Born: Dec. 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died: May 15, 1886, Amherst
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was, with Walt Whitman, one of the two foremost American poets of the 19th century. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, of an old Connecticut River valley family. Her grandfather, her father, Edward, and her older brother Austin served as the treasurers of Amherst College and in many other civic positions. But there was little in this middle-class family, ruled by the austere, authoritarian father, to anticipate the bold, concentrated, imaginative force of the second of the three children.
Dickinson graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847 and attended nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for one year, returning home shaken by the attempts to persuade her to join the Congregational church. Longing for a secure faith and Puritan by temperament, Dickinson was nevertheless unable to make a profession of faith.
The life of the imagination became an alternative commitment. She was steeped in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays; Emerson’s transcendentalism, in its optimistic affirmation of God’s immediate, benevolent presence in nature and in the soul, provided a response to Calvinistic predestination. By 1858, she had copied out some of her early poems, collecting them in small, sewn packets. In the early 1860s she underwent a profound psychological and emotional disturbance, which biographers have tried to connect with a tragic, unrequited love. Samuel Bowles (editor of the Springfield Republican), Charles Wadsworth (the famous Philadelphia preacher whom Dickinson probably heard in 1855), and others have been suggested as the beloved, but the evidence is inconclusive. Whatever its source, the crisis stirred her imagination and brought her to poetic maturity. During the years 1862-66, she wrote more than a third of her total output of poems.
In April 1862, she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a popular critic, asking for advice about her poems. Their originality in form and content—irregular rhythms adapted from hymn meters, slant rhymes, eccentric phrasing and syntax, and emotional intensity and candor—led him to advise against publication. Though keeping Higginson as a correspondent, she continued to write poems in the same style. By the late 1860s, increasingly withdrawn from contacts beyond the family circle, Dickinson had become a recluse, dressing always in white. But the sentimental stereotype of Dickinson as a frail, injured spinster has given way to the recognition that her seclusion was a deliberate choice made to secure independence for her vocation: living out her inner life unflinchingly in her tightly packed poems.
The facts of her external life reveal little to spark comment: friendships, mostly through correspondence; devotion to her parents until their deaths, to her younger, unmarried sister Lavinia, and to her brother Austin, whose unhappy marriage was a strain on all the family; and, finally, a reciprocated love for Judge Otis P. Lord, a widowed friend of her father, which came too late for marriage. What Dickinson gained through renunciation is enacted in the contradictory moods of her poetry. The nature pieces range in tone from an Emersonian sense of wonder to a feeling of alienation akin to that of Poe or Melville. Her responses to God run the gamut from coy submission to rebellious defiance. The lack of biographical evidence about a lover has recently aroused suggestion that the love poems present an integral struggle with a masculine aspect of herself that seems to be the link with and the key to her sexual nature, spiritual identity, and creative imagination.
Fearing that she would be misunderstood, Dickinson chose not to publish (she published only seven poems during her lifetime), confident of posthumous fame. During her final decades she never left her house and garden, but among her papers was a scrap that read, “Area–no test of depth.” Since her death, Emily Dickinson has come to be hailed as perhaps the greatest female poet since Sappho.
