American Characters - DickensonFinal Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems (1858-1955)
Study Guide | Suggested Poems | For Further Reading | Discussion Questions
Study Guide (1992) for Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s PoemsWritten by Virginia Johnson, Chair, Division of English and Foreign Languages, North Idaho College That Emily Dickinson is an intriguing character is clear from the varied descriptions of her. She has been called everything from "the partially cracked poetess from Amherst" to "one of the greatest lyric poets of all time", from "a little homekeeping person" to "the female (Marquis de) Sade", from "the belle of Amherst" (her own term for her fourteen-year- old self) to "the greatest of women poets" and "the best American poet." That she is an expressly American character is clear from her roots. Emily Dickinson was born to Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830. Her brother, Austin, was born in 1829, and her sister, Lavinia (Vinnie) in 1833. Edward Dickinson, a descendant of Puritans who had been in the country since the mid-seventeenth century, was an attorney who eventually took his son into his practice, treasurer of Amherst College for nearly five decades, and for several brief terms a representative to the state legislature and Congress. He was evidently a strict, unsympathetic, uncommunicative man. And though dedicated to his family and determined that they should live in the Dickinson Homestead established by his father, he had little interest in his daughters' intellectual development. Still, he had a powerful influence on Emily, and when he died, she chose to dress always in immaculate white, her color of mourning. Mrs. Dickinson was traditional homebody who was cared for by Emily and Vinnie from the time of Edward's death in 1874 until her own death in 1882. Vinnie, who, like Emily, never married, apparently tended to most of the domestic duties, leaving Emily free for her artistic pursuits. Next door to the Dickinson Homestead lived Austin and his wife, Sue, who became Emily's best friend, her confidante, and a key audience for her writing. Though Emily's formal education was limited, it was excellent. He attended Amherst Academy from 1840-1847, and spent 1847-48 at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. While at the Seminary, Emily was exposed to continuous religious influences, with frequent revival meetings and a curriculum based on the Bible and orthodox Trinitarian belief. The girls at the Academy were divided into three groups: those who were professed Christians, those who "had hope," and those "without hope." Emily belonged to this third group. She left the seminary, homesick and ill with the flu, but unconverted to church membership. She also resisted the Great Revival of 1850 in Amherst, even after her stiff-necked father finally succumbed. At nineteen, Emily wrote to her friend Abiah Root:
Her life-long struggle with and defiance of God, her "wrestling with faith', was thus established early. One particularly intriguing aspect of Emily Dickinson's character is her reclusiveness. Her recorded travels outside of Amherst are few-visits to relatives in Boston, Cambridge, Springfield, and Washington, D.C. Twice, in 1864 and 1865, she visited Boston for eye treatments. (The only known photograph of Emily Dickinson shows that she, like her mother and Vinnie, was slightly wall-eyed. And her mother, Vinnie, and Austin also suffered from eye troubles.) The frightening eye disease may have been severe enough to threaten blindness, and after she returned home from the treatments, she became increasingly more reclusive. Her decision to stay always at home has caused much conjecture about her: was she a shy, awkward, half-crazy spinster spurned in romance? Or was she such a sensitive, gifted, intelligent woman that an uneventful life was necessary for her art? Was she, rather than Thoreau, the artist who carried out the doctrine of self-sufficient individualism by really living it? The question of her romantic interests has prompted even more conjecture about her. Probably we will never know the details about any love interests she had. However, several men—besides her father and brother—played a role in her life. The first was Ben Newton, one of her father's law students, who shared an interest in poetry with Emily and who corresponded with her until his death in 1853. She referred to him in her letters as her "Tutor." He may have been replaced in this role by her most well-known correspondent and critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom Emily chose as her "Preceptor" after reading one of his essays in The Atlantic Monthly. Her relationship with him was almost certainly platonic, and except for his two visits to her in Amherst, it was carried out through letters only. It was Higginson who introduced Emily to Helen Hunt Jackson, a then-famous writer, who encouraged Emily to publish her poems. Despite this encouragement, Emily published only seven poems-anonymously-during her lifetime. Another man who affected Emily Dickinson was Charles Wadsworth, a married paster with whom she corresponded from 1855 until he died in 1882. Like Higginson, he visited her twice at her home. After the second visit, he moved to San Francisco with his family. The next year, 1862, Emily wrote 366 poems; in fact, two-thirds of her nearly 2000 poems were written between 1858 and 1866. The man who most clearly was romantically involved with Emily Dickinson was Judge Otis Phillips Lord. She probably met him in the 1840's of 1850's, when he was associated in the Whig party with Edward Dickinson. Drafts of her love letters to him date from 1878, a year after his wife died. Though Emily referred to herself in one letter as "Emily....Lord," the couple postponed marriage, primarily because Emily felt duty-bound to care for her ailing mother. Lord died of a stroke in 1884. One pattern prevails in all these relationships: Emily Dickinson's attractions to men were maintained always at a distance or through separation. In 1883, Emily's beloved nephew, Gib Dickinson, 8, died of dysentery. His death left the whole family grief-stricken, but Emily seems to have suffered exceptionally. She may have already been in the early stages of Bright's disease, a wasting kidney disease. Her weakness from the disease was increased by her grief. In May 1886, she wrote to her cousins Louisa and Fanny Norcross:
She died a few days later, at the age of fifty-five. Higginson, who attended the funeral, described her appearance: "She....looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle, & perfect peace on the beautiful brow." After Emily's death, Vinnie was astonished to discover a locked box that contained 1775 of Emily's poems. She apparently then became obsessed with having her sister's poetry published. She asked her sister-in-law, Sue, to help, and then she turned to Mabel Lommis Todd, a family friend, who edited both the poems and Emily's letters. The letters were later also edited by Thomas H. Johnson (in 1958) into three volumes containing nearly 10,000 letters. Johnson, who edited Final Harvest, also edited (in 1955) three volumes of Emily's poems "with variant readings compared with all known manuscripts." In a gift to a friend, Emily once enclosed a note that said merely, "Area-no Test of Depth." That might serve as a comment on Emily Dickinson and her writing. No other American writer has been so isolated (with the possible exception of J. D. Salinger). No other poet of the English language has said less about social or political events. She told Higginson, "My business is Circumference." One critic suggests that for Emily this notion came from an image of a "sphere of which the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.... (Dickinson) expanded it into a symbol for all that is outside. Her center is the inquiring mind whose business is circumference, intent upon exploring the whole infinity of the universe that lies before her." The ambitiousness of her "business" is made even more startling when one considers another of her observations from another letter: "The Bible dealt with the Centre, not with the Circumference." A recent biographer of Dickinson's maintains that Emily was indeed attempting to do something the Bible did not-she was using language to expose what she conceived as God's tyranny, developing a poetic voice that would "counter God's attempts to dominate us." Emily Dickinson's use of language is one of her major contributions to American literature. She used quite ordinary poetic forms-the rhythms common to English hymns. The ordinariness of the forms is reflected in the well-known contention that people can sing most of her poems to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas. But in those forms she condensed meaning and created riddling ellipses, thereby inventing a new means of poetic expression. If Thoreau is generous, even careless with words, Emily Dickinson is parsimonious. Words mattered greatly to her. She wrote to one friend that words were "mighty" and that "sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines until he glows as no sapphire." In her second letter to Higginson, who had apparently asked her about her friends, she said, "For several years, my Lexicon-was my only companion." However, not everyone can respond in kind to her experimentation. Readers are often left felling very ambiguous about her poetry: they can't understand her very well, but they are sure that she is a superior artist. And they agree that although she is frustratingly cryptic at times, she nevertheless meets some deep need in them. Suggested poems for discussion; numbers are from Final Harvest
For Further ReadingBy Emily Dickinson(Dates are original publication dates.)
About Emily Dickinson
Discussion Questions for Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems
Last updated: September 8, 2006 - 12:56pm by eric.hildreth
|
LiLI Services
Funded by Idaho Library News |
Idaho Commission For Libraries
Formerly the Idaho State Library
Contact Us Online
325 W State St., Boise, ID 83702 | Hours and Directions
Phone: (208) 334-2150 | Fax: (208) 334-4016 | In-State Toll Free: (800) 458-3271
Eastern Field Office Toll Free: (800)548-6212 | Northern Field Office Toll Free: (866) 212-0646
Eastern Field Office Fax: (208) 525-7255 | Northern Field Office Fax: (208) 892-8154
Idaho.gov Privacy Policy | Internet Cookie Policy
Login | Logout
This web site and other Idaho Commission for Libraries programs are assisted with funds from the Library Services and Technologies Act through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
