Only ten of nearly eighteen hundred Dickinson poems saw print alive
Emily Dickinson wrote almost eighteen hundred poems in Amherst, yet only about ten appeared in her lifetime. After her death, sister Lavinia found the packets. Early editors smoothed her dashes and slant rhymes; not until 1955 did a full edition restore her abrasive music.
Born 10 December 1830 into a prominent Amherst family, she studied seven years at Amherst Academy and briefly at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning home. Her grandfather Samuel helped found Amherst College and built the Homestead; father Edward was a lawyer, college treasurer, and sometime congressman. Her Puritan forebears had crossed the Atlantic two centuries earlier in the Great Migration. The family was prominent but not rich, and Edward married Emily Norcross of Monson in 1828; their children were Austin, Emily and Lavinia, known as Vinnie. Edward served as college treasurer from 1835 to 1873 and sat in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature before a term in the 33rd Congress. On a childhood visit to Monson, an aunt praised two-year-old Emily as contented and little trouble, and noted her gift for the piano, which the child called the moosic.
She wrote prolifically on nature and mortality in short, acerbic lines with lean description and off-rhyme. Few contemporaries knew the scale of the work. At least eleven poems address sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson; some scholars read a romantic bond later obscured by editorial caution.
An 1890 selection by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd altered poems to suit then-current taste. Thomas H. Johnson’s 1955 complete collection moved closer to her manuscripts. Once nearly unknown, she is now canonical; the Poetry Foundation credits her with an elliptical language for what was possible but not yet realized.
Source: Emily Dickinson
