Emily Dickinson
Along with Walt Whitman,
Dickinson is credited with bringing
American poetry into the 20th century
Family and Life
• Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886) born in
Amherst,
Massachusetts
Father: Edward Dickinson
 Lawyer
Treasurer of Amherst
College
Strict head-of-the-house
Dickinson’s Education
• Extensive for young women of the period
Dickinson in Seclusion
• 1853 Dickinson began to lead a rather
solitary life
• By 30 years of age, essentially withdrawn
from society
• Solitude did not turn morbid until 1874
(when her father died)
• After 1874, Dickinson practically never left
the family house.
Possible reasons for seclusion…
• Love for Charles Wadsworth (41 year old,
•
•
married, with a family) – he eventually moved to
San Francisco
Cared for Judge Otis P. Lord of Salem (a
widower and old family friend) – considered
marriage
She was an idealist in human relations,
expecting too much of people – and of God and
religion (her poetry indicates a disenchantment
both with present life and with the promise of
heaven
Dickinson was Eccentric
• She always dressed in white and preferred
to socialize through letters and to confide
her deepest thoughts in her poems
Dickinson wrote 1775 Poems
• Only seven were published during her
lifetime… and they were published
anonymously
• After Emily Dickinson’s death, her sister
discovered hundreds of her poems and
persuaded Thomas Higginson, Dickinson’s
friend/mentor, and Mabel Loomis Todd, a
family friend to publish the poems.
• Editors of her work freely made changes
because her poems did not meet the
conventional standards such as rhymes
and meter, punctuation and diction.
• Dickinson was given to erratic and
uncommon punctuation and extensive use
of capital letters.
• Her poems were untitled- titles we see
come from the first line of each poem.
• 1950’s- her estate was given to Harvard
University and a more authentic version
finally reached the public.
Dickinson’s Themes
• Dickinson wrote mainly about universal
themes: nature, love, death, immortality,
and God
• Wrote about common things, too
• Most powerful poetry dwells on time,
death, and eternity… (later in her life her
questions about death and immortality
became somewhat morbid – almost
grotesque)
How to read Dickinson’s poetry
• Poems often appear simple, but reading her poetry
requires careful attention, often to what is not said
• She makes unstated shifts in perspective –
frequently investigating her subject by turning it all
around, considering it from differing attitudes and
points of view
• She was one of the first American poets to map
careful the interior landscape of feeling, exploring
the terrain of the subconscious before it was
“discovered” decades later by Sigmund Freud.
• Concealment of personal facts and private thoughts
is the very framework of her poetry