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Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)
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 Intimate
Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson by
Emily Dickinson, Ellen Louise Hart (Editor), Martha Nell
Smith (Editor)
Emily Dickinson is a figure of intense
contradictions: the hermit, the spinster, the frail woman in white
who nonetheless wrote poems of almost painfully turbulent passion.
For years, biographers have speculated about the male mentor who
inspired Dickinson's work, naming intellectual figures like Thomas
Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Bowles as possible candidates. As
it turns out, however, they might have looked closer to home. For
years, both before and after a painful break in their
relationship, Dickinson wrote ardent letters to her friend (and
eventual sister-in-law) Susan Huntington Dickinson. In fact, she
wrote more letters to Susan than to anyone else, despite the fact
that at one point Susan lived only a stone's throw away. Like
Dickinson's poetry, these letters are a curious business: half
epistles, half poems, idiosyncratically capitalized, punctuated,
and spaced. They are not merely warm, in the 19th-century
way; they are fierce, even erotic, in the kind of attachment they
express. Yet editors Ellen Hart and Martha Smith aren't in the
business of outing anyone; they prefer to simply present the
correspondence in all its passionate oddity. Susan Dickinson was
clearly a friend as well as one of the most valued readers of her
sister-in-law's poetry--but was she its inspiration, as well? Hart
and Smith let the reader decide.
 Complete
Poems of Emily Dickinson by
Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson (Editor)
Emily Dickinson proved
that brevity can be beautiful. Only now is her complete oeuvre--all
1,775 poems--available in its original form, uncorrupted by
editorial revision, in one volume. Thomas H. Johnson, a longtime
Dickinson scholar, arranged the poems in chronological order as
far as could be ascertained (the dates for more than 100 are
unknown). This organization allows a wide-angle view of
Dickinson's poetic development, from the sometimes-clunky rhyme
schemes of her juvenilia, including valentines she wrote in the
early 1850s, to the gloomy, hell-obsessed writings from her last
years. Quite a difference from requisite Dickinson entries in
literary anthologies: "There's a certain Slant of
light," "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!" and "I
taste a liquor never brewed."
The book was compiled from Thomas H. Johnson's
hard-to-find variorum from 1955. While some explanatory notes
would have been helpful, it's a prodigious collection, showcasing
Dickinson's intractable obsession with nature, including death.
Poem 1732, which alludes to the deaths of her father and a onetime
suitor, illustrates her talent:
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
The musicality of her punctuation and the
outright elegance of her style--akin to Christina Rossetti's
hymns, although not nearly so religious--rescue the poems from
their occasional abstruseness. The Complete Poems is
especially refreshing because Dickinson didn't write for
publication; only 11 of her verses appeared in magazines during
her lifetime, and she had long-resigned herself to anonymity, or a
"Barefoot-Rank," as she phrased it. This is the perfect
volume for readers wishing to explore the works of one of
America's first poets.
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The Society creates a forum for appreciation of
Emily Dickinson's life and writings and for scholarly research on
Dickinson and on her relation to the tradition of American poetry
and women's literature.
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By Alexandria North
for Sappho.com
Excerpt:
The idea of finding out who inspired Emily to
write so prolifically has intrigued literary researchers for
decades. For a while, the popular assumption was that she had a
male mentor encouraging her, and that this is perhaps the person
she addressed in three letters written to "Master." Some
have speculated she was in love with Samuel Bowles (editor of a
prominent local newspaper) for a time, and others speculate that
she had a relationship with Judge Otis Lorde, and either of these
men could have been the mysterious "Master." She may
have been in love with both or either of these men; it's hard to
confirm or deny the nature of her involvements with them. But the
evidence that is available seems to show that the person who most
affected her life and her work was Susan Gilbert--friend, eventual
sister-in-law, and Emily's passionate love. This is the woman
about which Emily wrote hundreds of poems, and the person who
received three times more poems of any of Emily's other friends...
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By David Bianco for Q
Online
Excerpt:
Since the first publication of her poems four
years after her death, many literary critics have painted Emily
Dickinson as a passionless, reclusive spinster who pined away for
an unidentified man she referred to in several verses as the
"Master." But in recent years, feminist scholars have
suggested that Dickinson's passionate friendship and creative
collaboration with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert,
may have been the most significant relationship of her life...
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Nine poems are included on this page, including:
Her breast is fit for pearls,
But I was not a 'Diver' -
Her brow is fit for thrones
But I have not a crest.
Her heart is fit for home-
I - a Sparrow - build there
Sweet of twigs and twine
My perennial nest.
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From GayGate.com
Excerpt:
It was not until 1955 that Dickinson's complete
poems were published as she wrote them. So much energy has been
poured into attempts either to picture Dickinson as a quaint,
asexual spinster or to uncover a conventionally heterosexual if
sublimated love life from the inner fire of her poems that it is
difficult to see past the cloying, sentimental myths that have
accrued around her. About her intense woman-to-woman
relationships, an important aspect of her life, virtual silence
has long been the rule. Recent thinking has painted a richer, more
provocative picture for us. Of such revisionist work, educator
Toni McNaron has written, "I am not waiting to turn Emily
Dickinson into a practicing lesbian.... What I do want is a
lesbian-feminist reading of her poetry and her life as the most
accurate way to handle that otherwise confusing constellation of
myth and fact surrounding her." In an important and
influential 1975 essay, "Vesuvius at Home: the Power of Emily
Dickinson," the poet Adrienne Rich attempts to refute some of
the clichés by which we have presumed to know Dickinson. She
takes her cue from an incident narrated by Dickinson's cousin
Martha, in which "she told of visiting her in her corner
bedroom on the second floor at 280 Main Street, Amherst, and of
how Emily Dickinson made as if to lock the door with an imaginary
key, turned, and said: 'Matty: here's freedom.'" The stakes
for someone like Dickinson were high...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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