Life Dickinson lived most of her life in the family's houses in Amherst. In 1840, Emily was educated at the nearby Amherst Academy, a former boys' school which had opened to female students just two years earlier. She studied English and classical literature, learning Latin and reading the Aeneid over several years, and was taught in other subjects including religion, history, mathematics, geology, and biology. At 17, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which would later become Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley. When she again became ill in the spring, Austin was sent to bring her home after less than a year at the Seminary, and she did not return to the school. After that, she left home only for short trips to visit relatives in Boston, Cambridge, and Connecticut. For decades, popular wisdom portrayed Dickinson as an agoraphobic recluse. New scholarship suggests a much wider circle of influence. Dickinson's possible romantic and sexual adventures have been matters of great controversy among her biographers and critics. There is little evidence on which to base a conclusion about the objects of her affection, though Dickinson's passion is made clear by some of her poems and letters. Attention has focused especially on a group of letters addressed only to "Master", known as the Master letters, in which Dickinson appears to be writing to a male lover; neither the addressee of these letters, nor whether they were sent, has been established. Many biographers have been convinced Dickinson might have been romantically involved with the newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles, or a friend of her father's, Judge Otis Lord. Biographers have also found evidence that Dickinson may have had romantic attachments to women in her younger years, a hypothesis which has grown in popularity, despite scant and highly ambiguous evidence. After a claimed romance with Emily Fowler, circa 1850, some conjecture that Susan Gilbert 1851, a schoolteacher, was another possible love. All of Gilbert's replies were burnt by Dickinson's family after Dickinson's death, but Dickinson's letters to Gilbert have survived. The following is excerpted from a letter from Dickinson to Gilbert in late April 1852. Sweet Hour, blessed Hour, to carry me to you, and to bring you back
to me, long enough to snatch one kiss, and whisper Good bye, again.
During a religious revival that swept Western Massachusetts during the decades of 1840-50, Dickinson found her vocation as a poet. Most of her work is reflective of life's small moments and some larger issues in society. Over half of her poems were written during the years of the American Civil War. Many suggest that the Civil War gave some of the tense feeling in her poetry. Dickinson toyed briefly with the idea of having her poems published, even asking Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic and family friend, for advice. Higginson immediately realized the poet's talent, but when he tried to "improve" Dickinson's poems, adapting them to the more florid, romantic style popular at the time, Dickinson quickly lost interest in the project. By her death, only seven of Dickinson's poems (of 1789) had been published. Five of those seven were published in the Springfield Republican. Three posthumous collections in the 1890s established her as a powerful eccentric, but it wasn't until the twentieth century that she was appreciated as a poet. Because of her characteristic non-metrical rhythms and rhyme scheme, it has been observed that many Dickinson poems can be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. ("A bird came down the walk one day / he did not know I saw...") Dickinson's poetry was collected after her death by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, with Todd initially collecting and organizing the material and Higginson editing. They edited the poems extensively in order to regularize the manuscripts' punctuation and capitalization to late nineteenth-century standards, occasionally rewording poems to reduce Dickinson's obliquity. A volume of Dickinson's Poems was published in Boston in 1890, and became quite popular; by the end of 1892 eleven editions had sold. Poems: Second Series was published in 1891 and ran to five editions by 1893; a third series was published in 1896. Two volumes of Dickinson's letters, heavily edited and selected by Todd (who falsified dates on some of them), were published in 1894. This wave of posthumous publications was Dickinson's poetry's first real public exposure, and it found an immediate audience. Backed by Higginson and William Dean Howells with favorable notices and reviews, the poetry was popular from 1890 to 1892. Later in the decade, critical opinion became negative. Thomas Bailey Aldrich published an influential negative review anonymously in the January 1892 Atlantic Monthly: It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional
and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake,
and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson....But the incoherence
and formlessness of her — I don't know how to designate them — versicles
are fatal....[A]n eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way
New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at
defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. (in Buckingham 281-282) She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private
poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift
for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry
instead of antimacassars....She came, as Mr. Tate says, at the right
time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of sophisticated, eccentric
vision. That is what makes her good — in a few poems and many
passages representatively great. But...the bulk of her verse is not
representative but mere fragmentary indicative notation. The pity of
it is that the document her whole work makes shows nothing so much
as that she had the themes, the insight, the observation, and the capacity
for honesty, which had she only known how — or only known why — would
have made the major instead of the minor fraction of her verse genuine
poetry. But her dying society had no tradition by which to teach her
the one lesson she did not know by instinct. (195) Later readers would draw attention to the remaining problems in reading even Johnson's relatively unaltered typeset texts of Dickinson, claiming that Dickinson's treatment of her manuscripts suggested that their physical and graphic properties were important to the reading of her poems. Possibly meaningful distinctions could be drawn, they argued, among different lengths and angles of dash in the poems, and different arrangements of text on the page. Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using multiple typographic symbols of varying length and angle; even R.W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems, which aimed to supplant Johnson's edition as the scholarly standard text, used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely. Some scholars claimed that the poems should be studied by reading the manuscripts themselves. This biography is courtesy of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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