Emily Dickinson, the "Belle of Amherst", is one of the
most highly-regarded poets ever to write. In America, perhaps only
Walt Whitman is her equal in legend and in degree of influence.
Dickinson, the famous recluse dressed in white, secretly produced
an enormous canon of poetry while locked in her room and refusing
visitor after visitor. Her personal life and its mysteries have
sometimes overshadowed her achievements in poetry and her extraordinary
innovations in poetic form, to the dismay of some scholars.
Dickinson was born in December of 1830 to a well-known
family, long established in New England. Her family lived in the
then-small farming town of Amherst, Massachusetts. The middle child, Dickinson
was adored by both her older brother Austin and her younger Dickinson
Lavinia. Her relationship with her mother was distant, and though
she was likely her father's favorite, her relationship with him
was sometimes frosty.
Dickinson regularly attended her family's church, and
New England Calvinism surrounded her. Dickinson stood out as an eccentric
when, as a young girl, she refused to join the church officially
or even to call herself a Christian. At school she proved a good student,
but spent only one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before
leaving the school due to health problems. In the years prior to
her cloistered existence at the house in Amherst, Dickinson was
quite social, attending parties, impressing her father's Washington
political comrades during a trip there, and amusing everyone with
her witticisms. Emily Dickinson was a fun, fiercely intelligent, young
woman.
Something changed in her life, and that change is one
of the greatest mysteries surrounding Dickinson's legend. Some
time around 1850 she began writing poetry. Her first poems were
traditional and followed established form, but as time passed and
she began producing huge amounts of poetry, Dickinson began experimenting.
In 1855, Dickinson, already a homebody, took a trip to Washington
D.C. after much prodding from her family. She also went to Philadelphia,
spending three weeks there. While in Philadelphia, she made the
acquaintance of a brilliant, serious man named Dr. Charles Wadsworth,
a married reverend at one of the Presbyterian churches in the city.
He was an arresting figure and Dickinson deeply admired him. Most
scholars agree that Wadsworth was the man Dickinson fell in love
with, and the man who inspired much of her love poetry. Just before
he left his Philadelphia church in 1861 to move to San Francisco,
Wadsworth visited Dickinson to tell her of his plans to leave.
No one in the family witnessed their meeting, but when he left,
Dickinson suffered a nervous breakdown that incapacitated her for
a week and nearly ruined her eyesight.
Dickinson was experimenting with the form and structure
of the poem. Many of her innovations form the basis of modern poetry. She
sent her poems as birthday greetings and as valentines, but her love
poetry was private. She tied it in tight little bundles and hid
it away. She did, however, seek out a mentor in Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
a prominent literary critic in Boston. They began a correspondence
that would last for the rest of her life. Though she doggedly sought
out his advice, she never took the advice he gave, much to Higginson's
annoyance.
During the 1860s and 1870s, Dickinson grew even more reclusive.
She stopped wearing clothes that had any hint of color and dressed
only in white, she turned away almost every visitor who came to
see her, and she locked herself in her room for days at a time.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, a number of people close to Dickinson
died in quick succession, including her mother, her friend Judge
Otis Lord, her young nephew, her good friend Helen Fiske Hunt and
Dr. Charles Wadsworth.
In 1886, Dickinson's health began deteriorating and she
found herself slowly becoming an invalid. Dickinson was only fifty-six, but
she was suffering from a severe case of Bright's disease. She died on
May 15, 1886, and was buried in a white coffin in Amherst.
