Form and Content
Seventy-four years after Emily Dickinson’s death, all of her existing poems were gathered into the single volume The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a text that represents one woman’s rebellion against her patriarchal society’s institutions and literary conventions. After the poet’s death on May 15, 1886, her sister Lavinia began the customary burning of the deceased’s papers but stopped when she discovered the locked wooden box that contained the forty handmade volumes of Dickinson’s poems, fifteen sets of unbound volumes, and hundreds of loose rough-draft poems. Thus began the disclosure of what is now commonly known as the most fantastic instance of self-publication in literary history, a career that extended from about 1858 until the early 1870’s.
Immediately after discovering the volumes, Lavinia began her attempts to get them published. First, she took some of the volumes to her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, who apparently proceeded to study them methodically. Two years later, Lavinia decided she was moving too slowly. It is significant that, at a time when women held little power, Lavinia turned for help to still another woman, her brother’s lover Mable Loomis Todd, who was responsible for the first editions of Dickinson’s poems. By turning to Todd, the somewhat reclusive Lavinia placed herself between two formidable forces; as a result, first there was a fissure in Lavinia and Susan’s already strained relationship, then another between Lavinia and Todd. Dickinson’s poems were scattered between the Todd and Dickinson residences, and the manuscripts remained so divided until 1950, when ownership of Dickinson’s literary estate was transferred to Harvard University.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, is a condensed reading version of the three-volume variorum text published by Harvard University Press in 1955, which brought together all the poems from the editions published by Todd and Thomas W. Higginson (a longtime friend of Dickinson persuaded by Todd to coedit) and by the daughters of Todd and Susan. For ease of reading, the shortened edition makes no distinctions between volume, set, and workshop poems, and unlike the variorum text, it excludes almost all variants. Like the three-volume edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson makes use of handwriting analyses in order to present the poems in chronological order. This edition, which prints with each poem both the approximate composition date and the first publication date, presents Dickinson’s canon as extending from the single poem written in 1850 to the two poems written in the year of the poet’s death. Since Dickinson herself did not title her poems (except for a handful included in letters), Johnson has headed each of the 1,775 poems with a number for ease of reference.
Johnson’s edition was groundbreaking. Before he collected and initiated the handwriting analysis, scholars hoping to study Dickinson’s poems had to rely on separate editions of undated texts (since Dickinson herself did not date her poems). Johnson’s dating, however, is in no way absolute. Also, Dickinson’s incorporation of variant word choices, her several multiple drafts, her use of dashes (sometimes slanted up, sometimes down, sometimes long, sometimes short), and even her placement of words on a page complicate any editor’s task. Most especially, her handwriting is at times extremely difficult to read. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson is the definitive edition, but it is not a perfect text.
Context
When Dickinson was writing, she had few women role models. There were poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning whom she admired greatly, but there was no one—female or male—using language the way she was in her volumes. In midcentury...
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America, the most popular lyrics of the day were the conventional and sentimental verses composed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier (the “Fireside Poets”) and their female counterparts, such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney. In a way, Higginson was correct when in 1862 he deemed her poetry conventionally unpublishable. Dickinson herself had seen what would happen to her unique style when editors, without her permission or knowledge, conventionalized her lines. So her volumes waited, secreted in the bureau drawer.
It is significant that Lavinia, the woman who had protected Dickinson’s need for solitude, was the determined force in bringing Dickinson’s poetry to a late nineteenth century audience then ripe for change. Furthermore, two generations of women were her first editors (and biographers), thus initiating the scholarly recognition and popularity of Dickinson’s poetry. The first collection, Poems (1890), went through seven printings in one year, and the 1891 Poems: Second Series went through five printings in two years. By the third edition, Poems: Third Series (1894), Dickinson was known internationally. Today she is widely accepted as the greatest woman poet. Clearly, Emily Dickinson is a significant literary and cultural force.
Though they were conventionalized, the poetry of those first editions anticipated the verses of the modernists, and leading figures of that movement, such as Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, pointed to Dickinson’s role in poetry’s revolution. Certainly, her unconventional grammar, punctuation, and word choices opened up language, making way for the experimentations of the modernists. Another poet who has been very much affected by Dickinson—her poetry and her life—is Adrienne Rich. Sitting in the Dickinson homestead in the 1970’s, Rich could not help but marvel at Dickinson’s formidable strategy in surviving as a poet and at her absolute rule over her household, society’s social conventions, and the language strictures of the time. In the solitude she demanded, Dickinson pursued her self-publishing with total control. She was not a suffragist. As she herself explained, she followed no doctrines. To the patriarchal times in which she lived and to the literary conventions handed her by tradition, however, Dickinson turned her back. She was America’s first self-reliant woman poet.
Places Discussed
*Amherst
*Amherst. Massachusetts town where Dickinson lived, about ninety miles west of Boston. Although her poems mention Amherst by name only twice, it is organic to Dickinson’s poetry. She absorbed the old-fashioned Calvinism of nineteenth century Amherst. At the congregational church she attended in childhood, sermons depicted a wrathful God and threatened everlasting punishment. Dickinson frequently chose religious subjects, and yet, with the contrariety endemic to New Englanders, she rebelled far more than she acquiesced. In a few instances, she seems to have been influenced by the New England Transcendentalists.
*Homestead
*Homestead. Dickinson family home on Main Street in Amherst. Most of Dickinson’s poems employ the imagery of the domestic sphere. Yet she possesses the New England Puritan typological imagination that beholds cosmic meanings in homely images. Everyday events become, through metaphor, intense psychological states. She can comment that “The Bustle in a House/ The Morning after Death/ Is solemnest of industries/ Enacted upon Earth—.” The household imagery used to describe feelings so profound provides much of the impact of her poems. Home was, to Dickinson, her natural place, and to her imaginative vision, the source of the “types” of ineffable psychological states.
*Homestead grounds
*Homestead grounds. Garden and meadow near the Dickinson home. Dickinson’s store of images brims over with the natural phenomena of her gardens. The robin, she declares, is her “Criterion for Tune—/ Because [she] grow[s]—where Robins do—.” Daisies, roses, and bees abound in her poetic garden, as well as berries, carnations, maples, gentians, butterflies, anemones, orioles, whippoorwills, and violets—all found in the immediate surroundings of the house.
*Amherst cemetery
*Amherst cemetery. Community graveyard that is within walking distance of the Homestead. Dickinson must have contemplated the cemetery many times as funeral processions passed, as some of her poems testify. A few are spoken from the grave, as shown in lines “I died for Beauty,” and “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.”
