The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

2004 Modern Library Mass Market Edition

Introduction copyright © 2000 by Billy Collins
Biographical note copyright © 1996 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A trade paperback edition of this work was originally published by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2000.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886.
[Poems. Selections]
The selected poems of Emily Dickinson/introduction by Billy Collins.
p.    cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82378-6
I. Title.
PS 1541 .A6    2000
811’.4—dc21        00-63792

Modern Library website address: www.BookishMall.com

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Emily Dickinson: An Introduction by Billy Collins

THE SELECTED POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON

Life

Nature

Love

Time and Eternity

Reading Group Guide

Biographical Note

Emily Dickinson: An Introduction

Billy Collins

Today Emily Dickinson is recognized not only as a major poet of the American nineteenth century but also as one of the most intriguing poets of any place or time, in both her art and her life. The outline of her biography is well known. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830 and, except for a few excursions to Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, spent her entire life there, increasingly limiting her activities to her father’s house. “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or Town,” she wrote, referring to a personal reclusiveness that was noticeable even to her contemporaries. In the front corner bedroom of that house on Main Street, Dickinson wrote over 1,700 poems, often on scraps of paper and on the backs of grocery lists, only a handful of which were published in her lifetime and then anonymously. She was known to give poems to friends and neighbors, often as an accompaniment to the cakes and cookies she baked, sometimes lowering them from an upstairs window in a basket. Her habit of binding groups of poems together into little booklets called fascicles might indicate she felt her poems were presentable, but most of her poems never went farther than her desk drawer where they were discovered by her sister after Dickinson’s death in 1886 of kidney failure. In her lifetime, her poetry remained unknown, and although a few small editions of her poems were published in the 1890s, it was not until 1955 that a reliable scholarly edition appeared, transcribing the poems precisely from the original manuscripts and preserving all of Dickinson’s typographical eccentricities (see Note). Convincingly or not, she called publication “the auction of the mind” and compared the public figure to a frog croaking to the admiring audience of a bog.

It is fascinating to consider the case of a person who led such a private existence and whose poems remained unrecognized for so long after her death, as if she had lain asleep only to be awakened by the kiss of the twentieth century. The quirky circumstances of her life have received as much if not more commentary than the poems themselves. Some critics valorize her seclusion as a form of female self-sufficiency; others make her out to be a victim of her culture. Still others believe that her solitariness has been exaggerated. She did attend school, after all, and she maintained many intimate relationships by letter. Moreover, it was less eccentric in her day than in ours for one daughter—she had a brother who was a lawyer and a sister who married—to remain home to run the household and assist her parents. Further, all writers need privacy; all must close the door on the world to think and compose. But Dickinson’s separateness—which has caused her to be labeled a home-body, a spinster, and a feminist icon among other things—took extreme forms. She was so shy that her sister Lavinia would be fitted for her clothes; she wore only white for many years (“Wear nothing commoner than snow”); and she rarely would address an envelope, afraid that her handwriting would be seen by the eyes of strangers. When asked of her companions, she replied in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself that my father bought me.”

However tempting it is to search through the biographical evidence for a solution to the enigma of Emily Dickinson’s life, we must remember that no such curiosity would exist were it not for the poems themselves. Her style is so distinctive that anyone even slightly acquainted with her poems would recognize a poem on the page as an Emily Dickinson poem, if only for its shape. Here is a typical example:

’T is little I could care for pearls

Who own the ample sea;

Or brooches when the Emperor

With rubies pelteth me;

Or gold, who am the Prince of Mines;

Or diamonds, when I see

A diadem to fit a dome

Continual crowning me.

Such a short form leads to concision and quick-wittedness, her poems standing as dramatic examples of poetry’s ability to compress wide meaning into small spaces. She was also fond of the riddle. The diadem that crowns her always is the sky. With the dome of earth overhead, the little poem wants to ask, who needs the grosser riches of pearls, rubies, gold, or diamonds? The modest size of her poems (most are shorter than a sonnet) matches the modest space of house and garden in which she chose to live. The poems are also short because she does not waste time introducing the poem. She neither provides the details of a physical setting, as a conventional nature poem might do, nor does she explain the poem’s occasion. The poems begin suddenly, often with a declaration (“Superiority to fate / Is difficult to learn”) or a definition (“Hope is a subtle glutton”). Dickinson does not knock before entering, so the reader may feel swept up into the center of the poet’s thought process without warning.