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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=156

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Emily Dickinson including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/index.html

This link connects you to the Dickinson Electronic Archives at the University of Virginia. Here you will find a comprehensive electronic library of Dickinson's poetry and correspondence as well as scholarly articles of criticism and other resources for studying her work.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1830, Emily Dickinson grew up in one of the more prominent of nineteenth-century New England families. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson founded Amherst Academy in 1814 and Amherst College seven years later. Dickinson's father was a successful Amherst lawyer, who served as treasurer of the college and was elected a member of the U. S. House of Representatives. The Dickinson family home was the annual site of the Amherst College commencement receptions and a center of the community. At the heart of Amherst's social life, however, Emily Dickinson chose a life largely devoted to the solitary cultivation of her poetic imagination, becoming, in the words of her friend and editor Samuel Bowles, "the Queen Recluse." Rather than define herself through the available roles of dutiful daughter, attentive wife, devoted mother, or a devout Christian, she largely turned her back on the Amherst community, in favor of an existence where, as she writes in poem 303, the "Soul selects her own Society."

As capable as any of the great Dickinson patriarchs, Emily excelled as a student first at the Amherst Academy, where she studied under Edward Hitchcock, and later during the year she spent at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847-1848. It was at Holyoke that her radical independence asserted itself as she became the only student in her class not to profess a belief in Christ by the end of her year there. Similarly, by age thirty she stopped attending church services, largely cutting her ties with Amherst public life. Instead, she cultivated a rich inner spirituality and intense creative life that would produce some 1,147 poems and thousands of letters to her select circle of correspondents. Of her large corpus of poetry, however, only ten were published by the time of her death from Bright's disease in 1886. Although she courted literary editors, she was skeptical of literary fame in her own lifetime and was extremely guarded in her literary negotiations with such editors as Samuel Bowles and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Stitched together into packets or "fascicles," Dickinson's verse, in its formal innovations parts company with the conventional writing of her age and remains an important precursor for modernist poetics and also for twentieth-century feminist verse. Her use of experimental punctuation and dashes, her typographical capitalization of key words, her unconventional phrasings and syntax, her penchant for paradox (captured in striking oxymorons such as "Heavenly Hurt" in poem 258), the composed quality of the poem on the page and the intertextual relations poems among broke new ground for lyric expression.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Crumbly, Paul. Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Grabher, Gudrun, Ed. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

Guthrie, James R. Emily Dickinson's Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

Hart, Ellen Louise and Martha Nell Smith, Eds. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998.

Liebling, Jerome. The Dickinsons of Amherst. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001.

MacKenzie, Cynthia J., Ed. Concordance to the Letters of Emily Dickinson. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000.

McIntosh, James. Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Mitchell, Domhnall. Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception. Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 2000.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER