Introducing Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson was, by all accounts, eccentric.  

She was born into a prominent Massachusetts family in 1830, and had a pretty typical childhood and teen years for the daughter of a New England lawyer.  She attended a local school as a child, though she missed school periodically because she had a tendency to be sickly.  In her later teens, she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the oldest women's colleges in the US.  She left college after less than a year and returned home, where she grew more and more reclusive.  By the end of her life, she refused to leave her bedroom at all, much less her home.  She also insisted on wearing only white for many years.  She sometimes refused to speak to people face-to-face, but would only talk to them through a closed door.  Definitely eccentric.

Emily Dickinson loved to write poetry -- we have almost 1800 of her poems still today!!!  She often sent poems to family and friends (she was also a prolific letter writer), but only ten of her poems were published while she was still alive.  Her sister Lavinia discovered a huge stash of poems after Emily died in 1886, and a heavily edited collection of them was published by some close friends.

The poems in that first collection were heavily edited because Emily Dickinson did not like to follow popular poetic conventions of the day, and she sometimes also didn't do things like capitalize the first word of a new line.  She loved dashes.  She wrote very short lines.  This seems pretty normal to us now, but at the time, it was new and weird and quirky.

It wasn't until 1955 that a full collection of her un-edited poetry was finally made available to the public. 

Dickinson loved the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well the poetry of her fellow American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Both Emerson and Dickinson are often considered American Romantic poets.  She also loved Shakespeare's writing, and liked Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte so much, she named her dog Carlo after a dog in the book.

The deaths of several close friends when she was a teen and young adult caused Dickinson a lot of distress.  Today, we would probably say she became clinically depressed, though in her time, she was just called "melancholy."  This was part of why she gradually became more and more reclusive.  Her poetry focuses a lot on death, beauty, nature, and sorrow.  

We don't know why Emily Dickinson eventually withdrew so much into herself.  People speculate she may have suffered from agoraphobia (severe anxiety caused by being outside the environment you consider safe, often leading to an inability to leave your home) or from a chronic disease like epilepsy that caused seizures or had embarrassing side effects like tremors.  But that is only speculation.  She died at age 55, in 1886, after suffering for several years from what her physician called Bright's Disease.

It's uncertain if Emily Dickinson was a Christian.  She did attend church as a child, and attended a revival in 1845 that made her briefly quite religiously zealous.  But she did not attend church services as an adult.  Some of her poems have deeply Christian subjects and themes, while others reflect the Transcendentalism philosophy.  Transcendentalism teaches that people are inherently good and can work to transcend the corrupting influences of society and other people and attain true goodness.  It was very popular in New England in the first half of the 1800s -- if it sounds familiar to you, it's probably because Louisa May Alcott and her family were Transcendentalists and she espouses that philosophy in Little Women.

Random fun fact: Taylor Swift is reportedly Emily Dickinson's sixth cousin, three times removed.