much cooler than I anticipated

Selections from the Heath Anthology by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born and died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent the majority of her life. She was the daughter of a congressman and an educated but reclusive mother, from who she inherited a tendency towards introversion. Because of her mother’s reclusiveness, Dickinson inherited a considerable domestic responsibility from a very young age, and wrote that she often felt she did not have a mother. She was allowed the privacy to write and read by her family, but was not supported by them — her father, for example, would buy her books and then beg her not to fill her head with them. She was not religious and resisted the evangelical fervour of her time, believing instead in a heaven-on-earth found through communing with nature. Her refusal to profess a sense of sin got her kicked out of Mount Hollyoake College, but Dickinson felt she had a direct route to the infinite and traditional faith didn’t express her awe for nature.

Dickinson had difficulty with the gendered expectations of her, and she found much of polite society hollow. For this reason, she opted not to travel with her father. Women of her time were expected to devote themselves to family or church and not thought or art — it was against this description of womanhood that Dickinson felt compelled to rebel. She left her home very little, but was not disconnected from the world — she was a cosmopolitan and eclectic reader of news, periodicals, fiction, and poetry, and was especially enamoured with women writers of her own time.

She was devoted to her friendships and part of her anger with a Christian God came from her inability to swallow the idea that her pain of losing a friend was in some way part of God’s “plan.” Dickinson’s closest friend in life was her sister-in-law, Sarah, who received more of her writing than anyone else. Their relationship was, as near as scholarship can ascertain, not strictly platonic. Dickinson’s family went to great lengths to hide any evidence of her homosexual love for Susan (which seems, in some of the poems anyway, to have been reciprocated). The poetry that has survived is evidence of the love and passion between the two women, and Susan was the only person from whom Dickinson would accept creative advice.

Dickinson did not seek — and in fact, actively avoided, publication in her own lifetime. She requested that he papers be destroyed at her death, but her poems were found (over 1000 of them) and published in various editions to great acclaim. (I don’t know how I feel about this, incidentally. I’d hate to think of my final wishes being ignored.) Content-wise, her poetry was satiric and scornful of religion, but she aligns herself with Christ or a co-creative God. She disagreed with the idea of pain being earned (ie. from original sin) or something to be denied (ie. transcendentalism). She writes of pain unflinchingly as a means of contrasting the opinions of her time. Formally, she was interested in playing with and breaking standard conventions of grammar and poetic form. For instance, she was attracted to the dash, and used it heavily because she saw it as less final than the period. She experimented with form to develop a condensed and terse style that was both intimate and stark. She ignored conventions of word order, punctuation, and rhyme scheme because she wanted to open up language to be more indicative of a life in motion — to Dickinson, life didn’t rhyme, though it often came tantalizingly, painfully close.

In poem 14, we see a declaration of a sisterly love for Susan that was stifled by Austin Dickinson (Emily’s brother and Susan’s husband). 446 shows the depth of her sadness at her unfulfilled relationship with Susan. Likewise, in 518, Dickinson weeps for her “bride” who has returned to “him,” which seems to allude to Susan and Austin. 640 (as well as many other poems) highlights the pain and grief she felt at not being with the woman she loved. In 249, it’s clear that Dickinson seems to be seeking love (she is tossed upon a stormy night and wishes for the shelter of a lover who could shield her from the storm). In 288, we see some solace for Dickinson in friendship, and the importance of those relationships in protecting her anonymity in a frighteningly busy world becomes clear. (This nervousness about the world becomes clear in 441, where she describes her poems as a “letter to the world” — a world she was quite timid of in her life — as she asks people the “judge tenderly.” Likewise, in 299 Dickinson eschews material wealth.) I also kind of think that 1072 is about how she feels misaligned in heterosexual society, but I’m not certain. Most tragic of the love poems, though, is 1737, which really illustrates the pain caused to Dickinson by the closeting of her homosexuality. In it, she begs to be made a man and weeps over the date of Susan’s engagement to Austin. There is also a sense, in this poem, that there is some kind of reciprocity between them; interestingly, this was one of the many poems that Austin attempted to destroy after Emily’s death.

In 324, we see Dickinson’s love for the natural world. She celebrates the heavenly in nature, eschewing a Sunday in church to instead experience the birds of her orchard. She is listening directly to God and sees it as heaven on earth. 508 expresses her problems with baptism and the act of declaring a faith for a child (she asserts that she has “ceded” from it and seems to be newly baptized in nature). In 1461 we see her again questioning religion, asking why she should apologize to God for her sins when he made man and therefore gave man the capacity to sin — she calls this duplicitous, on God’s part. In 1545 she expresses a very modern point of view in suggesting that the condemnatory nature of the Christian bible diminishes its relevancy.

In 569, she writes of poets as capable of painting and understanding all, and in 593 she writes a kind of homage to Barrett Browning. It’s interesting to me that she places herself in the stable of great artists yet never sought publication in her own lifetime. I’ve read elsewhere that she had a great fear of rejection, but I guess there’s no way for us to know if that’s true. It’s clear from the poetry, though, that she saw herself as an artist and wished to be taken seriously. Her writing was important to her as an escape, as we see in 613 where she illustrates the strength of her imagination as an escape from her family’s lack of attention or understanding.