What Have We Done to Emily Dickinson?
And why? I'll tell you what I think...
✨ Below the paywall, you will find a Zoom link for this Sunday’s craft talk and generative workshop on Dickinson, definitions, and riddles (3 pm EST; replays available). ✨
Dear Friends,
Emily Dickinson, the preeminent poet’s poet, remains universally esteemed by writers who have nothing but their admiration for her in common. She is equally a musician’s poet (Aaron Copland, John Adams, and Samuel Barber are among the composers to set her poems to music), a playwright’s poet (see William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst, which made its Broadway debut in 1976), and thanks to television shows like Netflix’s Dickinson, singularly part of the public imagination. The recent revelation that Emily Dickinson is a distant cousin of Taylor Swift (six-times removed) has secured her cultural capital and permanent fixture in the zeitgeist.
No one had it on their 2024 bingo card, but if anyone was going on the Era’s Tour, it was Dickinson.
I recently had the privilege of writing an essay for Poetry on the new edition of Dickinson's letters, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024). I was interested in looking at how these letters upend the myth of her reclusive genius, a story perpetuated by scholars throughout the ages. If you’re interested in learning more about how this impressive new edition was put together, you can read the piece in its entirety on the Poetry Foundation.
Today, I want to highlight how—and why—I feel scholarship has done Dickinson a disservice. You will be dismayed to learn that I suspect there’s an insidious form of sexism at the heart of this. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking: scholarship throughout the ages has been so measured, reasonable, even-keeled in its assessments. You’re bewildered by the suggestion that a writer’s contributions and historical portraiture might be diminished over something as insignificant as gender.
Take my hand, friends. Here we go.
Forget the Emily Dickinson you think you know, that hermetic author of bedeviling sense, “So Anthracite, to live - // For some - an Ampler Zero -.” Say goodbye to the Belle and Recluse of Amherst, Mythic Emily, and every other epithet that scholars, biographers, and critics have coined to stoke the public’s fascination with a human sphinx. Behold, instead, a woman who baked—a lot—for friends, family, and neighbors; who lamented that she didn’t receive any valentines at school (“I have not quite done hoping for one”); who was very often funny and used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family (“Your welcome letter found me all engaged in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!”); and who, until age 35, traveled and visited friends, before poor health made traveling impossible. Toward the end of her life, in 1884, she sent 86 letters to 34 recipients: the majority express thanks, others include a gift of flowers or food, and a handful convey condolences or congratulations. Her supposed withdrawal from the world—and readers’ continued interest with such a narrative—has an apocryphal dimension we must be willing to forego in order to see and hear the poet clearly, perhaps for the first time.
Certainly, scholarship has made leaps and bounds since its earliest attempts to categorize an uncategorizable talent—still, I cannot help wondering what has taken so long, and if there’s isn’t more at play than a portrait unintentionally skewed by historic shadows. When faced with genius that is sui generis, that invites no immediate comparisons, there is an understandable urge to lean on the biography for answers. Surely something must explain such insistent originality, the poet’s enigmatic, compulsively absorbing cadence, textured diction, and time-bending syntax in poems that anticipate T.S. Eliot’s charge that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Johnson and Ward’s 1958 edition proclaimed that Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it, past or current.” Her letters, richly detailed and relishing their present, prove decidedly otherwise.
Somewhere along the way, scholars accounted for Dickinson’s psychic complexity and epigrammatic vision by turning her into a steely, nightgown-wearing spinster, a mind alternately cooled by the language of the stars or agitated by death. We’ve looked away as she baked gingerbread and pressed flowers. We have framed her genius in the way that is comfortable to imagine: the result of an intensity exclusively achievable in a vacuum, acquired in seclusion hinged on temperamental proclivities. What selfishness, what loneliness—we might achieve some genius ourselves, but at what cost? All along, it is our vision that has been too small, not Dickinson’s.
What is made plain in these letters is that the reality is far more wondrous than the prefab myth of Dickinson that has so long existed, in part, to rationalize how so extraordinary a mind could come by its power. What if Dickinson’s vision wasn’t arrived at through hermetic seclusion but in company? Is it not, perhaps, the ancient refusal to acknowledge women in their fullness that has denied Dickinson her social life, diminishing her inherent playfulness, renouncing the warmth of her intimacies in favor of otherworldly fevers? Might it have seemed incongruous to past scholars to wrestle with a picture of a person as at ease on earth as on Parnassus—a poet who could toggle her vision from wide to atomic, traveling the reverberations of a single word and following that mental thread to its essential, unknowable nature? When we deny Dickinson a chance at triviality, we deny her the fullness of existence, the very material from which she drew her strength. Can we accept that being a loving friend was at least as important to her as her poetry? Can we imagine a person whose social life unfolded on her own terms, and who, in fact, turned to it for inspiration? In doing so, we honor Dickinson not as a myth but as a flesh-and-blood woman who once walked—and wrote—among us. We let in the richness of life for which Dickinson stood.
I hope that you will join me this Sunday at 3 PM EST for a deeper look at the historical context of Dickinson’s poetry, and her love of dictionary definitions and riddles.
As always, come prepared to do some writing of your own!
xM