Emily Dickinson - Influential Women in History

By Read Books Ltd.

This volume contains a collection of essays and excerpts on the famous American poet and influential woman of history, Emily Dickinson. Highly recommended for students of literature and others with an interest in the life and work of this seminal writer. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830–1886) was an American poet commonly hailed as being among the most important figures in American poetry. Not much is known about her personal life, but evidence suggests that this is because she spent most of her time isolated from other people. Those who lived around her claimed that she took to wearing only white apparel and rarely left her bedroom in her later years. Despite being a prolific writer producing a corpus of over 1,800 poems, only 10 were published during her lifetime. Her poetry was considered unusual for her time, incorporating a variety of odd features and breaking many of the conventional rules.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473380448

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EMILY DICKINSON

Influential

Women in History

By

VARIOUS

Copyright © 2021 Brilliant Women

This edition is published by Brilliant Women,

an imprint of Read & Co. 

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

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 your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

1891.

Contents

Emily Dickinson

PREFACE

By Sarah K. Bolton

THE VERSES OF EMILY DICKINSON

An Excerpt by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

EMILY DICKINSON'S POEMS

An Excerpt by Mabel Loomis Todd

AUNT EMILY DICKINSON

An Excerpt by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

EMILY DICKINSON

A Chapter by Gamaliel Bradford

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON

Selected Chapters by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, western Massachusetts, USA. Her family were one of the most prominent in the state – her father, Edward Dickinson was a Yale graduate, successful lawyer, Treasurer for Amherst College and a United States Congressman. The Dickinsons were strong advocates for education and Emily benefited from an early education in classic literature, studying the writings of Virgil and Latin, mathematics, history, and botany.

In 1840, Dickinson entered Amherst Academy under the tutelage of scientist and theologian, Edward Hitchcock. She proved to be an excellent student, and in 1847, at the age of seventeen, Dickinson left for South Hadley, Massachusetts to attend the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She stayed there less than a year, however, perhaps due to homesickness, and returned home. It was at this point that she began to write her first poems, and to adopt something of a reclusive lifestyle.

In 1862 Dickinson answered a call for poetry submissions in the Atlantic Monthly. She struck up a correspondence with its editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and the two of them became close friends. In the mid-sixties, she visited an eye-doctor in Boston, who forbade her to read or write. It would be the last time she ventured from Amherst, and by 1874, following the death of her father, she had stopped going out in public. Living out the rest of her life in solitude, she eventually began to suffer from Bright’s Disease, and died in 1886, aged 56.

Although many friends and fellow artists had encouraged Dickinson to publish her poetry, only a handful of them appeared publicly during her lifetime. Upon her death, her sister Lavinia found hundreds of them. Mostly written in pencil, only a few were titled, and many were unfinished. Gradually, her sister arranged them chronologically into collections for publication: Poems, Series 1 in 1890, Poems, Series 2 in 1891, and Poems, Series 3 in 1896.

In 1914, Dickinson's niece published another of her collections. Even with the first few volumes her work attracted much attention. In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson published the first comprehensive collection of her poems in three volumes titled The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Including Variant Readings Critically Compared With all Known Manuscripts.

Today, Dickinson ranks amongst the greatest American poets of all time, and one of the most original writers of the 19th century. She is noted for her unconventional broken rhyming meter, frenetic punctuation, and bizarre use of metaphor. Amongst her most famous poems are 'Because I Could Not Stop for Death', 'Heart, we will forget him!', 'I'm Nobody! Who are You?', and 'Wild Nights! Wild Nights!'

PREFACE

By Sarah K. Bolton

All of us have aspirations. We build air-castles, and are probably the happier for the building. However, the sooner we learn that life is not a play-day, but a thing of earnest activity, the better for us and for those associated with us.

Energy, says Goethe, will do anything that can be done in this world; and Jean Ingelow truly says, that Work is heaven's hest.

If we cannot, like George Eliot, write Adam Bede, we can, like Elizabeth Fry, visit the poor and the prisoner. If we cannot, like Rosa Bonheur, paint a Horse Fair, and receive ten thousand dollars, we can, like Mrs. Stowe and Miss Alcott, do some kind of work to lighten the burdens of parents. If poor, with Mary Lyon's persistency and noble purpose, we can accomplish almost anything. If rich, like Baroness Burdett-Coutts, we can bless the world in thousands of ways, and are untrue to God and ourselves if we fail to do it.

Margaret Fuller said, All might be superior beings, and doubtless this is true, if all were willing to cultivate the mind and beautify the character.

EMILY DICKINSON

Influential Women in History

THE VERSES OF

EMILY DICKINSON

An Excerpt by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called the Poetry of the Portfolio,—something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. In the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter; she must write thus, or not at all. A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems. Yet she wrote verses in great abundance; and though brought curiously indifferent to all conventional rules, had yet a rigorous literary standard of her own, and often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness.

Miss Dickinson was born in Amherst, Mass., Dec. 10, 1830, and died there May 15, 1886. Her father, Hon. Edward Dickinson, was the leading lawyer of Amherst, and was treasurer of the well-known college there situated. It was his custom once a year to hold a large reception at his house, attended by all the families connected with the institution and by the leading people of the town. On these occasions his daughter Emily emerged from her wonted retirement and did her part as gracious hostess; nor would any one have known from her manner, I have been told, that this was not a daily occurrence. The annual occasion once past, she withdrew again into her seclusion,