The Amherst College, where Dickinson studied in 1840 - 1847. Then it was known as the Amherst Academy.
College/University
Gallery of Emily Dickinson
50 College St, South Hadley, MA 01075, United States
Dickinson began her education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1847. This was the first and longest time, where she spent a year away from her family.
50 College St, South Hadley, MA 01075, United States
Dickinson began her education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1847. This was the first and longest time, where she spent a year away from her family.
(Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them brings us ...)
Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them brings us closer to the writing practice of a crucially important American poet and provides new ways of thinking about Dickinson, allowing us to see more fully her methods of composing, circulating, and copying than previous editions have allowed.
(Here is the best of Emily Dickinson's poetry - 576 poems ...)
Here is the best of Emily Dickinson's poetry - 576 poems that fully and fairly represent not only the complete range of Dickinson's poetic genius but also the complexity of her personality, the fluctuation of her mood, and the development of her style.
(These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with...)
These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy - addressed to no one and everyone at once.
(Poet, professor, and scholar Susan Snively has carefully ...)
Poet, professor, and scholar Susan Snively has carefully chosen 35 poems of interest to children and their families. Each poem is beautifully illustrated by Christine Davenier and thoroughly explained by an expert. The gentle introduction, which is divided into sections by season of the year, includes commentary, definitions of important words, and a foreword.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.
Background
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the eldest daughter of Edward Dickinson, a successful lawyer, member of Congress, and for many years treasurer of Amherst College, and of Emily Norcross Dickinson, a timid woman. The Dickinsons' only son, William Austin, also a lawyer, succeeded his father as treasurer of the college. Their youngest child, Lavinia, was the chief housekeeper and, like her sister Emily, remained at home, unmarried, all her life. The sixth member of this tightly knit group was Susan Gilbert, an ambitious and witty schoolmate of Emily's, who married Austin in 1856 and moved into the house next door to the Dickinsons. At first, she was Emily's confidante and a valued critic of her poetry, but by 1879 Emily was speaking of her "pseudo-sister" and had long since ceased exchanging notes and poems.
Education
The education catered to Emily was not one that was usually provided to girls during the Victorian age. She received classical education that only the elite could afford.
Emily went to a primary school in Amherst before she was enrolled at the Amherst Academy (now Amherst College). Along with being a brilliant and observant student, she took keen interest in piano and domestic chores, especially gardening.
After receiving seven years of formal education in Amherst Academy (1840), she began her education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1847. This was the first and longest time, where she spent a year away from her family.
It is not known when Dickinson began to write poetry or what happened to the poems of her early youth. Only five poems can be dated prior to 1858, the year in which she began gathering her work into hand-written fair copies bound loosely with looped thread to make small packets. She sent these five early poems to friends in letters or as valentines, and one of them was published anonymously without her permission in the Springfield Republican (February 20, 1852).
After 1858 she apparently convinced herself she had a genuine talent, for now the packets were carefully stored in an ebony box, awaiting inspection by future readers or even by a publisher. Publication, however, was not easily arranged. After Dickinson besieged her friend Samuel Bowles, editor of the Republican, with poems and letters for 4 years, he published two poems, both anonymously "I taste a liquor never brewed" (May 4, 1861) and "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" (March 1, 1862). And the first of these was edited, probably by Bowles, to regularize (and thus, flatten) the rhymes and the punctuation.
In 1862 Dickinson turned to the literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson for advice about her poems. She had known him only through his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, but in time he became, in her words, her "preceptor" and eventually her "safest friend."
He helped her not at all with what mattered most to her-establishing her own private poetic method-but he was a friendly ear and a congenial mentor during the most troubled years of her life. Out of her inner turmoil came rare lyrics in a form that Higginson never really understood - if he had, he would not have tried to "edit" them, either in the 1860s or after her death.
Between 1858 and 1866 Dickinson wrote more than 1100 poems, full of aphorisms, paradoxes, off rhymes, and eccentric grammar. Few are more than 16 lines long, composed in meters based on English hymnology. The major subjects are love and separation, death, nature, and God - but especially love.
In the last 2 decades of her life Dickinson wrote fewer than 50 poems a year, perhaps because of continuing eye trouble, more probably because she had to take increasing responsibility in running the household. Her father died in 1874, and a year later her mother suffered a paralyzing stroke that left her an invalid until her death. There was little time for poetry, not even for serious consideration of marriage (if it was actually proffered).
Dickinson's health failed noticeably after a nervous collapse in 1884, and on May 15, 1886, she died of nephritis.
How the complete poems of Dickinson were finally gathered is a publishing saga almost too complicated for brief summary. Lavinia Dickinson inherited the ebony box; she asked Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst astronomy professor, to join Higginson in editing the manuscripts. Unfortunately, they felt even then that they had to alter the syntax, smooth the rhymes, cut some lines, and create titles for each poem. Three volumes appeared in quick succession: 1890, 1891, and 1896.
In 1914 Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published some of the poems her mother, Susan, had saved. In the next 3 decades four more volumes appeared, the most important being Bolts of Melody (1945), edited by Mrs. Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, from the manuscripts the Todds had never returned to Lavinia Dickinson.
In 1955 Thomas H. Johnson prepared for Harvard University Press a three-volume edition, chronologically arranged, of "variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts." Here, for the first time, the reader saw the poems as Dickinson had left them. The Johnson text of the 1,775 extant poems is now the standard one.
Achievements
Emily Dickinson is hailed as one of the most prolific American and her poetry is widely read among people of all ages and interests. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through 11 editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Her legendary poems such as "Because I could not stop for Death", "Success is counted Sweetest", and plenty others, have not only found a place on the shelves of major libraries, but have also occupied a convenient spot in the syllabi of eminent universities.
Emily Dickinson rebelled in matters of religion and social propriety. Although she attended church regularly until her 30s, she called herself a pagan and wrote about the merits of science over religion.
Views
Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded.
Quotations:
"We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble."
"The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care."
"We turn not older with years but newer every day."
"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all."
"If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves. You can gain more control over your life by paying closer attention to the little things."
"Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality."
"If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain."
"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
"You don't have to be a house to be haunted."
"Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell."
Personality
Dickinson’s approach to poetry was unconventional. As her original manuscripts reveal, she interspersed her writing with many dashes of varying lengths and orientations (horizontal and vertical). Early editors cleaned up her unconventional markings, publishing her poems without her original notations. Scholars still debate how Dickinson’s unusual punctuation affected the rhythm and deeper meaning of her poems.
Dickinson largely eschewed in-person social interactions, preferring to communicate with most of her friends via letters.
Throughout her life, Dickinson was a major gardener. On her family’s property, she grew hundreds of flowers, planted vegetables, and cared for apple, cherry, and pear trees. She also oversaw the family’s greenhouse, which contained jasmine, gardenias, carnations, and ferns, and she often referred to plants in her poetry.
Physical Characteristics:
In 1863, Dickinson began having trouble with her eyes. Bright light hurt her, and her eyes ached when she tried to read and write. During her treatment, the poet had to eschew reading, write with just a pencil, and stay in dim light. By 1865, her eye symptoms went away.
Quotes from others about the person
Adrienne Rich: "[she] chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed... She carefully selected her society and controlled the disposal of her time... neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economics."
Interests
Emily’s herbarium, consisting of 66 pages of special plant species from her garden is now preserved at the Harvard University. The special collections of Amherst College also contains the original portrait and locks of the great poet.
Connections
Very little is known about the romantic life of Emily Dickinson, and it seems that she abstained from any such emotion. Yet evidence reflects that she had received a marriage proposal from a graduate at the Amherst, named George H. Gould, but she declined his proposal and died a spinster.
Father:
Edward Dickinson
(January 1, 1803 – June 16, 1874)
Edward Dickinson was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts. Edward, was treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1838–1839; 1873) and the Massachusetts Senate (1842–1843), and represented Massachusetts's 10th congressional district in the 33rd U.S. Congress (1853–1855).
Mother:
Emily Norcross Dickinson
(née Norcross, July 3, 1804 – November 14, 1882)
Emily Norcross Dickinson was a member of the Dickinson family of Amherst, Massachusetts.
Sister:
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
(February 28, 1833 – August 31, 1899)
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson was the younger sister of American poet Emily Dickinson. She was instrumental in achieving the posthumous publication of her sister's poems after having discovered the forty-odd manuscripts in which Emily had collected her work.
Brother:
William Austin Dickinson
(April 16, 1829 – August 16, 1895)
William Austin Dickinson was an American lawyer. Known to family and friends as "Austin", he was the older brother of the poet Emily Dickinson. After his father's death, Austin became treasurer of Amherst College from 1873 until his death.
Friend:
Sue Gilbert
References
Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries
Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.
Emily Dickinson
Cynthia Griffin Wolff's brilliant literary biography of Emily Dickinson is the first to unravel the intricate relationship between her life and her poetry. It is a vivid portrait of the poet and her times as well as a fascinating interpretive study of the poems that will enable every reader to approach them with new understanding and delight.
