invited me to come & sing to her mother sometime.... People tell me the myth will hear every note—she will be near, but unseen.... Isn’t that like a book? So interesting (Farr, Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 20).

One can hardly blame Todd for being fascinated by such an unusual “character.” But unfortunately, the “myth” she takes such pleasure in describing influenced our later notions of Dickinson much too heavily. Despite her seclusion, a large number of prominent figures came and went through her house. She also developed deep, though largely epistolary, friendships with several people: the clergyman Charles Wadsworth, whom she met in Philadelphia and described as her “dearest earthly friend”; Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican; and Judge Otis Phil lips Lord of Salem, Massachusetts.

During this time Dickinson also began to write poetry. On April 15, 1862, she read in the Atlantic Monthly a “Letter to a Young Contributor,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In the letter Higginson, a man of letters, active abolitionist, and early supporter of women’s rights offered advice to novice writers about finding an audience for their work. Dickinson sent him four poems, along with a letter inquiring “if my Verse is alive?” and telling Higginson, “Should you feel it breathed—and had you leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—” (Selected Letters, p. 171). Although Higginson may have been politically ahead of his time, his literary tastes were not quite as advanced; he suggested that Dickinson revise her unusual punctuation and syntax. Still, their correspondence, which lasted until the last month of her life, seems to have gone a long way toward helping Dickinson feel part of a greater literary community.

Dickinson experienced her most tumultuous decade during the 1860s, when several events took their toll on her: the outbreak of the Civil War, the changed circumstances of several friends (Bowles was sick in Europe, Wadsworth moved to San Francisco, and Higginson served as an officer in the Union Army), and her own severe eye trouble in 1864 and 1865. After the late 1860s she never again left her home. In April 1862 she wrote mysteriously to Higginson, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—” (Selected Letters, p. 172). These lines certainly confirm Dickinson’s difficulties during this time, even though no one knows exactly what her “terror” was. This period, however, proved to be the most productive of Dickinson’s life; between 1860 and 1865 she wrote an average of three hundred poems each year.

Although Dickinson never married, her passionate poems, as well as a series of letters that have come to be called “The Master Letters,” suggest that she may have been deeply in love at least once; it remains in doubt whether the object of her affection was Charles Wadsworth, Otis Lord, her sister-in-law Susan, or indeed any real person.

The last years of Dickinson’s life were sad ones, due to the numerous deaths she experienced. Her father died in 1874, Samuel Bowles in 1878, her nephew Gilbert in 1883, and both Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882. In April 1884 Otis Lord died, and Dickinson herself suffered the first attack of an illness that would prove fatal; she died on May 15, 1886.

 

With a few exceptions, Dickinson’s poems are quite short, and they consist of stanzas written in what is known as common measure, also called common meter: four iambic lines that alternate between four and three beats. They recall the hymns that would have been intimately familiar to Dickinson from her childhood on. By far the most popular writer of these hymns was Isaac Watts, whose collections of hymns and other books could be found in every New England home. Opening Watts’s Divine Songs for Children (1715), Dickinson would have encountered stanzas like this:

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For ‘tis their nature, too.

 

But, children, you should never let
Such angry passions rise;
Your little hands were never made
To tear each other’s eyes.
(from “Against Quarreling and Fighting”)

Another perennially popular example of common measure is the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which begins: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me.” But, although Dickinson’s poems may superficially resemble sternly moralistic or sweetly consoling hymns, a closer look reveals that they are anything but:

The Soul’s superior instants
Occur to Her alone,
When friend and earth’s occasion
Have infinite withdrawn. (p. 275)
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency! (p. 36)

Unfolding as predictably as a hymn, these two stanzas nevertheless show—with their preference for individuality over community, attention to detail over the “invention” of faith—how in Dickinson’s crafty hands form is an occasion for cutting ironies, allowing her poems to enact an ongoing battle between received opinion and “superior instants.” (The abrupt rhythm achieved by her characteristic use of dashes in place of expected punctuation also helps advance the battle; Dickinson’s use of dashes may not always be evident in this edition, as discussed later in this essay.)

Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of rhyme adds even more tension to her deceptively hymn-like poems. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” she famously wrote (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, poem 1129); and she practiced this wily doctrine in almost every poem:

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

 

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die. (p. 10)

This wrenching little poem attains much of its power from Dickinson’s use of “slant rhymes,” or off-rhymes, like “pain-suffering” and “be-die,” which don’t allow the comfort that might come from exact rhymes and instead remind us of life’s conflicts and near misses.