When she died in 1886 at the age of fifty-six, Emily Dickinson, the New England spinster daughter of Emily Norcross Dickinson and Edward Dickinson, prominent lawyer and one-time representative to Congress, whose heart, she said, was ‘pure and terrible such as I have found in no other’, did not have a single book of poetry to her name. Days after her death, her sister Lavinia opened her bureau, in the room that Emily always kept locked, and found, neatly copied and sewn together in groups, over nine hundred poems. The number would eventually total 1,775. Emily Dickinson’s is the most remarkable story in the history of literature. Eventually, after four years of bitter family disputes, which became known as the Emily Dickinson wars, her first book of poetry was published and became the literary event of 1890. However, it was not until 1955, when the family’s oddly touching, artistically disastrous, editorial ‘tidying up’ process was reversed (they had removed the dashes, dots and capitals that were crucial to her poetic code), that the sheer elemental ferocity of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was released.
‘Publication – is the Auction/Of the Mind’ may be the opening lines of one of her poems, as is ‘Fame is a fickle food.’ However, during her lifetime she had secretly tried for both, and failed. She tried again and failed again – she knew why ‘Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne’er succeed’. On 15 April 1862 – a date that Thomas H. Johnson describes in his introduction to The Complete Poems as one of the most significant in American nineteenth-century literature – Emily Dickinson sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She had written to Higginson in response to an article of his for Atlantic Monthly. His ‘Letter to a Young Contributor’ – advice to those who wished to be published – included the admonition, ‘Charge your style with life.’ Higginson was unaware, as Johnson points out, that Emily Dickinson, then thirty-one, had already written over three hundred poems.
The four he received were shocking enough. Johnson quotes Higginson speaking years later of their impact. ‘The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism.’ He declined to publish the poems as he thought them ‘extreme’. They were: extreme works of genius. ‘Strangeness’ is, Harold Bloom writes, ‘one of the prime requirements for entrance into the Canon’. Emily Dickinson certainly qualified. Bloom declared her ‘as individual a thinker as Dante’. She sent three more poems to Higginson. Again, he was confounded. Below is the famous letter that she sent on 7 June 1862 to Higginson, it having taken her less than two months to signal her retreat from the public arena. Note its construction, the dashes, the dots, the capitals.
I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish” – that being
foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.
If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her – if she did not,
the longest day would pass me on the chase – and the approbation
of my Dog, would forsake me – then. My Barefoot-Rank is better.
You think my gait “spasmodic.” I am in danger, Sir.
You think me “uncontrolled.” I have no Tribunal.’…
The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can.
It is one of the most elegant exits in literary history. Though she was to continue a correspondence with Higginson, there were to be no more efforts at publication. She withdrew to her genius and lived quietly with it for the rest of her life. ‘I don’t go from home, unless emergency take me by the hand.’ Ecstatics often withdraw. The intensity with which they react to experience often makes its curtailment necessary. St Teresa of Avila – who was ‘in the world but not of it’ as my mother constantly reminded me: a maternal warning against worldliness – withdrew to a convent. The poet and ecstatic Gerard Manley Hopkins – whose piety was such that in gardens he walked with his head bowed, in order not to be distracted from the worship of God by the beauty of roses (a favourite tale of the nuns) – found solace in a monastery. Emily Dickinson simply stayed at home. Unlike novelist Jane Austen, who in an equally small world looked out at her ‘3 or 4 families’ and created a universe, Dickinson looked inward, and in what Ted Hughes called her ‘tranced suspense’ came closer than any other writer to the depiction of the sublime. He quotes her reaction to the visit of a circus: ‘Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A Circus passed the house – still I feel the red in my mind.’ For such a temperament, her elective, virtual imprisonment in her house was either an act of psychological wisdom or one which made ‘the smallest event an immensity’ as Ted Hughes believed.
Reclusive, however, is not the same as shy. Emily Dickinson was very popular at school, and later proved an excellent hostess in her father’s house (her prizewinning bread was often served). Ted Hughes points out that when in 1870 she finally met the key literary figure in her life, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, he seemed stunned by the ‘very wantonness of overstatement’ in the conversation of ‘his halfcracked poetess’, adding: ‘I was never with anyone who drained my nerve power so much.’ Her description of herself, prior to their meeting, speaks of a considerable self-confidence in her appearance and most especially her colouring. The ‘nun of Amherst’, as she was eventually called, was not veiled, though she remained hidden. ‘I am small like the Wren, and my hair is bold, like the Chestnut bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.’ Read it again. Imagine it without the capitals and note that the guest has already drunk his sherry but has left enough in the glass to reflect the colour of her eyes. It is a compelling image, all the more so when one realises that Emily Dickinson suffered from a serious and extremely painful eye condition, possibly rheumatic iritis according to biographer Connie Ann Kirk, who stresses that the poet may have feared the loss of her sight (she shares this awful terror with Joyce and Milton who finally became wholly blind). Emily Dickinson’s poetic ‘vision’ therefore becomes ever more complex; her line, ‘Renunciation – is a piercing Virtue’, for example, now reads differently. Judith Farr in her introduction to a collection of critical essays makes the intriguing point that, in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, wordplay on ‘I’ and ‘eye’ occurs in literally hundreds of poems. Whether in her poetry or prose, behind the originality and the glittering brilliance lies something mysterious, shadow-light behind the closed door.
Emily Dickinson is sometimes thought of as a great religious poet. However, she obeyed her own rules, not necessarily those of the Church, which she often refused to visit. Her God was her own. Ted Hughes, whose insight has particular weight in the light of his own marriage to an ecstatic and a poet, Sylvia Plath, notes that ‘vision, and the crowded, beloved Creation around her and Death – became her Holy Trinity.’ Such passion in real life might well have overwhelmed the object of its affection. Was there an object of affection, of desire? If there was, his identity remains obscure. Harold Bloom says of her work, ‘It is a drama of erotic loss.’ What is certain is that between 1858 and 1862, she wrote the so-called ‘master letters’, which continue to puzzle scholars. They are passionate, intimate, full of longing. They were also probably never sent. In what are known as ‘the flood years’, 1860–66, Emily Dickinson wrote over a thousand poems. They range from ‘Given in Marriage unto Thee’, and ‘Rearrange a “Wife’s” affection’, passionate poems, full of longing, which give way to poems of loss, such as ‘Heart! We will forget him!’, shame even, ‘Not with a Club, the Heart is broken’ resignation, ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’ and the oft-quoted ‘My life closed twice’. Perhaps in Hughes’ haunting phrase Emily Dickinson realised that her ‘unusual endowment of love was not going to be asked for’.