Emily Dickinson

Book 0: The Great Poets

by Emily Dickinson

Genres: Feminist

Synopsis

Born in Massachusetts in 1830, Emily Dickinson composed over 1770 poems; but apart from her closest friends, no-one knew she was writing at all. Only after her death was her astonishing output discovered and published. A reclusive figure for much of her life, few could have imagined the range of her subjects, the intensity of her imagination or the powerful delicacy of her writing. Emily Dickinson is one of America's greatest writers. This selection includes 147 of her best known poems, and is a perfect introduction to her unique voice.

Release date: April 26, 2012

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 112

Sample

EMILY DICKINSON was born in the United States in 1830, the second child of Edward Dickinson, a lawyer and politician in the western Massachusetts town of Amherst. Unusually for a young woman of the period, she received a challenging education in the modern curriculum of co-educational Amherst Academy. She then went on to study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the first degree-granting institutions for women, but she returned home after one year. Except for visits to Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston, Dickinson spent the rest of her life at home in Amherst. She enjoyed a passionate friendship with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, who was the preferred first reader of her poetry, and in the early 1860s she suffered some emotional torment, possibly connected to a figure she called the ‘Master’. But it is the story told by the poetry which is the story worth reading.

Dickinson began writing poetry seriously in the late 1850s, and during her flood period of 1862–3 (also a time of crisis for the nation, plunged into a bitter Civil War) she was writing more than a poem a day. Her refusal to compromise her highly condensed expression and idiosyncratic punctuation meant that her works were mangled by editors until she withdrew from the ‘auction’ of publication. At the time of her death in 1886 only about one per cent of her 1,775 known poems had been published. In 1955 an accurate edition finally appeared.

The strongest influences on Dickinson’s poetry are the Bible and Shakespeare. As a religious sceptic since adolescence in a community whose social and spiritual life was based on churchgoing and revivalism, she wrote many poems about being shut out of a lost heaven. As an innovative woman poet in a male literary culture, she sought out literary ‘sisters’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Bronte¨s, George Eliot, George Sand. She herself has in turn become a guiding figure for recent women’s writing. One of the two great nineteenth-century American poets (together with Walt Whitman), Dickinson looks startlingly modern today: her pure, fierce complexity seems the missing link between the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century and the fragmented demands of the modern.

HELEN McNEIL is the author of the critical and biographical study Emily Dickinson (Virago and Pantheon, 1986). Amongst other critical works and broadcasts, she has published on Eliz. . .