Emily Dickinson transitioned long ago. She led what biographers think was a quiet, or even a solitary, life; they called her the “New England mystic.” Pearl S. Buck asserts in Advice to Unborn Novelists, “How could an actual person fit into the covers of a book? The book is not a continent, not a definite geographical measure. It cannot contain so huge a thing as an actual full-size person. Any person has to be scaled by eliminations to fit the book world.”
And biographers have “scaled” Dickinson in several ways. An overview of known situations in her life reveal that she was the middle child with a brother and a sister whose father served one term in the United States Congress and a sickly mother. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she examined nature in depth and refused to profess as a Christian. Her head mistress thought her doomed, and Dickinson left school before the year was finished. She had a well-stocked library in Amherst at the family home where she lived for the rest of her life. Around 1850, when she was 20, she began to write poetry although only a few poems can be dated prior to 1858. Among her mentors were Benjamin Newton, her father’s law clerk; Samuel Bowles, an editor of the Springfield Republican; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister. She sent four of her poems to Higginson, but he advised her not to publish. He seemed to recognize their originality, but he quibbled about her precise word choice. She says “I wish I were a hay” in her poem with the first and the penultimate line, “The grass so little has to do.” Higginson disapproved—she must say “the hay,” if the poem were to be published. His critique led her to allow only seven of her poems to be published while she lived. The others, she collected in small, handsewn booklets.
During the Civil War years, she wrote over 800 poems but omitted the war as a subject. After 1865, she never left home and began dressing only in white. Why? Exegeses of her poems have included suggestions that she had agoraphobia, was becoming mentally unstable, or preferred to be a recluse. She did have Bright’s disease, the archaic term for “nephritis” or inflammation of the kidneys. Toxins or autoimmune conditions cause the infection, and the side effects could possibly have kept her close to home. Whatever the reason, she made the choice not to fully integrate with her community. As a spinster (known simply as a “single woman” today), she knew that she would be making cookies and pies and feeding the sick. And if she were called upon to do those things, she would have been married to the town with no time for her soul’s purpose—the creation of her poetry.
Dickinson captures astounding concepts in few words. She adapted the quatrain with three iambic feet, much like hymn writing at the time. Contracted and precise, her poetry has originality in both content and style. She used off-rhymes and experimented with syntax. While Walt Whitman was using ten words to describe a book, for example, Dickinson continued to pare her poems to their bones. She clearly had an inner life based on experiences of reading, natural observation, and lost love (either by death or relocation). When reading her poems carefully, one realizes how much depth the seemingly simple phrases contain. She wrote “There is no Frigate like a book / To take us Lands away / Nor any Coursers like a Page of prancing Poetry—This Traverse may the poorest take / Without oppress of Toll—How frugal is the Chariot / That bears the Human soul.” (c. 1873)
She elaborates her unpretentious references by dramatically developing them for far greater import . “There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter afternoons—That oppresses, like the Heft of Cathedral Tunes!” She says, “I taste a liquor never brewed—From tankards scooped in Pearl—Not all the Vats upon the Rhine / Yield such an Alcohol!” She comments, “I never saw a Moor– / I never saw the Sea– / Yet know I how the Heather looks / and what a Billow be. / I never spoke with God / Nor visited in Heaven– / Yet certain am I of the spot / As if the Checks were given—” She unexpectedly shifts point of view to first person when she announces, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air—Between the Heaves of Storm.” But the poem captures the exact moment “then it was / There interposed a Fly—”. Another first-person poem also focuses specifically on death’s arrival (or “transition,” as many now understand death to be simply a change in frequency from the physical to the spiritual). “Because I could not stop for / Death— / He kindly stopped for me— / The Carriage held but just / Ourselves– / and Immortality.” And an 1864 poem explains the existential value of life. “A Death blow is a Life blow / to Some / Who till they died, did not / alive become– / Who had they lived, had / died but when / They died, Vitality begun.”
Finally, after her death, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother’s mistress, edited and published her poems. Not until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson published his edition of her 1,775 poems, were they published as she wrote them.
To me, Emily Dickinson is America’s greatest poet, the North Star for all poets succeeding her. So “Happy Birthday, Emily!”