Emily Dickinson led one of the most prosaic lives of any
great poet. At a time when fellow poet Walt Whitman was ministering
to the Civil War wounded and traveling across America—a time when
America itself was reeling in the chaos of war, the tragedy of the
Lincoln assassination, and the turmoil of Reconstruction—Dickinson
lived a relatively untroubled life in her father’s house in Amherst,
Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830 and
where she died in 1886.
Although popular myth often depicts Dickinson as the solitary genius,
she, in fact, remained relatively active in Amherst social circles
and often entertained visitors throughout her life. However, she
was certainly more isolated than a poet such as Whitman: Her world
was bounded by her home and its surrounding countryside; the great
events of her day play little role in her poetry. Whitman eulogized
Lincoln and wrote about the war; Dickinson, one of the great poets
of inwardness ever to write in English, was no social poet—one could
read through her Collected Poems—1,776 in
all—and emerge with almost no sense of the time in which she lived.
Of course, social and historical ideas and values contributed in
shaping her character, but Emily Dickinson’s ultimate context is
herself, the milieu of her mind.
Dickinson is simply unlike any other poet; her compact,
forceful language, characterized formally by long disruptive dashes,
heavy iambic meters, and angular, imprecise rhymes, is one of the
singular literary achievements of the nineteenth century. Her aphoristic
style, whereby substantial meanings are compressed into very few
words, can be daunting, but many of her best and most famous poems
are comprehensible even on the first reading. During her lifetime,
Dickinson published hardly any of her massive poetic output (fewer
than ten of her nearly 1,800 poems)
and was utterly unknown as a writer. After Dickinson’s death, her
sister discovered her notebooks and published the contents, thus,
presenting America with a tremendous poetic legacy that appeared
fully formed and without any warning. As a result, Dickinson has
tended to occupy a rather uneasy place in the canon of American
poetry; writers and critics have not always known what to make of
her. Today, her place as one of the two finest American poets of
the nineteenth century is secure: Along with Whitman, she literally
defines the very era that had so little palpable impact on her poetry.
