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ESSAY1SOURCE.docDALA: Digital American Literature Anthology Edited by Dr. Michael O'Conner, Millikin University Unit 11: Dickinson and Whitman
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
[ image ] Emily Dickinson, one of the United States' great poets, was born December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. As a member of a prominent family, she received an extensive formal education. At fifteen, Dickinson attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for one year, where she was placed in the "without hope" category for religious potential, when she declined to profess herself as a believing Christian. She returned home and became a virtual recluse for the rest of her life, accepting few visitors outside the immediate family. She read deeply and widely from her home. She traveled only briefly in 1864 and 1865, to nearby Boston, and almost never afterward. Since Dickinson was so reclusive, she communicated to the outside world through letters and correspondence, many of which have now been published. She developed a series of friendships through her letters, with Benjamin Newton, a law student, with Charles Wadsworth, a Philadelphia minister, and with Thomas Higginson, a literary critic. She also had many such exchanges with Samuel Bowles, a newspaper editor. Within the household, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her brother's wife, became one of Dickinson's closest friends. There is speculation that Gilbert was among Dickinson's unrequited loves, but evidence is inconclusive on the matter. During her lifetime, only a dozen of Dickinson's poems were ever published. She died on May 15, 1886. After her death, to the surprise of her family, roughly 1800 poems were found in her room within forty hand-bound volumes, called fascicles, which the poet had constructed. These poems contained unconventional punctuation marks and capitalizations, which were highly edited when they were first published. Eventually, more recent editors restored the integrity of Dickinson's original work, accomplished by restoring her dashes and her fragmented syntax and by restoring her unique capitalization. Since her poems are untitled, Dickinson's two most recent editors, Thomas H. Johnson and R. W. Franklin, have both assigned each poem a number, based upon their research of the order in which the poems were written. Since their numbering system does not coincide, care must be taken when referring to the poems by number. Some sources use the more authoritative Franklin numbers and some the Johnson numbers. Three key biographies include Richard B. Sewell's The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), Cynthia Griffin Wolff'sEmily Dickinson (1986), and Alfred Habegger's My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2001). There are numerous book-length studies and critical collections on this poet. Students will find valuable Wendy Martin's The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (2002) and Jane D. Eberwein's An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (1998).
Dickinson, Emily. Poems by Emily Dickinson. Edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890.
source of electronic texts: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12242
Editor's note: Scholars and students of Dickinson's works should note that what are considered definitive versions of these poems, with a much greater attention to the original intentions (and punctuation) of the author, are available in published formats currently under copyright protection. Those versions could not be included in a free open source textbook such as this one. The poems included here have been edited and punctuated by Todd and Higginson and are mostly considered flawed by scholars today. See the Dickinson Resources page for alternative authoritative versions of many of these poems.
I'm nobody! Who are you?
I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there 's a pair of us — don't tell! They 'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!
