Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her home and visitors were few. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she first met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not clear that their relationship was romantic—she called him “my closest earthly friend.” Other possibilities for the unrequited love that was the subject of many of Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.

By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended law school and became an attorney, lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson’s younger sister, Lavinia, also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions for Dickinson during her lifetime.

Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumors of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or “fascicles” as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her unusual and varied dashes, replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version of her poems replaces her dashes with an en-dash, which is a closer typographical approximation to her intention. The original order of the poems was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her intended order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures, and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or convenient. "The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson" (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

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Selected Bibliography

Poetry

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems(New Direction, 2013)
Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems (Little, Brown, 1962)
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1960)
Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harper & Brothers, 1945)
Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1935)
Further Poems of Emily Dickinson: Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (Little, Brown, 1929)
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, 1924)
The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (Little, Brown, 1914)
Poems: Third Series (Roberts Brothers, 1896)
Poems: Second Series (Roberts Brothers, 1892)
Poems (Roberts Brothers, 1890)

Prose

Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932)

Letters of Emily Dickinson (Roberts Brothers, 1894)

BECAUSE I COULDN'T STOP FOR DEATH

Listen to the poem:

Study the following materials:

Analysis 1
Analysis 2
Analysis 3

WATCH A PRESENTATION

And here's another presentation

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS

Questions About Mortality

1.      Why couldn't the speaker stop for Death? What makes her incapable and him capable of stopping?

2.      Why do you think the speaker is so willing to die? What kind of person is ready to die?

3.      How did you feel when you read the first stanza? How did you think the rest of the poem would turn out? Were your expectations correct?

4.      How long do you think the carriage ride takes? What clues does the poem give you?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

The speaker isn't really relaxed about her experience with Death; she's terrified.

Questions About Immortality

1.      What kind of afterlife do you imagine the speaker is telling the story from?

2.      What makes the speaker so certain she will continue on after death? (Immortality is mentioned right away, in the first stanza.)

3.      Do you think the speaker misses her life on Earth, or do you think she's happier where she is?

4.      Do you agree that horses' heads signal "Eternity"? Are there any other animals you think might be capable of signaling the afterlife? Why?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

Even though Dickinson doesn't specifically name it, the speaker is in Heaven.
The horses mentioned in the poem were actually angels, carrying the speaker to the afterlife.

Questions About Spirituality

1.      What do you think passing the children and the fields of grain meant to the speaker on this journey?

2.      Do you think the speaker knew it the man was Death right away, or only in hindsight? Why?

3.      What do you think the "House" was like? Is it really just a plain old coffin? Is it the "house of God"?

4.      Do any of the speaker's behaviors or attitudes remind you of any religious attitudes you know of? Which ones?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

The formality of their slow progressions is supposed to mirror a traditional religious death procession.
The spirituality of the speaker belongs to no formally-established religion, but is her own personal belief system.

Questions About Love

1.      Why didn't the speaker and Death ever speak?

2.      Think about what she's wearing. Does her outfit remind you of a wedding gown at all? Or a fancy outfit? What do you think this means?

3.      Is the love between the speaker and Death romantic love, or something else? What could it be? What evidence in the poem makes you think so?

4.      Do you think Death is really gentlemanly, or is this just a front to get her to go along with him?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

The speaker knew about the date beforehand and that's why she's dressed up and not at all surprised to see Death.
The speaker hasn't really passed into an afterlife, but lives in the "house" with Death.

Bring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.

1.      Do you believe the speaker's relaxed attitude toward death? Sometimes we pretend to be confident when we're nervous and brave when we're scared. Is this an example of that? Which lines of the poem support your opinion?

2.      Why might the speaker not fear death?

3.      If Dickinson were writing this today, do you think she could still illustrate the journey to death with as a carriage ride, or would that be silly? What would be a good present-day equivalent?

4.      Try reading the poem out loud. How does the sound of the poem affect your reading of it? Think about the action in the poem (the driving, the stopping). When does the sound mimic the action?

5.      The speaker seems to speak fondly and clearly of her memory of death. What do you think that means about the afterlife? How do you imagine the place where she now speaks from?
                                    (http://www.shmoop.com/because-i-could-not-stop-for-death/questions.html)