential ingredient—as, in other words, the poem's flame. Yet Dickinson employs her dashes here to qualify and cast doubt on the seeming stability of both the poem and the lamp it evokes.

The dashes undermine the lamp's security, which is as fleeting as the ever-consumed oil that dwindles in the vessel of the lamp. Dashes also dramatize the oncoming extinction of the flame igniting the ultimately oil-less wick. In a line such as “The Lamp—burns golden—on—” the dashes overtly dispute the lamp's observed action, eroding the announced continuity of light and instead imitating the unsure flickering of a guttering flame. But because Dickinson chooses not to visualize the flame's death, she leaves us with a paradoxical closing impression: of steadfastness in a state of conscious uncertainty.

That state is finally the poet's, since she is the author of the metaphorical lamp. In the poem, Dickinson ironically salutes her own indentured and overlooked strength. The self-effacing writer, like the wick, rests on her own unsteady bravado as creator while her sustenance and stamina recede.

Although the critic R. P. Blackmur has voiced a negative view of Dickinson's dashes, he also clarified her use of them for his own earlier critical era, claiming that her dashes acted as musical notation for her words, which he compared with musical notes. The notation of the dashes was, Blackmur argued, inadequate to guiding the reader through Dickinson's ambiguous “music.” Even so, the very inadequacy of the notation encouraged successively different readings (or hearings) of any given Dickinson poem, thus highlighting and serving her propensity for lyric freedom.

Failing at Sea

Similarly, in poem No. 226, Dickinson employs dashes.

Should you but fail at—Sea— In sight of me— Or doomed lie— Next Sun—to die— Or rap—at Paradise—unheard— I'd harass God — Until He let you in!

Here the dashes insinuate an implicit undertone in the action of the poem and comment on it. This seven-line poem lacks the visual symmetry of the previous poem's twinned quatrains, and unlike No. 233, No. 226 also begins on an emphatically subjunctive note of unconfirmed future possibility. “Should you but fail at—Sea—” reads the first line, with seemingly gratuitous paired dashes fluttering up at its end. What could be the connotative meaning of those pronounced dashes?

At the very least, the dashes interject further doubt into the already unsure “sea” of the first line, where the identity of the “you,” the locale of the “sea,” and the full meaning of the anticipated “failure” all remain hazardously unknown. As the reader's eye travels down the lines of the poem, that eye is rocked by an unstable wake, thanks mainly to Dickinson's dashes.

She resolves No. 226 with a countervailing irony utterly unlike that imbuing poem No. 233. For after conjecturing the various possible future fates of the “you” addressed in No. 226, fates of doom and suspected expiration, the poem's narrator insists that she will save the day if need be: she'll “harass God” to forestall disaster and grant the “you” safe passage into heaven. While Dickinson may be mocking her own powers before God, she also asserts these powers merrily by crafting the poem in the first place, by summoning and then puckishly solving the poem's challenges. As an author she permits herself a godly kind of mischief.

Hymns and Anti-Hymns

Emily Dickinson's mischief-making tendencies, whether construed from punctuation or by other means, were tempered almost always by her poetry's reliance on hymn meters, ranging from “common meter” (an eight-syllable line followed by a six-syllable line) to “short meter” (two six-syllable lines followed by a line of eight syllables followed by a line of six syllables) to “long meter” (lines of eight syllables only).

Hymn meter typically occurred in four-line stanzas and in Dickinson's work included mainly iambic or trochaic metrical patterns. The regularity of hymn meter gave Dickinson's poetry a steady base to work with and to deviate from, as well as a specifically liturgical point of origin for earthly and spiritual meditations alike. As the eminent Dickinson scholar Thomas H. Johnson has noted, Dickinson often mingled different hymn meters within a single poem and varied exact rhymes with imperfect and suspended rhymes. With the passing of time, she asserted with increasing frequency her right to expressive liberties.

As the contemporary Dickinson critic Timothy Morris has observed more recently, Dickinson's approach to rhyme developed comprehensively over her career. In her first poems, written during the first half of the 1850s, she preferred exact rhyme. Later in the same decade, she experimented consistently with what Morris calls “a much less conventional rhyming,” meaning a less regular and a more sonically subtle kind.

As Morris has proved by surveying analytically her poems by year of composition, Dickinson also imposed another signature innovation upon hymn form: She typically enjambed her lines, whereas the lines of hymns are traditionally end-stopped. Enjambment—in which the end of one line continues, in its syntactical organization and in its sense, into the next line—confers on Dickinson's poetry a supple speed of impetus and delivery that would have been wholly exotic to hymn lyrics. Although Dickinson's early work contains end-stopped lines, Morris's quantitative analysis has demonstrated that over the years she increased the prevalence of enjambed lines in the poetry.

Clearly Dickinson was a poet who counted and measured even while she worked to subvert traditional forms. Why did she choose to subvert at all? Was the impulse a well-considered one?

Rules of Subversion

Some of her poems, devoted to fathoming nullity or immensity as a spiritual quantity, may offer a partial answer to the question. For example, consider poem No. 546:

To fill a Gap Insert the Thing that caused it— Block it up With Other—and 'twill yawn the more— You cannot solder an Abyss With Air.

The six lines of this poem, ranging dramatically in their length, seek, at least nominally, to provide a sort of prescription for the writing of a poem—at least, for a certain kind of poem as it might be written by a certain kind of poet.

“To fill a Gap,” begins the poem in its prescription, “Insert the Thing that caused it.” The counsel offered is so matter-of-factly pragmatic as to foretell the construction of this very poem. What is the Gap except the space between what may be left unsaid and what might instead be written?

If the poet fails to express herself, then the gap must remain as it is; she would thus prolong the gap. To “block it up” may serve to fill it but will also meanwhile press upon the edges of the gap, widening it. In other words, each poem presses on its own borders and presses against other poems, written or yet to be written. Although writing may fulfill the momentary beckoning of an unwritten poem, writing cannot conclude the greater work of poetry, which expands in its possibilities with each word written. Like a cubist ahead of her time, Dickinson seems to envision a poetry of shifting juxtapositions that will never fully occupy or settle the space of poetry or the mind that creates it.

If all poetry remains provisional and unfinished, forever shifting in place and extending in dimension, then the poet might do well to reflect such material facts of aesthetic life in the form of the poems she writes. The visual “yawning” of this poem does just that by carving gaps into itself and defying its own finishing. By closing her auspicious first line with the word “Gap” and by concluding her oracular last line with the word “Air,” with both words capitalized like Platonic ideals or like reigning gods, Dickinson seems to salute the poem's ability to unmake itself, whatever the will of the poet.

Creation, especially for a maverick Puritan such as Dickinson, would needfully call to mind and into question the poet's heterodox and troubling position as a would-be rival of God. To concede truthfully the necessary originality of the poet in the effort of creating, she may have refused to mimic poetic tradition or to venerate theological orthodoxy. Creation by either God or man must, by definition, forgo mimicry and commit originality; formal rebellion may further poetic justice.

Beyond Ingenuity

Not even Dickinson's formal ingenuities should distract a reader for too long from what she writes about and how she feels—or how the poems feel. A fact of continual amazement in her poetry is the exacerbated emotion that infuses, with terrific selectivity, phrases and lines and single words that otherwise might mainly suggest by their spare singularity the poet's unusual restraint in writing.

Such emotion flourished with Dickinson's extreme verbal scruples and with her dictional precision. She relied on relatively few words to do the work and play of a poem, yet the combined effects of syntax, rhythm, diction, rhyme, and metaphor in her writing confer an uncanny power on the slimmest scaffolding. She was able to economize marvelously, seizing smallness and wringing it for feeling. Her style was grandly parsimonious.

Dickinson's poem No. 365, beginning with the line “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat ?,” shows what may be asked by her poetry of reader and writer alike.

Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat? Then crouch within the door— Red—is the Fire's common tint— But when the vivid Ore Has vanquished Flame's conditions, It quivers from the Forge Without a color, but the light Of unanointed Blaze. Least Village has its Blacksmith Whose Anvil's even ring Stands symbol for the finer Forge That soundless tugs—within— Refining these impatient Ores With Hammer, and with Blaze Until the Designated Light Repudiate the Forge—

To see the ore that “quivers from the Forge / Without a color” is to see the soul fully ignited and refined, a vision beyond the scope and ability of most eyes. To recognize the ore so vividly colorless demands a courageous, penetrating glance. So does Dickinson's poetry.

Nature is What We Know

Visual perception was a mainstay of Dickinson's writing, nowhere more so than in her many poems observing nature. “ ‘Nature’ is what We know” she declared, “But have no Art to say.” Nature's art guided Dickinson's.

She conceived exquisitely stark and airborne metaphors of a bee's erotic conquests in poem No. 1224:

Like Trains of Cars on Tracks of Plush I hear the level Bee— A Jar across the Flowers goes Their Velvet Masonry Withstands until the sweet Assault Their Chivalry consumes— While He, victorious tilts away To vanquish other Blooms.

The workaday bee, who nonetheless seeks sexual “Plush,” finds it over and over again in the open (ajar) blossoms, whose “Velvet Masonry” excitingly evokes both a watertight floral construction and the possibility of entering it rapturously. Dickinson's unexpected merger in her metaphor of love with business eroticizes each, as though pollinating both. The poem marks a conquest of its subject, inspecting bee and flower as if conducting an “assignment” in love.

Another remarkable piece of more extended natural observation, poem No. 1575, describes the bat as a sort of anti-poet who is unable to sing anything. Yet Dickinson's eye lingers upon him with a covetous adoration.

The Bat is dun, with wrinkled Wings— Like fallow Article— And not a song pervades his Lips— Or none perceptible. His small Umbrella quaintly halved Describing in the Air An Arc alike inscrutable Elate Philosopher. Deputed from what Firmament— Of what Astute Abode— Empowered with what Malignity Auspiciously withheld— To his adroit Creator Ascribe no less the praise— Beneficent, believe me, His eccentricities—

To visualize inscrutability in a creature is not far removed from conducting the devotional duty of a congregant, which may help to explain why the poem moves, in the last stanza, to consider the bat's creator. Immaculately imperfect—“dun, with wrinkled Wings”—the animal is as such doubly desirable and infinitely beloved. Dickinson's fine and sharp portrait leaves out so much that what persists is unforgettable, fiercely and religiously real.

Sorest Need

“There is a word / Which bears a sword / Can pierce an armed man—,” wrote Dickinson in poem No. 42. Although that metaphor is for this poet relatively undistinguished, even mundane, her poetry aims to pierce in just such a way, and her narrators tend to welcome their share of piercing too.

“I like a look of Agony,” reflects the speaker in poem No. 241, “Because I know it's true—.” To be properly felt, truth must wound, as when, in poem No. 561, “I measure every Grief I meet / With narrow, probing, Eyes—/ I wonder if It weighs like Mine—/ Or has an Easier size.” Poetic readiness was for Dickinson cued by pain, well received. “To comprehend a nectar,” she wrote, “Requires sorest need.”

Even so, her writing thrives on indirection as a technique, on the avoidance of explicit statements. When Dickinson's poetry is at its most cryptic and unfathomable, the writer seems to claim a stance of diabolical removal, deitylike, from which to preside, overlook, and administer. The stance recalls that of the lordly “He” in poem No. 315:

He fumbles at your Soul As Players at the Keys Before they drop full Music on— He stuns you by degrees— Prepares your brittle Nature For the etherial Blow By fainter Hammers—further heard— Then nearer—Then so slow Your Breath has time to straighten— Your Brain—to bubble Cool— Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt— That scalps your naked Soul— When Winds hold Forests in their Paws— The Universe—is still—

The artful inevitability of death needs no announcing, all the more so as the mortal mind could not understand death anyhow.

A Dimple in the Tomb

Dickinson's mind enjoyed danger and was wont to frisk with it. Her poem No. 1489 can be read as a mordantly earnest wisecrack.

A Dimple in the Tomb Makes that ferocious Room A Home—

For the legendary secluded one, a sepulchral dimple was perhaps a redeeming joke.

When writing with the fewest possible words, as above, Dickinson seemed to compress and expose at once, to speak translucently in order to mete out a transporting justice. In the process, “she” vanished in the purity of her sight and insight. Although unmistakably hers, the poetry aspires to a wayward disappearing act:

By homely gifts and hindered Words The human heart is told Of Nothing— “Nothing” is the force That renovates the World—

See also Poetess in American Literature, The .

• The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1951; edited by Thomas H. Johnson )
• The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958; edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward )
• Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson ( 1971 ; edited by Thomas H. Johnson )
• The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson ( 1986 ; edited by R. W. Franklin )
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson ( 1998 ; edited by R. W. Franklin )
• Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson ( 1998 ; edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith )

Further Reading

• Bianchi, Martha Dickinson . Emily Dickinson Face to Face . Hampden, Conn., 1932.
• Cady, Edwin H. , and Louis J. Budd , eds. On Dickinson: The Best from American Literature . Durham, N.C., 1990. An up-to-date anthology of criticism, originally published in the scholarly journal American Literature , on such topics as Dickinson's style, her links with the metaphysical poets, and “thirst and starvation” as a theme in her writing.
• Cameron, Sharon . Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre . Baltimore, 1979. Analysis of Dickinson's use of time in her writing.
• Cameron, Sharon . Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles . Chicago, 1992. A leading contemporary Dickinson scholar's contribution to the field.
• Farr, Judith . The Passion of Emily Dickinson . Cambridge, Mass., 1992. An incisive investigation of Dickinson's love poetry.
• Farr, Judith . I Never Came to You in White . Boston, 1996. An epistolary novel, based on fact, about Dickinson's schooldays, written by the Dickinson scholar.
• Ferlazzo, Paul J. Emily Dickinson . Boston, 1976. A compact biographical and critical study.
• Gelpi, Albert . The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet . New York, 1991. This collection of Gelpi's criticism includes the essay “The Self as Center,” a highly regarded work of Dickinson criticism.
• Gilbert, Sandra M. , and Susan Gubar . The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . New Haven, Conn., 1979. Includes a chapter offering a substantial and significant feminist reading of Dickinson.
• Habegger, Alfred . My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson . New York, 2001. A much-praised full-length biography of Dickinson.
• Howe, Susan . My Emily Dickinson . Berkeley, Calif., 1985. The noted contemporary American poet's ruminations on Dickinson.
• Johnson, Thomas H. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson . 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1951.
• Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography . Cambridge, Mass., 1955. A significant contribution to Dickinsoniana.
• Leyda, Jay . The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn., 1960. Essential reading.
• McQuade, Molly , ed. By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry . St. Paul, Minn., 2000.
• Sewall, Richard B. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963. Essays by Thomas H. Johnson, R. P. Blackmur, Louise Bogan et al, that give a sense of how critical reactions to Dickinson have changed over time.
• Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New York, 1974. A milestone in the field of Dickinson studies.
• Ward, Theodora Van Wagenen . The Capsule of the Mind: Chapters in the Life of Emily Dickinson . Cambridge, Mass., 1961. Useful early work on the poet.

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A Timeline of Emily Dickinson’s Life and Legacy

Emily dickinson's life and legacy.

Samuel Fowler Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s paternal Grandfather, builds the Homestead on Main Street in Amherst. 

“To ascertain the House

and if the soul’s within

and hold the Wick of mine to it

to light, and then return -” (Dickinson, Fr802)

Amherst College opens with Samuel Fowler Dickinson as a principle founder. 

1828, May 6

Marriage of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross , Emily Dickinson’s parents. 

1829, 16 April

Birth of William Austin Dickinson , Emily Dickinson’s brother 

1830, 10 December

Birth of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson 

1833, 28 February

Birth of Lavinia Norcr oss Dickinson , Emily Dickinson’s sister

The Homestead is sold to the Mack family. The Dickinson family continues to live in the Homestead as tenants of the Macks, living in the eastern half of the house.

1840, April

The Dickinsons purchase and move to a house (no longer standing) on North Pleasant Street in Amherst.

1847, September

Emily Dickinson enrolls for one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley.

“This term is the longest in the year and I would not wish to live it over again, I can assure you. I love this Seminary and all the teachers are bound strongly to my heart by ties of affection. There are many sweet girls here and dearly do I love some new faces, but I have not yet found the place of a  few dear ones filled, nor would I wish it to be here.” (Dickinson, L59)

1850, February

The earliest record of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in publication. “Magnum bonum, harem scarem” is published in the Amherst College  Indicator as a valentine letter. 

1851, February

Emily Dickinson’s earliest known message to Susan Huntington Gilbert . Susan, a lifelong friend and early champion of Dickinson’s poetry, would go on to receive more than 250 poems from Dickinson, more than sent to any other correspondent.

“Don’t forget all the little friends who have tried so hard to  be sisters, when indeed you  were alone!” (Dickinson in an early letter to Susan, L101)

1852, February 20

The Springfield Daily Republican  publishes Dickinson’s “Sic transit gloria mundi” anonymously as “A Valentine.” 

1852, December 17

Election of Edward Dickinson as a member of the Whig Party to the United States Congress (1853-1855). Edward represented Massachusetts’ Tenth Congressional District. 

1855, February and March

Emily and Lavinia Dickinson visit Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. 

1855, November

Following the death of David Mack, the Dickinson family purchases and returns to the Homestead on Main Street. Edward Dickinson remodels the house and constructs a small conservatory for Emily and Lavinia. 

1856, July 1

Austin Dickinson marries Susan Gilbert in Geneva, New York. A new home for the newlyweds, named the Evergreens, is built by Edward Dickinson to the west of the Homestead. 

Emily Dickinson begins collecting her poems into small packets, today called “fascicles.” This practice continues until 1864. 

1861, April 12

The Civil War begins 

“ Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines …” (Dickinson, L436)

Early 1860s

Emily Dickinson’s reclusiveness increases. While the origin of this departure from social life is specifically unknown, Dickinson’s withdrawal from society also marks the beginning of one of her most productive times, artistically. 

“A Charm invests a face 

Imperfectly beheld – 

The Lady dare not lift her Vail – 

For fear it be dispelled – 

But peers beyond her mesh – 

And wishes – and denies – 

Lest interview – annul a want – 

That Image – satisfies-” (Dickinson, Fr430A)

1861, June 19

Birth of Edward “Ned” Dickinson , Emily Dickinson’s nephew 

Is it true, dear Sue? 

Are there two ?

I shouldn’t like to come 

For fear of joggling Him! 

If you could shut him up

In a Coffee Cup, 

Or tie him to a pin

Till I got in – 

Or make him fast 

To “Toby’s” fist –

Hist! Whist! I’d come!” (Dickinson, Fr189)

1862, April 15

Emily Dickinson initiates a life-long correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson . 

1863, September

From late April to November, 1864, Emily Dickinson spends many months in Cambridge, Massachusetts for treatment of a severe, disabling eye condition . During these two months with Boston’s leading ophthalmologist, Dr. Henry Willard Williams, Dickinson lives with her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross in Cambridge. 

“The eyes are as with you, sometimes easy, sometimes sad. I think they are not worse, nor do I think them better than when I came home. The snow light offends them, and the house is bright … Vinnie [is] good to me, but ‘cannot see why I don’t get well.’ This makes me think I am long sick, and this takes the ache to my eyes.” (Dickinson, L430, 433, 439) 

The Civil War ends. 

1865, November 29

Birth of Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson’s niece

1866, 27 January

Death of Carlo , Emily Dickinson’s Newfoundland 

“Carlo died – […] would you instruct me now? ” (Dickinson, L454)

The Dickinson family hires Margaret Maher as their primary domestic help. She would remain with the Dickinsons for thirty years.

1874, June 16

Edward Dickinson dies in a Boston boarding house following his collapse while giving a speech in the Massachusetts state legislature. Edward’s death away from Amherst strikes Emily Dickinson and the rest of the Dickinson family as particularly tragic; the family has been robbed of a proper goodbye, all together, left only with the “Silence” of death. 

“ There marauds a sorer Robber – 

Silence -” (Dickinson, Fr1315)

1875, 15 June

Emily Norcross Dickinson suffers a stroke that produces “a partial, lateral paralysis.” The next summer she falls and breaks her hip, becoming permanently bedridden, and requiring further care. For the next seven years, until her death in 1874, Emily and Lavinia cared for their mother in her convalescence. 

“…have never seen a daughter so devoted.” (Harriet Jameson, Lavinia’s neighbor, 11-10-[1882], Container 5, Jameson Papers)

1875, August 1

Birth of Gilbert (“Gib”) Dickinson , Emily Dickinson’s nephew 

“Emily and all that she has are at Sue’s service, if of any comfort to Baby – Will send Maggie, if you will accept her.” (Dickinson, in a message to Susan)

Emily Dickinson’s romance with Judge Otis Phillips Lord begins. Dickinson’s relationship with Lord is one among many which continue to intrigue scholars. Dickinson and Lord continue to exchange letters until his death in March 1884. 

Mabel Loomis Todd and David Todd move to Amherst. Mabel Loomis Todd later becomes co-editor of the first volumes of Dickinson’s published poetry. 

1882, 14 November

Death of Emily Norcross Dickinson 

1883, 5 October

At barely eight years old, Gilbert (“Gib”) Dickinson dies tragically of typhoid fever. Gib was a delightful, intelligent little boy, whose “fascinating ways” and “witty little sayings” charmed everyone. Beyond the great love his father and mother had for him, Gib was also the last hope for Austin and Susan to carry on the Dickinson name. 

“Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets – 

His Life was panting with them …

No crescent was this Creature – He traveled from the Full – 

Such soar, but never set …

Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole…” (Dickinson, L800-801) 

1884, 13 March

Death of Judge Otis Phillips Lord 

1886, 15 May

Death of Emily Dickinson 

1886, 19 May

Funeral for Emily Dickinson in Amherst, MA 

1890, November 12

Mabel Loomis Todd publishes the first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson (Boston: Roberts Brothers). The popular reception of this first edition of Poems initiates the publication of the Second Series   (1891) and the Third Series   (1896) of Poems . Mabel Loomis Todd, as editor, publishes Letters of Emily Dickinson  in two volumes in 1894. 

Emily’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi publishes poems sent by her aunt to her mother, Susan Gilbert Dickinson in A Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime . Martha Dickinson Bianchi would go on to publish many subsequent editions of her aunt’s poetry and letters, renewing the 20 th  century public’s interest in the life and work of Emily Dickinson.

The Homestead is purchased by Amherst College and is open to the public for tours. In 1991, The Evergreens is passed to a private testamentary trust, the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust, which began developing the house as a museum. 

2003, July 1

The Emily Dickinson Museum is founded after the Homestead and The Evergreens are merged under the ownership of Amherst College. 

2013, October 13

The launch of the Emily Dickinson Online Archive . The Online Archive is a free-access resource, allowing online visitors to view digitized images of Dickinson manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives across the country. 

We live in an incredibly exciting time for Emily Dickinson scholarship. Through the efforts of many, Dickinson’s work is thriving throughout an international readership, forever securing her a place in literature and in a wider culture. 

The Encounter That Revealed a Different Side of Emily Dickinson

After eight years of letter writing, the author Thomas Wentworth Higginson finally met the reclusive poet face-to-face.

“My dear young gentleman or young lady,” the essay in the April 1862 issue of The Atlantic began. Thomas Wentworth Higginson went on in “Letter to a Young Contributor” to offer advice to would-be writers seeking to publish. Use black ink and quality paper, and avoid sloppy dashes. That beginning line, with its two-word invitation to ladies, may have caught the eye of a 31-year-old woman living in Amherst, Massachusetts—a woman who did not entirely agree about the dashes. Emily Dickinson read the essay and then took the most unprecedented step of her life. She wrote Higginson—a stranger to her—directly and sent four poems, along with a note. “Mr Higginson,” she wrote. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” Dickinson’s letter set into motion a correspondence with Higginson that lasted almost a quarter of a century. Eight years after writing her initial letter, on August 16, 1870, Dickinson and Higginson finally met face-to-face.

Higginson’s visit would be no ordinary call for Dickinson—not that she received many guests. Her great literary productivity of the Civil War years had tapered off. She had stopped collecting her poems in stitched booklets—fascicles—and new poems remained unbound on loose sheets. Nearly 40 years old, she was more patient, less insistent, and more forgiving of perceived slights from those close to her. Although others around her were busy with their own lives, she did not feel as forsaken as she once had. Dickinson’s sense of self made the difference. She knew who she was. She no longer was hoping to make her family proud. The hundreds of poems in fascicles and on sheets hidden away in her room bore witness to what she already had accomplished. In her letters, Higgison had noticed, she no longer signed her name on a card slipped inside the envelope—a game played as much for effect as reticence. Largely gone, too, were the callow signatures of “Your Gnome” and “Your Scholar.” Now she signed her name with a single word: “Dickinson.” That is who she had become.

Read: Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s ‘Letter to a Young Contributor’

Higginson was excited and nervous about paying calls. As a boy, he was shy around women outside his family. To mitigate awkwardness, he would write down conversation topics. If tongue-tied, he would pull the paper from his pocket and select a matter to discuss. But Higginson had plenty of questions for Dickinson, chief among them inquiries about her seclusion. At times, her talent made him reluctant to answer her letters, aware he never could match her artfulness. He was clumsy with words, he told her, and often missed the fine edge of her thought. But he forced himself to put aside timidity and continued to write, knowing what he could not offer in useful criticism he might be able to offer in dependability, friendship, and generosity. Higginson thought that she needed someone—a person who admired her, even if he did not always understand what she was saying. “Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend,” he wrote, “and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long months pass. I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.”

Higginson was exhausted as he prepared to meet Dickinson in her Amherst home. He had spent the past year writing two books. The Atlantic had serialized his first novel, Malbone: An Oldport Romance , and then there was an upcoming book based on his Civil War diary. Living in Newport, Rhode Island, had also lost its allure. He now found society life superficial and draining. Perhaps Dickinson knew better after all how to preserve the energy needed for creativity. The hotel she had suggested that he stay at was convenient: four stories tall, in the center of town, with a dining room, as well as a livery stable around the corner. It was not as hot as it had been that summer, but it was dry. Many town wells had dried up, and the Connecticut River was low, with brown banks stretching from shore. The town common looked terrible—scraggly and barren.

Calling card in hard, Higginson set out walking toward the Dickinson Homestead in long, loping strides. He followed the road down a gentle slope until it leveled off near a copse of trees and the start of a wooden fence. The fence marked the beginning of the Dickinson property. First the Evergreens, the stately home of the poet’s brother and sister-in-law, then the Homestead, the Dickinson-family manse. The walkway rose again as it approached the front steps—a not-so-inconsequential reminder of the family’s prominence. Higginson took in the sight so he could tell his wife everything. A large house. Like a country lawyer’s. Brick. Flower and vegetable gardens to the east and an apple orchard. Pears too. From where he stood, he could see the train depot and the distant line of the Pelham hills. He knocked, presented his card, and was ushered into a dark parlor on the left. Then he waited.

Read: Emily Dickinson’s letters

First he heard her. From upstairs on the second floor came the sound of quick, light steps—footsteps that sounded like a child’s. Then she entered. A plain woman with two bands of reddish hair, not particularly good-looking, wearing a white piqué dress. The white stunned him. It was exquisite. A blue worsted shawl covered her shoulders. She seemed fearful to him, breathless at first, and extended her hand—not to shake, but to offer something. “These are my introduction,” she said, handing him two daylilies. “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say.” Then Dickinson looked at him. A tall man in his mid-40s with a joyful face, she thought. Dark-haired, whiskered, graceful, he looked kind. Higginson did not reach into his pocket to fish out a topic for conversation. He did not need to.

Once they sat, Dickinson began talking and she did not stop. When she experienced eye problems several years before, she told him, “it was a comfort to think that there were so few real books that I could easily find some one to read me all of them.” She wondered how people got through their days without thinking. “How do most people live without any thoughts,” she said. “There are many people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street) How do they live. How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning.” She was full of aphorisms, sentences that seemed to have been crafted earlier in her mind and that she wanted to share. “Women talk: men are silent: that is why I dread women; Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it; Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?”

At times, Dickinson seemed self-conscious and asked Higginson to jump in. But every time he tried, she was off again, and words tumbled out, almost uncontrollably. He tried to recall every phrase, every thought, even her tone, humor, and asides. “My father only reads on Sunday—he reads lonely & rigorous books,” she said. Once, she recalled, her brother, Austin, brought home a novel that they knew their father would not condone. Austin hid it under the piano cover for Dickinson to find. When she was young, she said, and read her first real book, she was in ecstasy. “This then is a book!” she had exclaimed. “And are there more of them!” She boasted about her cooking and said she made all the bread for the family. Puddings too. “People must have puddings,” she said. The way she said it—so dreamy and abstracted—sounded to Higginson as though she were talking about comets.

Read: Emily Dickinson’s mysterious ‘You’

Dickinson said her life had not been constrained or dreary in any way. “I find ecstasy in living,” she explained. The “mere sense of living is joy enough.” When at last the opportunity arose, Higginson posed the question he most wanted to ask: Did you ever want a job, have a desire to travel or see people? The question unleashed a forceful reply. “I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time.” Then she loaded on more. “I feel that I have not expressed myself strongly enough.” Dickinson reserved her most striking statement for what poetry meant to her, or, rather, how it made her feel. “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry,” she said. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.” Dickinson was remarkable. Brilliant. Candid. Deliberate. Mystifying. After eight years of waiting, Higginson was finally sitting across from Emily Dickinson of Amherst, and all he wanted to do was listen.

It struck Higginson that the time he spent with Dickinson that day had been an act of self-definition for her: Her torrent of words was like a personal and literary manifesto. She reminded him of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father—although Dickinson was not pompous or overbearing. Before he rose to leave, Dickinson placed a photograph in his hand. It was an image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave, a memento a friend had brought back from Europe and presented to her a few days before. He accepted the gift reluctantly, knowing that it probably meant more to her than it would to him. Like with the daylilies from earlier, he knew the photograph was Dickinson’s way of saying thank you. “Gratitude is the only secret that cannot reveal itself,” she told him. Higginson said he hoped to see her again sometime, and she abruptly interrupted him. “Say in a long time,” she corrected, “that will be nearer. Some time is nothing.”

With a hundred thoughts whirling in his head, Higginson retraced his steps back to the hotel. He needed to go to bed. But before turning in, he compiled notes, trying to recall it all, and made a quick entry in his diary. Meeting Emily Dickinson quite equaled my expectation, he wrote. It had been a momentous day, one he would never forget. As he turned down the lamp, he hoped he would be able to calm his mind and get to sleep. He wanted to wake up early before catching the train to Vermont.

For Dickinson, Higginson’s visit felt unreal, as if a phantom had entered the family parlor and transformed it. “Contained in this short Life / Are magical extents,” she wrote. She felt elated, emboldened, and slightly off-kilter. Hearing herself talk so much, she said, made her feel as though the words rushing out were not sentences at all, but events. After the visit, Dickinson reached for the family Shakespeare and turned to Macbeth . “Now a wood / Comes toward Dunsinane,” she read, reliving how mystical her friend’s visit had been.

Yet as exhilarated as she felt, it was gratitude that lingered. When she thought about all Higginson had done for her—answering that first letter, writing her from the battlefront when he was wounded, continuing to write even when he felt that his life had lost its purpose, urging her to take time to perfect her art—she felt herself nearly speechless. Higginson’s generosity “disables my Lips,” she said, and magic, “as it electrifies, also makes decrepit.” It was not only that he had read her poems—although she was thankful for that. It was that he had been constant. When she sought words to thank him, she reached not for metaphors from nature or images of planets and dreams that she had been working with. She went deeper. She chose anatomy. “The Vein cannot thank the Artery,” she told him, “but her solemn indebtedness to him, even the stolidest admit.” Over the next months, the thought of seeing him again played in her mind with eerie repetition. It “opens and shuts,” she said “like the eye of the Wax Doll.” She hoped he would return to Amherst someday or in “a long time”—perhaps that would be nearer.

Jostling along on the tracks to Vermont, miles from Amherst, Higginson noted down that Dickinson had dazzled him, but had also made him uncomfortable. It took every ounce of his being to meet her level of intellectual intensity. “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much,” he admitted. “Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”

Higginson never got around to asking Dickinson if she was interested in preparing a book of poetry. Perhaps he couldn’t find the nerve, feeling that if he pressed too hard, she would withdraw, vanishing like those sparkles of light he always associated with her. But Higginson knew there was a time to sow and a time to reap. For Emily Dickinson, the harvest was yet to come.

This piece is adapted from These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson , published in February by Norton.

Because I could not stop for Death — Summary & Analysis by Emily Dickinson

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

"Because I could not stop for death" is one of Emily Dickinson's most celebrated poems and was composed around 1863. In the poem, a female speaker tells the story of how she was visited by "Death," personified as a "kindly" gentleman, and taken for a ride in his carriage. This ride appears to take the speaker past symbols of the different stages of life, before coming to a halt at what is most likely her own grave. The poem can be read both as the anticipation of a heavenly Christian afterlife and as something altogether more bleak and down-to-earth. Much of its power comes from its refusal to offer easy answers to life's greatest mystery: what happens when people die.

• Read the full text of “Because I could not stop for Death —”

The Full Text of “Because I could not stop for Death —”

1 Because I could not stop for Death –

2 He kindly stopped for me –

3 The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

4 And Immortality.

5 We slowly drove – He knew no haste

6 And I had put away

7 My labor and my leisure too,

8 For His Civility –

9 We passed the School, where Children strove

10 At Recess – in the Ring –

11 We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

12 We passed the Setting Sun –

13 Or rather – He passed Us –

14 The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

15 For only Gossamer, my Gown –

16 My Tippet – only Tulle –

17 We paused before a House that seemed

18 A Swelling of the Ground –

19 The Roof was scarcely visible –

20 The Cornice – in the Ground –

21 Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

22 Feels shorter than the Day

23 I first surmised the Horses' Heads

24 Were toward Eternity –

“Because I could not stop for Death —” Summary

“because i could not stop for death —” themes.

Death, Immortality, and Eternity

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

The Cyclical Nature of Life and Death

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “because i could not stop for death —”.

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun –

Lines 13-16

Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and Chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –

Lines 17-20

We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground –

Lines 21-24

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity –

“Because I could not stop for Death —” Symbols

The Carriage

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

The Children

“Because I could not stop for Death —” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

Personification

“because i could not stop for death —” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Because I could not stop for Death —”

Rhyme scheme, “because i could not stop for death —” speaker, “because i could not stop for death —” setting, literary and historical context of “because i could not stop for death —”, more “because i could not stop for death —” resources, external resources.

On Playing Emily — A clip in which actor Cynthia Nixon discusses playing Emily Dickinson on screen in "A Quiet Passion." 

A Reading of the Poem — A reading on Youtube by Tom O'Bedlam. 

Dickinson's Meter — A valuable discussion of Emily Dickinson's use of meter. 

The Dickinson Museum — The Emily Dickinson Museum, situated in the poet's old house, has lots of resources for students. 

In Our Time Podcast — Experts talk about Emily Dickinson's life and work on the BBC's In Our Time podcast/radio show. 

LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson

A Bird, came down the Walk

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

A Light exists in Spring

A Murmur in the Trees—to note—

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

An awful Tempest mashed the air—

As imperceptibly as grief

A still—Volcano—Life—

Before I got my eye put out

Fame is a fickle food

Hope is the thing with feathers

I cannot live with You –

I cautious, scanned my little life

I could bring You Jewels—had I a mind to—

I did not reach Thee

I died for Beauty—but was scarce

I dreaded that first Robin, so

I dwell in Possibility –

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

If I can stop one heart from breaking

I had been hungry, all the Years

I have a Bird in spring

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

I like a look of Agony

I like to see it lap the Miles

I measure every Grief I meet

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

I started Early — Took my Dog —

I taste a liquor never brewed

It was not Death, for I stood up

I—Years—had been—from Home—

Like Rain it sounded till it curved

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

Nature is what we see

One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted

Publication — is the Auction

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

Success is counted sweetest

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

The Bustle in a House

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants

There came a Wind like a Bugle

There is no Frigate like a Book

There's a certain Slant of light

There's been a Death, in the Opposite House

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise

The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean

The Soul has bandaged moments

The Soul selects her own Society

The Wind – tapped like a tired Man –

They shut me up in Prose –

This is my letter to the world

This World is not Conclusion

'Twas the old—road—through pain—

We grow accustomed to the Dark

What mystery pervades a well!

Whose cheek is this?

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

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The 2024 solar eclipse might be an omen, but what does it portend?

By Renée Bergland April 18, 2024

As the warmest winter in human history draws to a close, many of us are unsure about what comes next. Familiar patterns have changed. Here in New England, the seasons are becoming wildly unpredictable. At least celestial mechanics are unaffected. The Earth, the Moon, and the Sun continue to move like clockwork. We knew exactly when and where they would line up for the next solar eclipse. On April 8, the path of totality arced northward across the United States from Texas to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. 

Twenty years ago, New Englanders who wanted to witness an April eclipse would have booked tickets for Texas or Arkansas. This year, it was hard to predict. After months of back-and-forth, my little coterie of scientists, journalists, and historians decided to observe the event in northern Vermont. Though we knew that significant cloud cover would have been highly probable in the past, we concluded that historical weather patterns are not all that predictive anymore. 

Eclipses have a complicated relationship to foretelling the future. Long ago, astronomical and meteorological phenomena were seen as supernatural messages. Like shooting stars, auroras, and comets, eclipses were often considered portents of social upheaval and danger. Eclipses tended to come unexpectedly, out of the blue. They filled people with terror. Yet, it has been many centuries since eclipses were truly unpredictable. Cunieform inscriptions on ancient clay tablets show that  Babylonian astronomers knew how to calculate future eclipses twenty-five centuries ago. They shared their predictions with the king but kept them secret from the people.

If the information was kept under wraps, astronomical insiders who knew that an eclipse was coming could use their knowledge to manipulate the uninformed. The best-known example of such trickery happened in 1504, when Christopher Columbus used his almanac’s prediction of an eclipse to frighten indigenous Jamaicans into submission. 

In 1832, the natural philosopher  David Brewster condemned such abuses of scientific knowledge. In the past, he said, “the prince, the priest, and the sage were leagued in a dark conspiracy” to use their secret knowledge for “the subjugation of the great mass of society.” In a treatise that debunked Natural Magic , Brewster argued that keeping knowledge “occult” prevented people from working together to advance science. In his view, interpreting a meteorological event as a sign or a message was superstition, not science. 

Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court told the story of a time-traveling trickster who predicted an eclipse to manipulate the credulous denizens of the Dark Ages. By 1889, when Twain published his comic novel, it was easy to ridicule the idea that a solar eclipse might be seen as a meaningful portent. Prevailing, mechanistic views of the cosmos seemed to imply that everything was meaningless.

In the early twentieth century, the German sociologist Max Weber described the turn away from ascribing meaning to natural phenomena as “the disenchantment of the world.” However, some nineteenth-century figures refused to embrace disenchantment. 

Charles Darwin was among those who hesitated. The critic George Levine describes him as a “secular enchanter” who was as skeptical of dogmatic disenchanters as he was of all the other dogmatists.  It was impossible for Darwin to separate biology, geology, and astronomy from each other, and he thought life on Earth was connected to the cosmos beyond our planet in mysterious and awe-inspiring ways. On the Origin of Species concluded by declaring the “grandeur in this view of life… that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” 

Emily Dickinson was influenced by Darwin. Like him, she believed everything was mysteriously connected and that the natural world was rich with meaning. For her, eclipses symbolized the existence of the unseen. As she put it, “Eclipses—Suns—imply.”

Of course, any other implications of eclipses were mysterious. In another poem, Dickinson wrote about waiting for an eclipse (“Midnight’s—due—at Noon—”), and remarked,

Eclipses be—predicted— And Science bows them in— But do One face us suddenly— Jehovah’s Watch—is wrong—

Dickinson’s verse captures the mood of my eclipse group perfectly. From astronomy, we knew the eclipse was coming and that the path of totality would swing above northern New England on April 8. From meteorology, we knew that the eclipse was very likely to be obscured by clouds. Based on historical patterns, there was less than a 20% chance that we would be able to see the eclipse from Vermont. And yet, we gathered our eclipse glasses and made our reservations for the Northeast Kingdom. We thought the sky was likely to be clear because our climate had already changed, and this April would be shockingly different from Aprils past.

Our guess was right. The skies were clear over northern Vermont. The day was bright , sunny, and unseasonably warm. We beat the traffic and set up our camp chairs at 10:00 AM, more than five hours before totality. Although we had planned pretty well, we had not brought quite enough water, and we had completely forgotten sunscreen. We had expected—theoretically—that the afternoon on the shores of Lake Memphremagog might be sunny, but we were still surprised to find ourselves enjoying a day at the beach with thousands of other astronomy fans.

As the moon moved in front of the sun, the air grew colder. We shrugged on jackets and dug out hats and gloves. In the heart of the shadow, the light was deep, dark blue. Overhead, we could see the dark side of the moon encircled by pale silver radiance. Venus was bright. In every direction, the horizon flushed with pink and gold. A loudspeaker counted down the seconds until a blinding flash of direct sunlight forced us to cover our eyes as totality ended.

I was thrilled and terrified to witness that improbable Vermont eclipse. It is rare to experience the vertiginous thrill of planetary motion. It is extraordinary to witness the swift, smooth turning of the solar system. Yet although it was a glorious spectacle, seeing the eclipse on that clear April afternoon in Vermont made me as uneasy as an ancient Babylonian. It should have been cloudy and cold, not clear and bright. The moon and the sun might have followed the ancient laws, but Earth’s atmosphere did not. The weather is different this year.

We should not ignore the implication of all that sunshine. Far above the earth, the moon and sun kept to their schedule.  Down here, human activity has changed the season’s clockwork. If this was a portent, we should pay attention to the message: “Jehovah’s Watch—is wrong—.”

Renée Bergland is the author of Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science and a professor at Simmons University.

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Smart and timely features from our books and authors

Celebrating National Poetry Month with Tupelo Press

One of the University of Chicago Press’s newest distributed client presses is Tupelo Press, noted literary publisher of poetry and prose. In celebration of our new collaboration with Tupelo—and of National Poetry Month in April—we are delighted to share some of Tupelo’s thoughts about their history, their list, and their future.

Throughout April, shop our collection of new poetry books on Bookshop , or order directly from our website using the promo code POETRYMONTH to take 40% off all month long.

Can you give us a brief history of Tupelo?

Jeffrey Levine launched Tupelo Press as a nonprofit publisher in 1999, and we released our first five books of poetry in 2001. Since then, we’ve gone on to publish and distribute 345+ titles, so many of them prize-winning, all of them, we believe, important. We’re bi-coastal, with offices in western MA and on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. We publish about fifteen books per year (traditional and electronic) including poetry, translations, anthologies, creative nonfiction, memoirs, and literary fiction. Notably, we have long-privileged emerging writers, and also, especially, women and writers of color (women authors comprise 67% of our backlist). Over time, our list has also grown to include many of the world’s most distinguished, established writers as well, such as Robert Wrigley, two-time National Book Award finalist Lawrence Raab, Christopher Buckley, Annie Finch, Mark Halliday, Jeffrey Harrison, Valzhyna Mort, Paisley Rekdal, Ko Un, and Adelia Prado, just to name a very few.

How would you characterize what Tupelo seeks and celebrates in poetry and prose?

As our Poetry Editor, Cassandra Cleghorn, puts it, in Tupelo’s twenty-five years of existence, we have had the privilege of witnessing and helping to seed the extraordinary diversity of contemporary American writing—diversity of styles, voices, and identities. That is, our list is not reducible to any one style, school, or movement.

We have always looked for writing that takes palpable risks on the page, that makes discoveries, that enlightens, that makes us think, that makes us feel, that blows us away. Our broad aesthetic admits finds as diverse as Ilya Kaminsky’s career-marking Dancing in Odessa , Dan Beachy Quick’s transcendent translations of Sappho , Kelle Groom’s quicksilver memoir, How to Live . How can we not mention Karen An-Hwei Lee , G.C. Waldrep , Maggie Smith , Iliana Rocha ? Paisley Rekdal’s astonishing braided memoir, Intimate: An American Family Photo Album , or our recent anthology of contemporary Native American poetry and essays, Native Voices . From the many thousands of manuscripts submitted to us every year, Tupelo creates a list that crosses generations, positionalities, and sensibilities. What unites our books is the spark of passion, the work of intellect, and the discipline of craft.

Our Editor-in-Chief Kristina Marie Darling notes that the idea of writing as conversation and community is crucial to our acquisitions process. She writes, “We love publishing work that expands our sense of what is possible in the tradition that we’ve inherited.” At conferences, writers will frequently ask us how to stand out from the many excellent manuscripts we read each year. More often than not, what compels us is a writer’s voice made rich by a long and varied life in reading. We love seeing writers think through competing and often vastly different artistic influences. This inevitably results in a productive tension that drives the work forward.

What is Tupelo looking forward to this year?

We have so much to look forward to in our twenty-fifth anniversary year, a year in which we celebrate our liaison with the University of Chicago Press distribution, publicity, and sales. We’re excited to ramp up the size of our new lists, both domestic and international so that together we can begin to take full advantage of all that the University of Chicago Press has to offer.

In 2024, Tupelo Press is thrilled to be publishing work by Lise Goett, Christina Pugh, Leigh Lucas, Liz Countryman, Karen An-hwei Lee, Justin Gardiner, Emma Binder, Ae Hee Lee, and Xiao Yue Shan. These groundbreaking books represent artistic excellence across the boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, genre, and discipline. 

Here are just a couple of highlights:  

Rosa Lane, Called Back

In the tradition of writers like Lucie Brock-Broido and Janet Holmes, Rosa Lane allows the mysteries of Emily Dickinson’s life to blossom into an incisive exploration of feminist poetics, innovation, and the gendered, temporally bound nature of artistic audience. “Pull my chair / into dinner’s envelope,” Lane writes in lines as lyrical as they are mysterious. The title of her stunning volume, memorializing the last two words that Dickinson wrote, which are engraved on her headstone, evokes a rich tradition of poetic voice as an alterity that speaks through the writer. For Homer, it was the muses, for the great Modernist H.D., it was the unconscious mind, and for Jack Spicer, it was radio waves from outer space. Here, Lane shows us that otherness that speaks through the poet as inheritance, as history. Yet this history is imbued with new agency and a fresh sociopolitical urgency as Lane considers questions about sexuality and silence in Dickinson’s artistic legacy.

Christina Pugh, The Right Hand  

In poetry that dazzles with its erudition and cosmopolitan approach, Christina Pugh shows us the role of language in constructing—and eventually deconstructing—the self. “In a room made of windows, glass is the skin,” she tells us. At turns luminous and devastating, the work in this gorgeous volume reveals every facet of the narrator’s lived experience—from inhabiting the physical body to articulating a sophisticated artistic sensibility—as discursive constructs, arising out of a nexus of community and shared experience. “[L]ike a flock we all landed at Teresa and the angel,” she recounts. Yet, at the same time, Pugh interrogates the narrator’s lingering sense of cultural and linguistic otherness, revealing her connection with those around her as both contingent and inherently unstable. The voice that emerges from this intersection of philosophy and art, celebration and elegy, is as singular as it is eloquent.

These books and others from Tupelo Press are available on our website or from your favorite bookseller .

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The branch grows into my vagina and exits my mouth. Like sellers of fine carpets, leaves unfold their new colors at my lips. The lovers walk the scrawny path to visit at their assigned hours. The one who is meanest is the one I most love. He brings me a fish full of needles. I am happy to provide for everyone whatever they need, as everything outside swirls thickly and dark. My holes rotate positions. A strong stain is created by the fears of others. It tints the sky; her lilac iris watches. I’m stuck here, here where I have asked you to come. You are no friend. My only one is the dog there. The good blood dripping from his mouth, fast like a trill, is a novel full of ideas. The wind’s iron fingernails brush back sweetly my hair from my face. It’s true, we gave something up that was not ours to give. Is my ear the shape of a question? The scene exchanges my blood for a sound. Even the worms grow drunk on it.

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African American burial grounds across the United States have been erased or forgotten, and others are at risk of disappearing.

They have been covered by pools, playgrounds, parking lots and performance halls.

Community organizations in Charleston, S.C., and beyond are working to change that.

In the process, they are also searching for descendants of those buried.

Tracing Charleston’s History of Slavery, From a Burial Ground to a DNA Swab

A quest to find living descendants of 36 enslaved people has transformed into a project that gives Black residents new clues to their ancestry, wherever it may lead.

By Caroline Gutman and Emily Cochrane

Photographs by Caroline Gutman

Reporting from Charleston, S.C.

When Edward Lee heard about a project collecting DNA from Black residents like him in Charleston, S.C., he had reason to be skeptical. Knowing that African Americans have been exploited before financially and in medical experiments , he feared that handing over his genetic identity could leave him vulnerable.

But he knew the people behind the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project , having worked with many of them before on similar efforts to preserve the region’s Black history.

And they came to him with a unique proposal: With DNA extracted from 36 enslaved people whose bones had been unearthed by a construction crew downtown, researchers were now searching for their living descendants.

Even if he wasn’t related to any of them, Mr. Lee figured, maybe a DNA test could still provide other answers that had eluded him. He could trace his ancestry to a great-great-grandmother on one side, but no further. So last spring, he sat still as a researcher gently swabbed the inside of his cheek.

“I had to have guarantees that we control the results — that’s the only reason I did it,” Mr. Lee said.

Now, dozens of Black residents have agreed to play their part in this genetic detective work. Their catalyst came in 2013, when workers building a concert hall stumbled upon what is believed to be the oldest known burial ground of enslaved people in Charleston.

The project’s supporters believe it can serve as a blueprint for how to handle the preservation of neglected aspects of Black history across the country, before development and time erode more of it.

That history is particularly poignant in Charleston, where ships once docked with hundreds of kidnapped Africans onboard, and where community leaders like Mr. Lee have spent years fighting to protect the graveyards of enslaved people.

“It feels like every piece of ground you step on — it is seeped with that history,” said Joanna Gilmore, an anthropologist and a member of the project who has devoted much of her career to chronicling African burial grounds.

Researchers began taking DNA samples from current residents, holding events in familiar community spaces and promising confidentiality.

Because the community had been involved in the yearslong process of reinterring and honoring the 36 ancestors, there was already a sense of trust with the research team.

Black residents said those ties were essential to their confidence in the project.

The analysis of their DNA was conducted by Dr. Theodore Schurr, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the decade since the burial ground was discovered, Ms. Gilmore and other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the College of Charleston and the Charleston community have shed light on the African and Indigenous ancestry of the 36 people buried along Anson Street in the late 18th century — several men, most likely a mother and a child among them.

Six were most likely born in Africa, and others were born in Charleston or nearby. While the graves had no markings , the bodies were carefully spaced, buried with shrouds or with coins meant to cover their eyes.

The “Ancestors” — as they are collectively known — have since been reinterred, and there are plans to construct a fountain ringed with bronze hands , all modeled from Black residents of similar ages to the 36 people found.

But another question remained: Were there any living descendants still in Charleston?

That quest, however, required persuading as many people as possible from the region to participate. Some agreed because they saw it as a way to safely answer fundamental questions about their family history, or to trace their roots beyond the Carolina shores.

“Time is not on our side, and I feel like if somebody doesn’t take a stand to actually bring the attention to the family ties, the younger generation, they’re not going to do it,” said Karen Wright-Chisolm, after submitting her swab in spring 2023. “In order to be able to teach them, then I need to know the information, so that I can pass it on.”

Others came as a way to pay their respects to the enslaved Africans, or simply because friends suggested giving it a try.

“It’s just a vessel to connect,” said Clifton R. Polite Jr., who also participated in the creation of hand casts for the fountain.

So far, no direct descendants have been found, something researchers acknowledge may never happen. But the project has shown that each individual result has the possibility to transform people’s understanding of their heritage.

La’Sheia Oubré, a teacher who has led community engagement for the project, saw not only different regions of Africa reflected in her results, but also markers of German and Asian ancestry.

“For the first time in my life, I know where I came from,” she said. “If everybody could do this, they would then realize that you’re related to somebody in one way or another.”

Months after their swabs were taken, dozens of participants gathered again in a darkened auditorium. Ms. Gilmore, Dr. Schurr and Dr. Raquel Fleskes, another anthropologist who works at Dartmouth College, dove into their findings and dissected how to interpret each sliver of genetic data.

Hushed in silence, audience members snapped photos of screens and jotted down the occasional note as Dr. Schurr described how to see which lineage was represented where in their results.

“Just as a reminder, we’re all 99.99 alike — everybody in this room, we’re all alike because we’re a very recent species,” Dr. Schurr told the room, adding that the results would not “reflect the deep divisions between human populations in genetic terms, because that’s not true.”

And then, finally, the participants had a turn to see their results in full.

Mr. Lee was among those claiming a manila envelope with a broad summary of his DNA results. There was a surprise — a small, but unexpected, percentage of Middle Eastern ancestry.

“When the doctor said we’re all 99.9 percent the same, that hits you,” he said.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the given name of a hand model for a memorial fountain in Charleston. She is Zyaire Massie, not Zaiyre. Another picture caption misidentified the location of a waterfront scene. It was in Mount Pleasant, not on Sullivan’s Island.

How we handle corrections

Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville. More about Emily Cochrane

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