The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
The Squire's daughter in a Calvinist college town refused conversion, marriage, society and print, narrowed her world to her father's house and garden, and there wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems that she sewed into private booklets and showed to a handful of correspondents, choosing an audience of posterity over the editors who wanted to correct her, at a real cost to everyone who tried to get close.
Top traits
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Critical acts
- 1
Standing Alone in Rebellion (1847-1850)
She would not profess what she did not feel. From Mount Holyoke she wrote that she regretted "that I did not give up and become a Christian ... but it is hard for me to give up the world," and to Abiah Root, "I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections."
- 2
Binding the Fascicles (about 1858-1865)
"About 1858, according to the best estimates, she began to assemble her poems into groups, averaging about eighteen to twenty each, which she carefully bound by threading the folded sheets, four or five sheets to each group."
- 3
Six Sentences to a Stranger: the Letter to Higginson (April 15, 1862)
She sent him four poems and a note with no salutation and no signature; she "enclosed her signature in an envelope of its own." "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself — it cannot see distinctly — and I have none to ask." Habegger calls it "a box in a box, so to speak, with herself deep inside."
- 4
"I Do Not Cross My Father's Ground"
She narrowed her world step by step until it was complete "by her late thirties." In 1869 she declined Higginson's invitation to Boston: "I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or Town." She gave him reasons in her own idiom.
- 5
Refusing Print: Helen Hunt Jackson's Campaign (1876-1885)
Dickinson "said neither yes nor no; she asked Higginson's advice," and he, thinking stories were wanted, wrote her "a delicate no." Habegger reads the request as a ploy: "Unable to field Jackson's importunities, Dickinson asked the useful Higginson for a note saying he 'thought me unfit,'" but he "seemed to miss the point."
- 6
"No Is the Wildest Word": Choosing Against Herself with Judge Lord (1878-1884)
She wrote with a freedom she had shown no one else: "My lovely Salem smiles at me. I seek his Face so often - but I have done with guises. I confess that I love him - I rejoice that I love him." Then she pulled back: "Oh, my too beloved, save me from the idolatry which would crush us both."
Maxims
Ask whether your work is alive, not whether it is liked
Her first question to a stranger was "if my Verse is alive," and later, "Are these more orderly? I thank you for the Truth." She wanted to know if the work breathed and was true, not whether it would sell. See Act 3.
Do not stand up for what you do not feel
At Mount Holyoke and in the 1850 revival she stayed a "No-hoper" while everyone she loved converted: "I thought a lie would be queerer." See Story "I Thought a Lie Would Be Queerer."
Take the surgery, then keep your own gait
She thanked Higginson for his "surgery" and answered "You think my gait 'spasmodic' - I am in danger - Sir," and then went on writing exactly as before. Sewall finds she paid his advice "no attention whatever."
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant
Her rule protected her and sharpened the poems: "Success in Circuit lies." The cost was decades of being misread, "All men say 'What' to me." See Meta-skills.
Learn to say no early; your vocation will need it
Sewall: "At an early age ... Emily had learned to say no. It became habitual and ... an absolute necessity." Even to the man she loved: "'No' is the wildest word we consign to Language." See Act 6.
Part IThe Story
Two Day Lilies
On August 16, 1870, after eight years of letters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson finally came to Amherst. He was a radical minister and Abolitionist who had commanded a regiment in the war. "A step like a pattering child's in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair ... in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said 'These are my introduction' in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice - & added under her breath Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say - but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously."
She said, "I never had a mother." She gave him her test of poetry: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." She asked: "How do most people live without any thoughts. There are many people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street) How do they live. How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning." She said, "Women talk: men are silent: that is why I dread women."
That night Higginson described the visit to his wife. "I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." Later he called her "my partially cracked poetess at Amherst."
The little plain woman in white had by then written many hundreds of poems. She had copied them fair and sewn them by hand into booklets that she kept in her room. Almost none had been printed. She would write nearly eighteen hundred in all, and show them to a handful of correspondents, and let only seven appear in her lifetime, all anonymously. The Squire's daughter in a Calvinist college town refused conversion, marriage, society and print, narrowed her world to her father's house and garden, and chose an audience of posterity over the editors who wanted to correct her. That choice made her one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness. It also cost a great deal, to her and to everyone who tried to get close.
Her biographer Richard Sewall judged the visit plainly: "if the visit is to be measured by any future effort on Higginson's part toward furthering Emily Dickinson's poetic career, it must be regarded as a failure."
By the Numbers
The Myth of Amherst
~1,800Poems she wrote, nearly all unpublished in her lifetime
7-10Poems printed while she lived, all anonymously (Sewall counts 7, Habegger 10)
366Poems the 1955 edition assigns to 1862 alone
916Poems assigned to the five years of the fascicles' peak
39 + 4Booklets threaded by hand, plus four held with brass fasteners (Sewall's count)
93Known correspondents: her public life was the letter
15 yearsShe did not enter her brother's house, three hundred feet away
The Squire's Daughter
Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, a Congressman and the treasurer of Amherst College. He "kept his 'quick & ardent' feelings under control" and held his household to his own "standard of good workmanship." He warned his children off trains, snakes and the church vestry: "It is a most dangerous place, and I wonder that anyone will venture into it." Her mother's motto was "When in doubt, don't go out."
The household feared him. Her sister Vinnie said she and Emily "feared their father as long as he lived, and loved him after his death." Austin, bending over the coffin, is reported to have said, "There, father, I never dared do that while you were living." Sewall cannot see the house as "fear-ridden," but grants that "Dickinson wills could clash." The only recorded "real blowup" was the father's. Vinnie wrote that "Father is killing the horse ... He is whipping him because he didn't look quite 'umble' enough this morning," and "Emilie is screaming to the top of her voice."
She described her education to Higginson as a sequence of losses and one book. "I went to school - but in your manner of the phrase - had no education." After her tutor died, "for several years, my Lexicon - was my only companion." She told him of her childhood delight on discovering her first book: "This then is a book! And there are more of them!" Of Shakespeare: "why is any other book needed." Sewall warns that the poverty was partly a pose. Amherst Academy, the college lectures and the family library gave her a "feast in the reading line," and "she read widely and retentively throughout her lifetime."
As girls, Emily and Vinnie "were famous as wits, a little on the prickly side." She called her Aunt Elisabeth "the only male relative on the female side." And she was, at the same time, "a model child, a good girl in school, a dutiful daughter," and "not geared to rebellion." Since she could not rebel in the open, "she had to find another way."
Standing Alone in Rebellion
Amherst was a Calvinist town where conversion was the main business of a young woman's life. At Mount Holyoke in 1847–48, Mary Lyon divided her pupils into "No-hopers," "Hopers" and Christians, met each group weekly, and judged the year's success "by the number of converts they made." Emily was a No-hoper. A teacher reported: "Emily Dickinson appears no different. ... She says she has no particular objection to becoming a Christian."
She would not profess what she did not feel, and she knew what it cost. From Mount Holyoke she wrote that she regretted "that I did not give up and become a Christian ... but it is hard for me to give up the world," and to Abiah Root, "I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections."
Then came the Amherst revival of 1850, when "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered." Her friends Emily Fowler, Abby Wood, Jane Hitchcock, Mary Warner and Susan Gilbert all went. So did her father, at forty-seven, and her sister. In April 1850 she wrote: "Even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless."
Sewall calls it "an element of Dickinson pride, a sense of self-sufficiency, of being able to get along without the spiritual support that others found necessary—'the ark of safety.'" The same spring she wrote to Jane Humphrey: "I have dared to do strange things — bold things, and have asked no advice from any ... and life has had an aim." Sewall reads that letter as the moment she found a vocation in place of the conversion she had refused. Since she would not take the church's answers, "she took it upon herself to fill the void left by these rejections with all the verbal resources she could muster."
Paul Johnson tells it differently. He says she believed "from an early age that she was 'saved,' and took Communion, on occasion, without difficulty." Sewall's documents do not support this. She "stopped going to church regularly by the time she was thirty," and later told Higginson her family were "religious - except me - and address an Eclipse, every morning - whom they call their 'Father.'"
— Emily Dickinson, letter, April 1850Even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless.
I Thought a Lie Would Be Queerer
The most famous version of the refusal is a family story, and it needs handling with care. Mount Holyoke girls rose at six, accounted for every minute, and gave two half-hours a day to "solitary meditation and prayer." In January 1848 Mary Lyon held a meeting for the unconverted on the text "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve," and a teacher noted, "Seventeen attended. ... Emily Dickinson was among the number." Her cousin and roommate "seems quite engaged," but Emily "still appears unconcerned."
Years later her father's ward, Clara Newman Turner, wrote down what Emily had told her. "Miss Lyon, during a time of religious interest in the school, asked all those who wanted to be Christians to rise. The wording of the request was not such as Emily could honestly accede to and she remained seated - the only one who did not rise. In relating the incident to me, she said, 'They thought it queer I didn't rise' - adding with a twinkle in her eye, 'I thought a lie would be queerer.'"
Sewall cautions that the scene has been overdramatised. Sydney McLean found the Bianchi version "inaccurate in its details" and concluded that "Emily Dickinson's dramatic defiance is legend," though "the incident, surely, seems to have some basis in fact." Miss Lyon left the response optional, and thirty pupils finished the year "without hope," so she was not alone. "The error has been in overdramatizing it." But her own letters show what the refusal cost: "I am not happy."
Telling It Slant
Sewall opens his biography with her own rule: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant - / Success in Circuit lies." He argues that she lived it. "She avoided specifics, dodged direct confrontations, reserved commitments."
At nineteen she found that metaphor was a "powerful new protective weapon," a way "not only to 'cool the hurt' by telling it but to tell it so slant that no one would know she had been hurt," and a way of "throwing stones without hurting people." Her valentine to an Amherst student teased him with the tool itself: "That's what they call a metaphor in our country. Don't be afraid of it, sir, it won't bite."
Sewall's central claim is that she learned to strip an experience of its "accidents (who? when? where?)" and keep only the essence. He shows it with a single image. At twenty she wrote to Susan Gilbert, teaching in Baltimore, that the moon was "sailing around the sky in a little silver gondola," and "I asked her to let me ride a little while ago - and told her I would get out when she got as far as Baltimore, but she only smiled to herself and went sailing on." About a decade later the same moon returns in "I watched the Moon around the House" as a severed thing, "like a Head - a Guillotine / Slid carelessly away," indifferent to "little Mysteries / As harass us - like Life - and Death." Sewall: "In miniature, such was the journey, the life action, of Emily Dickinson. It required extraordinary discipline and concentration."
Her beliefs ran the same way. "The unknown is the largest need of the intellect." The truth "must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind." And: "My Country is Truth."
There was a less flattering side. "We detect her, in her rhetoric, stretching the truth, or posing, or just plain lying," Sewall writes. Austin told Mabel Todd that "Emily definitely posed in those letters." Yet Sewall insists the poems themselves, "in their basic structures, where they begin, where they end, and how they got there, they do not lie."
The Nicked Plate
Sewall calls her "a master strategist" with her father, "more adroit than her brother in managing their father, perhaps because she understood better than Austin that he needed managing." She joined morning prayers "while he addressed 'an Eclipse' and she thought her own thoughts." She read the books he "begs me not to read." She baked his bread. When their ideas of life collided, "she contrived ways of stating her position that would avoid any serious rupture."
Millicent Todd Bingham preserved the anecdote that shows the method. "One day, sitting down at the dinner table, he inquired whether a certain nicked plate must always be placed before him. Emily took the hint. She carried the plate to the garden and pulverized it on a stone, 'just to remind' her, she said, not to give it to her father again."
Sewall adds: "And 'just to remind' him, I suggest, that two could play at the game of temperament as well as one." Total compliance on the surface, and the message delivered "with a humor and dispatch he could not have missed."
Her humour was armour as much as wit. "Mirth is the Mail of Anguish - / In which it Cautious Arm, / Lest anybody spy the blood / And 'you're hurt' exclaim!" Sewall thinks her "humor about [her father] may have been in part protective."
Forty Booklets in a Bureau
By her late twenties she was writing poems in quantity with no outlet. The editors she knew, Samuel Bowles and Dr. Holland, did not take her hints, and Bowles's Springfield Republican "habitually honored" verses that Sewall finds inferior beyond comparison. A normal writer would have kept trying to place the poems, or would have stopped.
She did neither. "About 1858, according to the best estimates, she began to assemble her poems into groups, averaging about eighteen to twenty each, which she carefully bound by threading the folded sheets, four or five sheets to each group." Sewall counts "thirty-nine groups so threaded and four held together with brass fasteners," plus twenty-five unthreaded gatherings, kept up "for about seven years, spanning the period of her greatest productivity." Johnson's figures are forty booklets and ten unsewn volumes, about eight hundred poems, in 1858–1865, and he says she "decided she was a 'working poet.'"
The method was a workshop: draft on scraps, copy the keepers fair, thread the copies. Johnson notes that "many others must have been rejected as inferior or not worth preserving." She often left variant readings "undecided upon." When Sue criticised the second stanza of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers," she wrote two new versions and sent one back: "Is this frostier?" Her poem on choosing a word describes the discipline: "Shall I take thee, the Poet said / To the propounded word? / Be stationed with the Candidates / Till I have finer tried."
The booklets are "clear evidence that Emily Dickinson was extraordinarily busy during these years as poet, whatever she may have been as frustrated lover." The 1955 edition assigns 916 poems to those five years and "an almost unbelievable 366" to 1862 alone. Johnson's Franklin-based counts are 88 in 1861, 227 in 1862, 295 in 1863 and 98 in 1864.
Why did she bind them? Sewall gives several possibilities. She may have been preparing copy for "a Bowles or a Higginson." Or she may have meant the fascicles as "her private substitute for publication or, most important for us, her notion of the way her poems should be presented to the world when and if the world should be receptive." Later editors broke them up by theme ("Life," "Love," "Nature," "Time and Eternity") or by date, and Sewall warns that "the editorial freedom so far taken with them may have violated Emily Dickinson's profoundest intentions."
Six Sentences to a Stranger
In April 1862 the Atlantic led with Higginson's "Letter to a Young Contributor," and the Republican told "all the would-be authors of the land" that it was "a test of latent power." She was thirty-one, had written hundreds of poems, and had just "failed" with Bowles.
On April 15 she sent Higginson four poems and a note with no salutation and no signature. She "enclosed her signature in an envelope of its own." "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself — it cannot see distinctly — and I have none to ask." She asked him "to tell me what is true?" Sewall notes "the spareness of the letter, six sentences, with not a word to give this busy man of affairs the kind of leads one would normally look for." When she wrote "I have none to ask," "she was not quite telling the truth," since she had already asked Sue.
When Higginson asked who she was, she answered "so evasively that he later compared her to an accomplished coquette." She said she had made "no verse - but one or two - until this winter," and mentioned "Two Editors of Journals" who "asked me for my Mind." In June she asked, "But, will you be my Preceptor, Mr Higginson?" She signed herself "Your Scholar," "Your Pupil," even "Your Gnome." Sewall finds she "was enough of a coquette to flatter him," but that "in her exalted conception of herself as poet and in her confidence in her powers, she had no more reason to be deferential to Higginson than she had to be to Bowles; and one cannot help feeling that she knew it."
He called her gait "spasmodic" and urged her to delay publishing. She answered, "You think my gait 'spasmodic' - I am in danger - Sir," thanked him for his "surgery," and went on writing exactly as before. Sewall finds she "apparently paid no attention whatever" to his advice. Her poem "I cannot dance upon my Toes - / No Man instructed me" is, in Sewall's reading, her polite "Thank you just the same."
Sewall's verdict: "As a literary adviser he failed her completely," and "one of Emily Dickinson's failures of judgment was to turn to Higginson for literary advice." She took his friendship instead, and twice told him he had "saved [her] Life."
— Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, April 15, 1862Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself — it cannot see distinctly — and I have none to ask.
I Do Not Cross My Father's Ground
She had been "known in her youth for her brilliance, her wit," a sought-after guest at the Evergreens, her brother's house next door, where one visitor remembered "the inextinguishable laughter."
She narrowed her world step by step until it was complete "by her late thirties." In 1869 she declined Higginson's invitation to Boston: "I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or Town." She shunned people because "they talk of Hallowed things, aloud - and embarrass my Dog." In her later years she "conducted interviews ... from the top of the stairs and behind half-closed doors." For fifteen years she did not enter Sue's house, three hundred feet away. She would not let "doctors or dressmakers come near her," and when Mabel Todd came to sing, she listened unseen and sent out "a glass of rich sherry & a poem written as I sang." Johnson adds that "she preferred to sit at home writing while the others were out," because it gave her "the old king feeling."
There was no single cause anyone could name. Sewall dismisses the legends of a lover renounced at her father's command, or a father-tyrant, as too simple "in the light of what we now know." Vinnie insisted it "was only a happen," the result of their mother's invalidism: "Emily chose this part and, finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it." Sewall replies that "Vinnie's 'only a happen' is too simple."
The household made it possible. Vinnie "became the family's front line of defense against the world. She ordered, shopped, bargained." Emily did the bread, the garden and the nursing; she "never shirked the care of her mother" through seven years of invalidism. "The prickly part of housekeeping was left to Lavinia." Vinnie put it simply: "She had to think—she was the only one of us who had that to do."
By 1881 Mabel Todd was writing home about "a lady whom the people call the Myth," who "has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years." The gossip built the seclusion into a story of blighted love that Vinnie called "a cruel wrong." Sewall asks us to see it as chosen: "I think we should at least walk into the mystery standing up." Like Thoreau, "she had certain private affairs to transact that were more important to her," and "Emily Dickinson asked no favors from the world and granted it none." She "'selected her own society' and shut the door—not on life but on the non-life she saw about her."
The Ox and the Moth
One professional saw her clearly. Helen Hunt Jackson had grown up in Amherst and become the most praised woman poet in America. Emerson anthologised her, and Bowles wrote that she "stands on the threshold of the greatest literary triumphs ever won by an American woman." Higginson had shown her Dickinson's poems around 1866. In 1876 she wrote what no editor had said: "You are a great poet - and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy."
That August she offered a perfect shelter, Roberts Brothers' anonymous No Name Series: "Surely, in the shelter of such double anonymousness as that will be, you need not shrink." Dickinson "said neither yes nor no; she asked Higginson's advice," and he, thinking stories were wanted, wrote her "a delicate no."
Jackson called in person in October 1876, robust and worldly, "with seven books and well over four hundred magazine and newspaper pieces to her credit," and spoke bluntly. Afterward she apologised. "You looked so white and moth-like! Your hand felt like such a wisp in mine that you frightened me. I felt like a great ox talking to a white moth, and begging it to come and eat grass with me to see if it could not turn itself into beef! How stupid." Of the poems she had thought obscure: "Part of the dimness must have been in me." Sewall: "Here at last was someone who did not condescend."
She came again in 1878 and asked for one poem as a favour: "Can you refuse the only thing I perhaps shall ever ask at your hands?" "Success is counted sweetest" appeared anonymously in A Masque of Poets (1878). "We can only assume that Emily gave her permission," Sewall writes; Johnson says all seven poems printed in her lifetime appeared "without her permission." The poem was "slightly changed in phraseology" and widely credited to Emerson. The publisher, Thomas Niles, wrote that "for want of a known sponsor Mr Emerson has generally had to father" it.
Niles asked for a manuscript collection. She sent him single poems instead, including "How happy is the little Stone / That rambles in the Road alone, / And does'nt care about Careers." In 1884, after Jackson broke her leg, she asked to be "your literary legatee & executor," and wrote, "I do not think we have a right to with hold from the world a word or a thought any more than a deed, which might help a single soul." "There could hardly have been a handsomer tribute or a more generous offer. Emily Dickinson apparently ignored both." She wrote back with wit about crutches and canes, and said nothing about the offer.
Jackson died in August 1885, and with her went Dickinson's best chance of a professional editor. A Jackson biographer thought she "had sold her birthright" through too-easy success; Sewall adds that she had sold it "among others, to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Emily never did, and perhaps Helen Jackson realized it." His conclusion on the refusal is that "her written statements in both letters and poems show an ambivalence that she never entirely resolved. She would and she would not." Johnson sees the refusal as part of the work: "Denying people, not publishing her poems became almost as important as writing them."
No Is the Wildest Word
Otis Phillips Lord was a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, her father's closest friend, eighteen years her senior, "severe in his logic, blighting in his sarcasm." After his wife died in December 1877, Dickinson, in her late forties, was for once "in love and ... loved in return." There was "a very real ring and the possibility of a real marriage."
She wrote to him with a freedom she had shown no one else. "My lovely Salem smiles at me. I seek his Face so often - but I have done with guises. I confess that I love him - I rejoice that I love him." Then she pulled back. "Oh, my too beloved, save me from the idolatry which would crush us both." And: "Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer - dont you know that 'No' is the wildest word we consign to Language?"
Sewall reads the refusal as protecting the work: "complete abandonment to their love would destroy each of them in their vocations, he as judge ... she as poet." It is "hard to imagine her ever relinquishing" her privacy "for the complexities of married life with a distinguished member of the Massachusetts bar." Refusal was by then a learned skill. "At an early age (for whatever reasons) Emily had learned to say no. It became habitual and, as she became more and more dedicated to her vocation, an absolute necessity." She had watched her father and Samuel Bowles die "of overcommitment," and her brother unable "to say no to any personal or civic appeal." "By the late 1870s she was well used to 'choosing against' herself."
Lord ordered his papers burned at his death, and the drafts of her letters to him that survived were censored with scissors, probably by Austin. Lord died in March 1884. He had written to Vinnie of "knowing how entirely unselfish she is," a tribute Sewall calls "the only one of its kind we have," one that "at last gives a proper title to all those devoted labors for her family."
His Heart Was Pure and Terrible
On what Habegger takes to be Sunday, June 14, 1874, she did something unusual: she spent the afternoon with her father. "The last Afternoon that my Father lived, though with no premonition - I preferred to be with him, and invented an absence for Mother, Vinnie being asleep. He seemed peculiarly pleased as I oftenest stayed with myself, and remarked as the Afternoon withdrew, he 'would like it to not end.' His pleasure almost embarrassed me and my Brother coming - I suggested they walk. Next morning I woke him for the train - and saw him no more."
On Tuesday, June 16, "a cruelly hot day," Edward Dickinson felt faint while speaking in the General Court, went to his hotel, and died after "a dose of morphine." She stayed in her room during the funeral and apparently missed the memorial service. "I cannot recall myself," she wrote to her cousins. "I thought I was strongly built, but this stronger has undermined me." Two years later: "I dream about father every night, always a different dream, and forget what I am doing daytimes, wondering where he is."
To Higginson she summed him up in a single sentence. Sewall reads the loss as the start of a decade of "mighty" deaths and a new tone: "The playfulness and the whimsey disappear entirely from her remarks about him."
— Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, on her fatherHis Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists. I am glad there is Immortality - but would have tested it myself - before entrusting him.
Called Back
The deaths came in quick succession: Bowles in 1878; her mother in 1882 ("a larger mother died than had she died before"); her nephew Gilbert, eight years old, in October 1883 ("No crescent was this Creature - He traveled from the Full - Such soar, but never set -"); Judge Lord in 1884; Helen Jackson in 1885. Immortality was what she called "the Flood subject," the "natural complement," as one reviewer put it, "of an intense love of life." She had told Higginson, "I find ecstasy in living - the mere sense of living is joy enough."
After Gilbert died she fell into "nervous prostration," and in June 1884 she "had fainted and lain unconscious for the first time in my life." "The doctor calls it 'revenge of the nerves'; but who but Death had wronged them?" In her last spring she told Higginson she had been "very ill ... since November, bereft of Book and Thought." Her last note to the Norcross cousins read: "Little Cousins, / Called back. / Emily."
Austin's diary for May 15, 1886: "The day was awful. She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistles sounded for six."
She had designed her own funeral. "She asked to be carried out the back door, around through the garden, through the opened barn from front to back, and then through the grassy fields to the family plot, always in sight of the house." She was carried by the six Irishmen who had worked her father's grounds. Higginson read Emily Brontë's "No coward soul is mine" and wrote in his diary of "that rare & strange creature Emily Dickinson." Vinnie put two heliotropes in her hand "to take to Judge Lord."
Most letters to her "were destroyed in the burning of her papers after her death," but "the great bulk of her poems was found in her room," "in a bewildering state," with "hundreds of scraps and jottings; and ... almost no dates." In 1890 Higginson and Mabel Todd edited the first Poems, which ran to eleven editions within two years. They gave the poems titles and "regularized Emily Dickinson's wayward syntax or grammar or rhyming." A family feud kept 665 poems in a camphorwood chest until 1929.
The Cost of the Closed Door
Johnson, who pairs her with Jane Welsh Carlyle in a chapter on "Tortured Heroism in a Man's World," frames her whole life as "a successful struggle against fear, in which she drew nourishment from her creative gifts." The fear was real. "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." So was the bravery: "When much in the Woods as a little Girl, I was told that the Snake would bite me, that I might pick a poisonous flower, or Goblins kidnap me, but I went along and met no one but Angels." Johnson concludes that "she had considerable power of personality, which she evidently cherished and relished."
Her constraints were those of her place and sex: a town that measured a young woman by her conversion, a class that expected her to visit and receive, editors who printed lesser verse and missed hers, an adviser who tried to correct her gait. She answered each with a refusal, and each refusal bought her room to work.
But Sewall does not let the bargain pass as free. "Her failures, certainly, were with people. Throughout her life, she never achieved a single, wholly satisfying relationship with anybody she had to be near, or with, for any length of time." The reason "seems not far to seek. All her life she demanded too much of people. ... She seemed unable to take friendship casually, nor could she be realistic about love. The result was excessive tension at every meeting, so that meetings themselves became ordeals." Her early friends "dropped off, unwilling or unable to keep up." Johnson finds her late notes "marked by irony, superiority. They are dry. The claws are never quite sheathed." Sewall thinks the "Dickinson snobbishness" was "cultivated, I think, by Emily for defensive purposes."
And the refusal of print had a price that fell on the poems themselves. Because she would not publish, others edited her: titled her poems, regularised her syntax, broke up her booklets, and locked part of the work in a chest for forty years. She ranked "First - Poets - Then the Sun." The world did come to read her, but on terms set by people she had never chosen.
Part IIThe Playbook
Emily Dickinson built no institution and sought no audience. What she built was a method for first-rate work under conditions that should have prevented it. The method was mostly subtraction. It worked, and its costs fell exactly where she put them.
The principles
- 1.Ask whether the work is alive, not whether it is liked.
- 2.Do not stand up for what you do not feel.
- 3.Learn to say no early; your vocation will need it.
- 4.Narrow the ground to deepen the work.
- 5.Build your own edition before the world asks.
- 6.Take the surgery, then keep your own gait.
- 7.Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.
- 8.Concede the small thing, keep the large one.
- 9.Ration people, and know what rationing costs.
- 10.If you will not publish, someone else will edit you.
Principle 1
Ask whether the work is alive, not whether it is liked
Her first question to a stranger was whether her verse was "alive," whether it "breathed." To Sue it was "Do I paint it natural?" To Higginson later, "Are these more orderly? I thank you for the Truth." Her test of poetry was physical: cold no fire can warm, the top of the head taken off. She never asked whether a poem would sell.
That standard let her keep working for decades without an audience. It also told her when to revise: "Is this frostier?"
Tactic: Judge work by a test you can apply yourself (does it breathe, is it true, does it hit you physically) rather than by approval you cannot control. Then revise until it passes.
Principle 2
Do not stand up for what you do not feel
At Mount Holyoke, and again in the revival of 1850, she stayed a No-hoper while everyone she loved converted. The cost was that she was "not happy." The gain was a vocation: refusing the church's answers, she filled the void with "all the verbal resources she could muster."
Tactic: When a group demands a profession you do not hold, decline quietly and accept the cost. The space left by a refused consensus is often where original work begins.
Principle 3
Learn to say no early; your vocation will need it
She said no to conversion, to visiting, to Higginson's Boston, to Helen Jackson's offers, and finally to the man she loved: "'No' is the wildest word we consign to Language." When "Miss P-" asked her "to aid the world by my chirrup more," she "replied declining," and added that she "always burn such letters."
Tactic: Treat refusal as a skill to be practised, not a failure of nerve. The people around you who cannot say no are showing you what overcommitment costs.
Principle 4
Narrow the ground to deepen the work
The years of withdrawal were the years of 916 poems in five years. She designed the space: house and garden as boundary, Vinnie as "front line of defense," refuges in the stillroom (Johnson has her writing there "making butter and cheese") and, by Vinnie's story, the cellar bulkhead, flowers in place of visits, letters to ninety-three correspondents in place of society.
Tactic: Protect the conditions for deep work by subtraction: fewer places, fewer meetings, a partner or system that handles the outside world. Replace presence with written correspondence where you can.
Principle 5
Build your own edition before the world asks
With no outlet, she did not wait for one. For about seven years she threaded her fair copies into booklets that were, Sewall suggests, perhaps "her private substitute for publication." Even the counts are disputed, one of several places where the two main sources part.
✎
Where the Sources Disagree
The profile gives both versions where Sewall and Johnson differ.
| Question | Sewall | Johnson |
|---|---|---|
| Did she think herself "saved"? | His documents do not support it. | She believed so "from an early age" and took Communion "on occasion, without difficulty." |
| Did she consent to any publication? | "We can only assume that Emily gave her permission" for the 1878 poem. | All seven lifetime poems appeared "without her permission." |
| How many fascicles? | 39 threaded, 4 with brass fasteners, plus 25 unthreaded gatherings. | 40 booklets and 10 unsewn volumes, about 800 poems. |
| Mount Holyoke enrolment | 230 pupils. | 235 pupils. |
Tactic: If no one will publish your work, organise it as if they will. A finished, ordered body of work is your own edition and your instruction to whoever comes after.
Principle 6
Take the surgery, then keep your own gait
She asked Higginson for "surgery," thanked him for it, signed herself his "Scholar," and then "apparently paid no attention whatever" to his advice. "I never consciously touch a paint, mixed by another person," she told him. She deferred in form and kept control in substance.
Tactic: Seek out critics for the relationship and the friction, not for permission. Thank them, consider what they say, and keep your own voice.
Principle 7
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant
Metaphor was her "protective weapon," a way to "cool the hurt" and throw "stones without hurting people." It sharpened the poems by stripping away the "accidents (who? when? where?)." The cost was decades of being misread: "All men say 'What' to me." And in her letters it shaded into posing and, at times, "just plain lying."
Tactic: Indirection can make hard truths bearable and memorable. But keep the structure honest even when the surface is oblique, and expect to be misunderstood.
Principle 8
Concede the small thing, keep the large one
With her father she joined family prayers, baked his bread and stated her positions in ways "that would avoid any serious rupture," while reading the books he begged her not to read and refusing the faith he adopted. When he complained about a nicked plate, she smashed it on a stone in the garden: a joke he could not mistake. She declined invitations because father was "in the habit of me."
Tactic: With a powerful person you cannot leave, comply on the surface and reserve the ground that matters. When you must make a point, make it with humour they cannot miss and cannot punish.
Principle 9
Ration people, and know what rationing costs
Because meetings "became ordeals," "she found that she had to ration them very carefully," and reached her intimates by post. Her condolence letters were "an art in which she had few equals": when Higginson's wife died she wrote, "The Wilderness is new - to you. Master, let me lead you."
The cost is Sewall's hardest sentence: she "never achieved a single, wholly satisfying relationship with anybody she had to be near." Higginson, after one hour, was "glad not to live near her."
Tactic: If intense contact drains you and others, ration it and invest in written connection. But be honest that distance protects the work at the expense of intimacy.
Principle 10
If you will not publish, someone else will edit you
Her refusals left the poems to Higginson and Mabel Todd, who titled them and "regularized" her syntax; to editors who broke up the fascicles; and to a feud that kept 665 poems in a camphorwood chest until 1929. Helen Jackson had warned her: "When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy."
Tactic: Controlling your work in life does not control it after you. If the form matters, leave explicit instructions, or a trusted editor, before someone else decides for you.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Ask whether your work is alive, not whether it is liked. Her first question to a stranger was "if my Verse is alive."
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Do not stand up for what you do not feel. "They thought it queer I didn't rise ... I thought a lie would be queerer."
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Take the surgery, then keep your own gait. "You think my gait 'spasmodic' - I am in danger - Sir," and she went on writing exactly as before.
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Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. "Success in Circuit lies." The price was being misread: "All men say 'What' to me."
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Learn to say no early; your vocation will need it. "'No' is the wildest word we consign to Language."
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Build your own edition before the world asks. The threaded fascicles were her substitute for print and perhaps her plan for how the poems should one day be read.
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Narrow the ground to deepen the work. "I do not cross my Father's ground." Those were also the years of 366 poems in one year.
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Answer a tyrant's hint with a broken plate. She met her father's imperiousness with a joke he could not mistake.
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Wear mirth as mail. "Mirth is the Mail of Anguish ... Lest anybody spy the blood."
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If you will not publish, someone else will edit you. Others titled, regularised and locked away her poems.
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Let joy be abstemious and grief be wadeable. "I can wade Grief - / Whole Pools of it - / But the least push of Joy / Breaks up my feet."
