Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

I bought a small collection of the Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson from a book order when I was in high school. During April, I reread this collection to celebrate Emily Dickinson month in the Victorian Challenge. I enjoyed the preface, which gave a brief account of Dickinson, her life, and what is known of her writing the poems.

I loved reading the poems themselves. They are short poems, but yet Dickinson captured the essence of wonder about death, love, and life. I don’t know best how to describe my love for the poems, but I think the poems talk for themselves. A few of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems are below with my brief thoughts.

I think I feel like this every day . . .

I felt a clearing in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.

I think this was my favorite poem as a teenager. I think everyone knows what it is like to be a nobody.

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell you name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

I have loved this poem since I was a teenager as well. The last two lines are so well known now. I think it can mean many things to different people. Parting from a romantic love, especially when you are the one left behind. But it can also signify to me at least, losing someone you love through death.

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson also wrote a lot of nature poems. I like dandelions and the following poem struck a chord with me.

The Dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas –
The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower, -
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.

As a fan of the written word, I loved this poem about the power of a word.

There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man.
It hurls its barbed syllables, -
At once is mute again.

But where it fell

The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted brother
Gave his breath away.

Wherever runs the breathless sun,
Wherever roams the day,
There is its noiseless onset,
There is its victory!

Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul ‘forgot’!

I LOVE the following poem and I think that it describes Emily Dickinson and the power she still has on us. She may have lived a reclusive life and never tried to be in the light of fame, but you can not put her fire out.

You cannot put a fire out;

A thing that can ignite

Can go, itself, without a fan
Upon the slowest night.

You cannot fold a flood
And put it in a drawer, -
Because the winds would find it out,
And tell you cedar floor.

What are you favorite Dickinson poems?

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886): A Brief Biography by Cynthia Dickinson, The Emily Dickinson Museum

I am honored to have Cynthia Dickinson as a guest blogger today to give a brief biography of Emily Dickinson.  Cynthia (no relation to Emily) works at The Emily Dickinson Museum.  I love what she has to say about the Museum and her pictures - it looks like another place I need to add on to my places to visit in the future list!  Thank-you Cynthia for the great post!

 Emily Dickinson is considered one of the greatest poets of all time, yet in her own lifetime her work—virtually all unpublished--was known only to a small circle of family and friends.   Dickinson is famous now as a recluse, yet her lively childhood and youth were filled with schooling, reading, explorations of nature, religious activities, significant friendships, and important encounters with poetry.

The Emily Dickinson Museum is dedicated to helping visitors fully understand Emily Dickinson’s remarkable story and to untangle some of the myths that surround her and her work.  Located in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Museum consists of Dickinson’s family home, the Homestead, and the home next door of her brother Austin. 


On this day of her death, here is a short introduction to the life and work of one of America’s creative geniuses.

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in the family Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts.  When Emily was 9, she and her family (which also included older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia) moved to a house on what is now North Pleasant Street in Amherst.  The family returned to the Homestead in 1855.  Emily, who, like Lavinia, never married, lived at the Homestead until her death on May 15, 1886.

The poet’s formal schooling was exceptional for girls in the early nineteenth century, though not unusual for girls in Amherst.  She attended the co-educational Amherst Academy for about seven years before entering Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1847.  She attended the Seminary for one year, the longest time she spent away from home. 


In Dickinson's early twenties, writing became increasingly important to her.  In a letter to Austin that took him to task for writing poetry, she reveals something more significant about herself:   "I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things, and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent, so you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!”  (L110)  

Dickinson's letters to her brother also reveal a growing sense of "difference" between herself and others:  “What makes a few of us so different from others?  It’s a question I often ask myself” (L 118).  This sense of distinction became more pronounced as she grew older and as her poetic sensibilities matured.

Although Emily Dickinson's calling as a poet began in her teen years, she came into her own as an artist during a short but intense period of creativity that resulted in her composing, revising, and saving hundreds of poems.  That period, which scholars identify as 1858-1865, overlaps with the most significant event of American nineteenth-century history, the Civil War. 


During this time, Dickinson's personal life also underwent tremendous change. In the  mid-1850s, Emily Dickinson had moved with her family back to the Homestead, and her brother Austin had married and moved with his wife Susan (a dear friend of Emily’s) into a new house next door.  The couple named their house “The Evergreens.”  It quickly became a center for social and intellectual gatherings in Amherst. 

 Back at the Homestead, Emily Dickinson began to devote more time to her writing.  She did much of this work in her bedroom, the southwest corner room on the second floor.  By the time Dickinson turned 35, she had composed more than 1100 concise, powerful lyrics that astutely examine pain, grief, joy, love, nature, and art.  She once defined poetry this way:  “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way?” (L342a) http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/about_writings

Dickinson shared a portion of her poems with family and selected friends whose literary taste she admired, and a few of her poems were published in newspapers, though anonymously and apparently without her prior consent.  But the vast majority of her work remained known only to its author.  Many of these are recorded in small handmade booklets (now called “fascicles”), very private “publications” that she shared with no one. 

Dickinson's later life was marked by illness and death, including her father's, her mother’s, and her young nephew Gib’s.  The poet herself became ill shortly after Gib died:  "The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me" (L873).  She remained in poor health until she died at age 55 on May 15, 1886.  She was buried four days later in the town cemetery, now known as West Cemetery.

Each year the Emily Dickinson marks the anniversary of Dickinson’s death on the Saturday closest to that date with a Poetry Walk.  This year’s walk was an especially creative celebration of the “aliveness” of her verse. The walk marked the opening of a new exhibit on the Museum grounds:  “The Little White House Project.”  http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/littlewhitehouseproject

The Emily Dickinson Museum is open to the public from March through December each year and offers well-regarded guided tours of the Homestead and The Evergreens as well as a variety of public programs http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/.  We hope you’ll explore our website and make your own pilgrimage to Amherst to discover more about one of the world’s greatest poets.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson a Guest Blog by Author and Scholar Jerome Charyn

Emily Dickinson died more than 125 years ago, yet it is as if she’s usurped our landscape and our language – Emily is everywhere.

Last week an article about the virtues of walking one’s dog appeared in the New York Times, bearing the cryptic title: “Started Early, Took my Dog.” The author had burglarized one of Emily’s poems, and never even mentioned her - or Carlo, the wondrous Newfoundland who accompanied Emily for sixteen years.

It was while mourning Carlo that she began to wear white. She was lost without her mute Confederate. But that’s another matter.

Started Early, Took my Dog. We don’t even have to attribute her lines anymore. She’s become one of the most poignant icons of our new century – a full-blooded renegade -rather than a reclusive spinster with red hair – or a helpless agoraphobic trapped in a room in her father’s house.

Last year Holland Cotter, an art critic for the New York Times, wrote about this metamorphosis in an article entitled, "My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst.” Her upstairs bedroom was no secret sanctuary; it was “an empowerment zone.” [I felt that same power when I first visited her room in 2008, a kind of crazy thrill.]

Thirty-five years ago Emily was still the Belle of Amherst, as personified by Julie Harris, a harmless, asexual mouse. The play by William Luce was an enormous success, and it might have crippled Emily forever if Julie Harris hadn’t found other roles to play.

But around the same time that Belle romped around in her white dress, the late Adrienne Rich worked on one of the most perceptive essays ever written on Emily Dickinson – “Vesuvius at Home.” Rich dealt with Emily Dickinson as one poet contemplating another. She understood the depth of the problem. We’d turned Emily into some kind of “gnomic Garbo,” sentimentalized her in our own private menagerie of five or six poems. “I have come to imagine her as somehow too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will, not at all frail or breathless.” Nineteenth-century women had no voice; intelligence was a curse for any female.

Dickinson invented “a language more varied, more compressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date.” I would ever go further than that. She has wormed her way into the psyche of the West.

Harold Bloom hated to teach her, because looking at her poems with his students always gave him a headache – it’s a headache I’d love to have. And Bloom admits in The Western Canon that “except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante.” I see her as a kind of female Hamlet with daggers in her mind. She’s murderous and playful, and ultimately unknowable. And her language shifts from second to second, so that we’re never standing on solid ground. Consider Hamlet driving Polonius a little crazy as he compares a cloud to a camel, then to a weasel and a whale. All we would have to is supply the dashes, and we’d be right inside one of Emily’s electric whirlwinds.

But finally, it’s a whirlwind all her own. That’s why we celebrate her again – and again.

’Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch

* * *

Not all Pianos in the Woods

Had power to mangle me —

* * *
I started Early – Took my Dog –

And visited the Sea –

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me –
* * *

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—

As if my Brain had split—

I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—

But could not make it fit.



The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before—

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound

Like Balls—upon a Floor.

* * *

No one else on earth could have written those last two lines – these are her bolts of Melody, her invisible signature.

As Brenda Wineapple tells us in White Heat: “ . . . language like this had never been seen before; nothing like it, really, ever appeared again.” Emily was, according to Wineapple, a woman of secrets, who wanted her secrets kept but wanted you to know she had them: “. . . she seemed to exist outside of time, untouched by it. And that’s unnerving. No wonder we make up stories about her: about her lovers, if any, or how many, or why she turned her back on ordinarily life and when she knew the enormity of her own gift (of course she knew) and how she combined words in ways we never imagined and wished we could.”

Everyone seems to have his or her own version of Emily. In Aife Murray’s new book, Maid as Muse, we have a marvelous menagerie of ghosts – Emily’s servants, named and unnamed. Aife Murray relies on her own Irish roots to rescue these servants from oblivion, and she also rescues their habitat – that architecture of the unseen, where these servants labored and some of them lived – like Margaret Maher, who came to work for the Dickinson in 1869 and had a tiny room above the kitchen. Warm and wild and mighty, as Emily called her, she’s the real heroine of the text. It seems that Emily stored her “fascicles – her forty hand-sewn booklets of poems – in Margaret’s trunk. This explodes the whole notion of Dickinson’s “Immortality,” whether she ever wanted these booklets to be seen by another soul.

Why was Margaret the only one in Amherst who knew about the existence of these booklets and the rest of her mistress’ menagerie – that secret stash of poems. Emily wasn’t cavalier about other things. She left her own will and instructions about her burial – six Irish handymen from the Homestead were to carry her remains to the burial ground. But she left no instructions, to her own sister or her sister-in-law, Susan, about the most important matters of her life. Margaret didn’t burn this stash, as Emily had instructed her to do, and now, we have these poems, the wondrous shards of Emily’s existence, almost by accident.

Emily was an aberration, a female poet, who survived that terrible winter of nineteenth-century New England, where women weren’t allowed to think for themselves or reveal their own rage.

- Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn's most recent novel is The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. He is currently working on a study of the reclusive poet for Harvard University Press.

 Contact the author through the Facebook Page dedicated to Emily Dickinson in the 21st Century: http://www.facebook.com/SecretLifeOfEmilyDickinson

If you would like to see more about this blog, it goes with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZpXxBJRbXM (blog was taken from his recent talk at The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.)

Thank-you Jerome Charyn for this great guest post!  I can't wait to read The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson!

April Posts for the Victorian Challenge – Emily Dickinson Month!

I hope everyone is enjoying spring so far! It has been a very hectic one for me and I have gotten behind on posting on Laura’s Reviews. I’m working on catching up, but I now find that half of April has passed me by and I have yet to put the link up for April’s posts. I apologize! We are finally closing the reviews on the month of March– Robert Louis Stevenson month. We had a total of 21 reviews. I listened to the audiobooks The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island by Stevenson. I also watched Muppet Treasure Island with my family. I was hoping to read and watch Kidnapped, but alas, I ran out of time.

Fittingly for National Poetry Month, April is Emily Dickinson month for the Victorian Challenge 2012. You can post any Victorian related item you like this month, but I am going to focus on Emily Dickinson and you are allowed to focus with me! We will hopefully have two guest blog posts on the Emily Dickinson before the end of the month also to celebrate. Please post your April reviews below in Mr. Linky (and not on the January, February, or March link-up). If you haven’t signed up for the challenge yet, go to this sign-up link.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American Poet born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. After going to school at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson returned home to live the rest of her days as a recluse in white. Most of her relationships were carried about by letter, and she also wrote almost two thousand poems through the course of her life. Less than a dozen of these poems were published during her lifetime and they were considered radical poems for the Victorian era. Dickinson died in 1886. Her poems have been continuously in print since 1891.

It has been quite some time since I’ve read any of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I have a collection of her poetry buried in one of my bookcases. I’m going to hunt it down this weekend and read it. Do you plan on reading any Dickinson this month? If so, what works of or about Emily Dickinson interest you?

I look forward to reading your reviews this month!

Please post the name of your blog followed by the item you reviewed. For example, Laura’s Reviews (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson).