Dickinson’s Life: Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts and lived almost all of her short life as a recluse in her family home there. She was a shy and introspective person, but her poetic voice is masterful. In her youth, she left home for only one year to study at Mount Holyoke; during the years after her return to Amherst she made only a few trips away from home. She never married, and spent her life at home, under the wing of her sister Lavinia, writing poems (which she bound into fascicles--even as a private silence she was a book person) and letters (many of which included poems) and receiving only a few visitors.
Dickinson’s Poems: Dickinson published only 8 (some say 10) poems during her lifetime, but she wrote nearly 1800 of them in so powerful and so individual a voice that she pierces the veil of her cloistered, enigmatic life and speaks directly into the ears of her thousands of readers today. She and Walt Whitman, at opposite ends of the spectra of “poet” and “personality,” are the two great poetic voices of 19th century America. Her poems were slowly published, with a heap of editing to smooth them out -- as written they are full of abrupt dashes and bumpy wordplay. No titles for her, thank you.
Dickinson’s Muse: As for who her “Master” was, many scholars have moved on from Samuel Bowles (editor of a prominent local newspaper) to Judge Otis Lorde, and settle now on the person who most affected her life and her work: Susan Gilbert -- friend, eventual sister-in-law (she married Emily’s brother Austin), and Emily’s passionate love. Emily wrote her hundreds of poems, three times more than any of her other friends.
Dickinson’s Editors: After her death, Dickinson’s sister Lavinia asked a close friend, Mabel Loomis Todd, to edit the manuscripts Evily had left and see them published. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an editor at Atlantic Monthly who had carried on a long literary correspondence with Emily, worked with Todd on the editing. They removed the irregularities of her spelling and punctuation, and it was not until the late 1950s that Thomas Johnson published Dickinson’s poems as she wrote them, having gone back to the original letters and fascicles.
Emily “The Virgin” Dickinson, “Survivor poet”: One of the tribe of eight poets in our 2001 Survivor Poet game here at About Poetry, she was the single final survivor left standing at the end by vote of our readers.
