Emily Dickinson 18301886

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Emily Dickinson 1830-1886
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At HomeAmherst, Massachusetts

• Most prominent family in Amherst
• Attended Amherst Academy, founded by her
  grandfather
• 1847-8 Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
• refused to profess Christianity

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Edward Emily Norcross Dickinson
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The Homestead
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The Evergreens
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Evergreens interior
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Interior as Public Space

• Commerce btw the 2 family houses
• Btw Homestead Amherst Academy
• Bedroom as private but sweeping views
• Retired but overlooking the main street, the
  Evergreens, the railway and the burial ground

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Dickinsons Bedroom
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Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography"
(1931)

• The first people to be reproduced entered the
  visual space of photography with their innocence
  intact, uncompromised by captions. . . . The
  human countenance had a silence about it in which
  the gaze restedThere was an aura about them, an
  atmospheric medium.A strange weave of space and
  time the unique appearance or semblance of
  distance, no matter how close the object may be.

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Diana Fuss, Interior Chambers

• Ultimately, all of the mythologizations of
  Dickinson are based on the same twin premise
  Dickinson fashioned a radical interior life by
  shunning a conventional exterior one.
• differences 10.3 (1998)
• Project Muse

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Dickinsons Fascicles1858-64

• 40 Hand-stitched booklets
• plus 400 poems arranged but unstitched
• Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing (92) demonstrated
  the fascicles were deliberately ordered mini-books

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• 1775 poems
• 1147 fair copies in bedroom cabinet
• 833 bound in fascicles
• 10 poems published anonymously without consent in
  her lifetime
• Thousands of letters, 1100 published

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Called Back
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Posthumous editions

• Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890, 91, 96)
• Letters, 1894
• 1920s family editions
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), 3 volume,
  ed. Thomas Johnson
• The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981), 2
  vol, ed. Ralph Franklin

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William Dean Howells

• "if nothing else had come out of our life but
  this strange poetry we should feel that in the
  work of Emily Dickinson America, or New England
  rather, had made a distinctive addition to the
  literature of the world"
• Comment on 1890 edition

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Dickinson as Lyric Poet

• Poem as Miniature economy of scale
• Intimate address I/you self/other
• Stanza Room (Italian)
• Spatial and architectural metaphors
• Sophisticated reader, your scholar
• loved 17th century metaphysical lyrics, Keats,
  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Lyric Time

• Aesthesis suspension

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• All things swept sole away
• This is immensity
• (P1512)

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Style and Grammar

• Idiosynctatic punctuation
• Dash Exclamation mark
• Syntactic inversion
• Deixis (location, reference)
• Metaphorical compression
• Semantic density
• Abstract Nouns

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ED as Manuscript Poet

• Conservation of paper, thoughts, poetic fragments
• Recycling of Envelopes, Shopping Lists
• Poems embedded in letters, a form of manuscript
  publication, sociability

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Poems without Titles

• The greatest expression of Dickinson's
  linguistic skepticismis her decision to not
  supply titles for her poems. If names are a poor
  substitute for more immediate knowledge of
  objects and phenomena, so are titles a poor
  substitute for knowledge of her poems.
• John Mulvihill, EDJournal 5.1.1996

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