When Emily Dickinson (b. 1830) died in 1886 at the age of 55, her family opened a locked box in her bedroom and found 1,775 poems. Many were loose or written on scraps of paper, but some 800 were bound into 40 small booklets, stitched together by their author into "fascicles." A handful of her poems had been anonymously published in Dickinson's lifetime and others had been circulated among her close friends—but this treasure trove !? And what were they to do with all these poems? They were odd. They didn't conform to the form and meter of what was considered poetry in the 19th century. They were hard to read (Emily's handwriting was extremely difficult.). The punctuation was weird (the readers thought it simply sloppy, not deliberate). There were empty spaces and breaks in the thought. One has only to compare them with any popular poetry of the period (except for that of Walt Whitman) to see how different and difficult these poems were.

Lavinia or Vinnie, Emily's sister, was passionate to have the poems published. She turned to Mabel Loomis Todd. This was somewhat ironic, since Mabel hadn't met Emily, hadn't read any of her verses, and had become the mistress of Austin Dickinson, Emily's brother, while Sue Gilbert Dickinson, Austin's wife, was Emily's best friend as well as sister-in-law. No one ever claimed this family wasn't complicated. In any case, Mabel set about copying out Emily's letters and became so moved and excited by the depth of passion, thought, and wit in the words that she undertook a campaign to have the poems published.

Mrs. Todd turned to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily's "Preceptor" to whom she had written about her poetry and who had previously thought she should delay publication. Ironic, again, that today we remember Higginson primarily as Dickinson's first editor, not as the most influential American man of letters in the second half of the 19th century (which, indeed, he was). Mrs. Todd and Col. Higginson edited and published Dickinson's poems in 1890. But, alas. They couldn't deal with Dickinson's radical format, so they regularized spellings, "corrected" punctuation, closed the troublesome ellipses, and, worst of all, unstitched the fascicles that gathered Dickinson's poems according to her thematic categories. Over the next half century, a feud raged between the Susan Dickinson camp (the sister-in-law) and the Mabel Loomis Todd family contingent (the mistress) over copyright, preventing any re-editing of the work for decades.

However, Dickinson's poems became well-known and celebrated, not least because of the romantic legend of the Amherst recluse. But it was not until after World War II that American scholarship rescued her work as it was intended to be read. Thomas H. Johnson painstakingly worked with the originals to publish the three-volume The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Including Variant Readings Critically Compared With all Known Manuscripts in 1955, nearly seventy years after the great poet's death. The order of the fascicles was not reconstructed until Ralph Franklin's work in 1980.

It always gives me pause to reflect that such obstacles were put in the way of hearing Emily Dickinson's voice. For us, for her readers. She could simply have dropped into obscurity. How much the poorer for the American language that would have been, because Dickinson and Walt Whitman superheated and reshaped our tongue in the crucible of their poetry. The written American language was radicalized and hasn't been the same tired old colonial re-tread since they sang.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was the brilliant second child of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. Her visionary grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was the chief founder of Amherst College, while her father was the trustee/treasurer who put the institution on a firm footing. Both men were lawyers with active professional lives and both served in the Massachusetts State Legislature. Emily's father was authoritarian and often absent. Her mother was present but emotionally inaccessible. Her deepest bonds throughout her life were with her older brother Austin and her younger sister Vinnie. Edward Dickinson sent his talented daughter an extremely mixed message. With her father's encouragement, Emily excelled at Amherst Academy and for a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Even as a teenager and young woman she was a stunning writer. She became more accomplished at science, mathematics, and foreign and classical languages than most of her male peers. She read voraciously, both classics and contemporary work. But Edward firmly believed that women had no public role to play, that their destiny was entirely domestic. In this, of course, he was well within the norm of social attitudes toward women in the 1850s, but left the brilliant, but shy Emily with few choices.

Dickinson declined to occupy the narrow realms of social expectation. With a powerful, confident sense of vocation, she began to seriously write her poetry. She carved out for herself a golden kingdom of words in which she was unmatched, and she knew it. In her poetry she was "queen," "master," "ruler," and god-like.

Nothing was allowed to threaten her autonomy and self-command. The 1840s and ‘50s in New England were an age of earth-shaking religious revival and the "conversion experience" was expected if one was to be a true Christian. This meant accepting the idea of original sin and of redemption through submission to Christ. Emily never believed in original sin and she quarreled with a God that had introduced suffering and particularly death into the world and then become invisible. While all of her friends and every member of her family went through a conversion experience, Emily (at considerable emotional cost) held out, refusing to submit her selfhood even to God. This decision isolated her in many ways. She ceased church-going, but a huge amount of her poetry wrestles with the Divine and her relationship to it.

In her letters to those close to her, Dickinson often referred to her poetry as "snow"—because "no" was at the center of it. This bears on her decision to not marry and to live quietly in the family compound at Amherst. She fell in love several times (as her brother Austin attested) and had a passionate nature, yet something always held her back. Even her late life romance (she was nearing 50) with Judge Otis Phillips Lord that nearly brought her to marriage was not consummated. First she dithered, then her mother had a stroke and required nursing, then, sadly, the judge died. Indeed, her most powerful, most intimate relationships (outside her family) were conducted through correspondence, as though she negotiated and controlled the distance between herself and the friend or loved one through words, not through being physically present. This is true even of relations with her very close sister-in-law, Sue, who lived just beyond the hedge next door. As in her poetry, where the silences and empty spaces are crucial to the meaning, Emily's relationships were conducted by ellipsis, in the absences. So Dickinson conducted passionate, emotional relationships with several men (Samuel Bowles, Charles Wadsworth, the unknown Master, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and several others) through correspondence, flirting without consequence, seldom face-to-face. When Higginson did meet Dickinson face-to-face, this public literary man and warrior experienced her startling intensity, telling his wife afterwards: "I was never with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."

The legends about some disappointment in love being the reason for Dickinson's withdrawal from the world were manufactured by those who can't conceive that a woman's hard-won selfhood would trump being someone's wife. Among the men Emily counted as friends, who was her intellectual equal? Having renounced Christ as the Bridegroom, how would she measure her mortal men-friends? Where would her precious writing time and guarded privacy have gone if she had wed? After a terrifying bout of eye disease in 1864-65, Dickinson withdrew even more as if husbanding the time she had to spend on reading and writing.

She writes feelingly of her audience and Dickinson must have played with the idea of publication and needed readers like Higginson and her friends to connect to. Her strong conviction of the value of her art must have made her think of fame. Yet every publication in her lifetime (and for decades after) robbed her of the true sound of her voice. The standards of the day (punctuation, rhyme, grammar, meter) were imposed on the poems by those, like Higginson, awed and "bewildered" by her.

Instead, by not publishing, Dickinson was free to write as her practice led her, without compromise or accommodation. She took standard hymnody and wrenched the form apart. Used slant or "sprung" rhyme for the first time in centuries. Achieved an economy of meaning in words that often feels volcanic in its compression. Opened spaces of emptiness that terrify, even while they vitalize. In her unpublished privacy, Dickinson was free to write in deeply unfeminine ways—irony, heresy, satire, rage, sarcasm, despair—as well as in the more acceptable tones of celebration, ecstasy, and wonder. But most of all, by NOT publishing, Dickinson connected with her audience. She was free to write naked, in a breathless, conversational, unedited direct voice that makes most readers feel that she is addressing them personally. Leave it to another poet, Archibald MacLeish, to describe what her readers know: "No one can read Emily Dickinson's work without perceiving that he is not so much reading as being spoken to. . . The voice is never a voice over-heard. It is a voice that speaks to us almost a hundred years later with such an urgency, such an immediacy, that most of us are half in love with this girl."*

For further reading:
Thomas H. Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1976.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson. New York, Knopf, 1987.
Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Notes: Adrienne Rich, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson," Parnassus: Poetry in Review, vol V, no. 1, 1976.
Archibald MacLeish, "The Private World," in Emily Dickinson: Three Views, by Archibald MacLeish, Louise Bogan, and Richard Wilbur (Amherst: Amherst College Press, 1960.)