Biography and Discussion of the Poet's Craft
[from The Norton Poetry Workshop CD-ROM, edited by James F. Knapp]

The Dickinson Family and Amherst

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second child of Edward (1803–1874) and Emily Norcross Dickinson (1804–1882). She lived in only two houses, the spacious "Homestead" where she was born, then another large house nearby from 1840 until 1855, when her father bought back the Homestead. Dickinson thereafter lived in the house where she was born, dying there, of Bright's disease, on May 15, 1886.

Emily Dickinson seldom left Amherst. Her one lengthy absence was a year (1847–48) at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, in South Hadley, ten long miles away, where she was intensely homesick for her "own DEAR HOME." Undaunted by her powerful father's domestic tyrannies, cherishing her mother, Dickinson declared home to be holy, "the definition of God," a place of "Infinite power." While all the Dickinsons struck people as unusual, Emily was identified as "the climax of all the family oddity" and became known as the "Myth" and the "character of Amherst" well before she died. Her closest friends were her older brother, William Austin, and her sister, Lavinia (Vinnie).

Economically, politically, and intellectually, the Dickinsons were among Amherst's most prominent families. Edward Dickinson was treasurer of Amherst College for thirty-six years and served as a state representative and a state senator. A successful lawyer, Austin became a justice of the peace in 1857 and followed his father, in 1873, as treasurer of Amherst College. Emily Dickinson attended Amherst Academy from 1840 through 1846—years her biographer Richard B. Sewall calls "a blossoming period in her life, full and joyous"; then she spent her year at Mount Holyoke. At eighteen she was formally educated far beyond the level then achieved by most Americans, male or female.

Religion and the Poet's Development

Religion was an essential part of Dickinson's education. For Dickinson, being terrorized by old-fashioned sermons about damnation was compounded by the closeness of death in an age when infant, childhood, and childbirth mortality rates were high. In 1844, the death of her friend Sophia Holland at age fifteen made Dickinson think she "should die too" and set her into "a fixed melancholy." Soon afterward, swayed by the revivalistic fervor of the community, Dickinson felt that she had experienced an awakening in which she found her "savior."

Dickinson's religious exaltation did not last, however, and as her girlhood friends married and moved away, she gradually became estranged from the religious beliefs of the community. For several years she dutifully attended church, but her terror diminished, especially after 1852, when she became friends with Josiah Gilbert Holland, associate editor of the Springfield Republican, and his wife, Elizabeth; their liberal theology encouraged Dickinson to struggle against the influence of sermons threatening damnation for souls like her own.

Richard B. Sewall showed that in her twenties Dickinson worked out a modus vivendi by which she could be private and independent and at the same time a loving and dutiful daughter. In the Dickinson house, where there were servants to empty chamberpots, scrub floors, dig potatoes, and care for the horses, Dickinson's chores were limited by her delicate health; according to her sister, it was accepted that what Dickinson had to do was "to think." Her thought came in the form of terse, striking definitions or propositions, used and reused in letters and poems.

Though Edward Dickinson's financial security meant Emily never needed a husband to support her, letters and many dozens of love poems have convinced biographers that Dickinson experienced a number of passionate relationships. One of these relationships may have been with the friend who became her sister-in-law, and one or more intense relationships are thought to have been with married men. One of these men was Samuel Bowles, who published a few of her poems, and was the electric, startlingly handsome, and married editor of the Springfield Republican. Another possible object of Dickinson's affections is the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met in Philadelphia in 1855 and who visited her in Amherst in 1860 and 1880. As a minister in Philadelphia, and in San Francisco after 1862, he lived a public life as a minister, husband, and father. The last man she is known to have loved was Judge Otis Phillips Lord, two decades older than she, and a conservative Whig who had outlived his party.

The Poet's Craft

Literary Influences

Reading literature was a guilty pleasure in the Amherst of Dickinson's childhood, where there still reigned the anti-artistic spirit common to late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century New England households. Edward Hitchcock, the president of Amherst Academy, labeled much modern poetry "disastrous to religion," all the more insidious when the "poison" was "so interwoven with those fascinations of style, or thought, characteristic of genius, as to be unnoticed by the youthful mind, delighted with smartness and brilliancy."

Dickinson's deepest literary debts were to the Bible and to British writers. Her knowledge of Shakespeare was minute and extremely personal, and she knew line by line works of other older British poets, notably Milton. Another favorite poet was Keats. Dickinson's reading of her English contemporaries started early. She read the novels of Charles Dickens year by year and knew Robert Browning's poems well. The English contemporaries who mattered most to her career were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Brontë sisters. Browning, whom she revered, was immensely important as an example of a successful contemporary female poet and seems to have awakened Dickinson to her vocation. For Dickinson the Brontë sisters (or the "Yorkshire girls," especially "gigantic Emily") became not merely admired authors but daily presences in her life. George Eliot was another model. 

Poetic Originality

Dickinson's originality, which emerged in music before it emerged in verse, found poetic freedom within the confines of the hymn meter familiar to her from her earliest childhood. Within that form she multiplied aural possibilities by what a later audience called "off" rhymes or "slant" rhymes. Her precise syntactical allocations, which would run across the end of the conventional stopping place of a line or a stanza break, forced her reader to learn where to pause to collect the sense before reading on.

The Hard Road to Publication

Dickinson knew how good she was, and for some years she wanted fiercely to be published, but on her own terms. She sent many poems to Mr. and Mrs. Bowles in tacit hope that Samuel Bowles would see that they appeared in the Republican; he did publish a few after whipping them into more conventional shape. She also sent poems to Josiah Holland, who chose not to publish them in Scribner's when he could have and who did not push Bowles to publish more in the Republican.

When Dickinson read Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Letter to a Young Contributor" in the April 1862 Atlantic Monthly, she was so inspired by his compendium of practical advice on the literary marketplace that she copied out a few of her poems to see if he would publish them. In her April 15, 1862 letter to Higginson, a liberal essayist and lecturer who would become her lifelong correspondent, Dickinson's first sentence was a naked plea for recognition: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" If it was alive, plainly, it deserved to be in print. Higginson was incapable of responding as she hoped, and in the face of his disapproval of her formal imperfections she defensively disguised her desire to become a published poet.

Dickinson's greatest literary "break" was instigated by her mother, who several months before her death in 1882, read some of her daughter's poetry to Mabel Todd, the young wife of an Amherst colleague of Austin Dickinson, who found them "full of power." Soon Mabel Todd and Emily Dickinson had established "a very pleasant friendship" without actually meeting. Dickinson may have been wholly forgotten had not Todd (at Lavinia's instigation) painstakingly transcribed many of her poems. The subsequent preservation and publication of Dickinson's poems and letters was initiated and carried forth by Todd. She persuaded Higginson to help her see a collection of Dickinson's poems into print in 1890 and a "second series" of poems in 1891; she published a third series in 1896, without Higginson's involvement. In the 1890s some critics reacted with superiority toward what they saw as verse that violated the laws of meter, but the public loved the poems at once. After Mabel Todd's labors, Dickinson's survival as a popular minor poet was never long in doubt; and through her efforts, the documentary materials were preserved on which literary scholars and critics could later crown her as one of the great American poets.