Emily Dickinson - Influential Women in History

Various

• Publisher: Brilliant Women - Read & Co.
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781473380448
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Mujeres en la poesía

This volume contains a collection of essays and excerpts on the famous American poet and influential woman of history, Emily Dickinson. Highly recommended for students of literature and others with an interest in the life and work of this seminal writer. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830–1886) was an American poet commonly hailed as being among the most important figures in American poetry. Not much is known about her personal life, but evidence suggests that this is because she spent most of her time isolated from other people. Those who lived around her claimed that she took to wearing only white apparel and rarely left her bedroom in her later years. Despite being a prolific writer producing a corpus of over 1, 800 poems, only 10 were published during her lifetime. Her poetry was considered unusual for her time, incorporating a variety of odd features and breaking many of the conventional rules.

THE LIFE
AND LETTERS OF
EMILY DICKINSON

Selected Chapters by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

ANCESTRY

There was nothing in the parentage or direct heredity of Emily Dickinson to account for her genius. There was equally nothing to impede its course or contradict its authority. It claimed her without those dissenting elements of being which came to her from her ideally mated but completely opposite father and mother. Her parents did not interfere with her actual life and behavior, both because they never realized her preoccupation quite fully, and because they had no will to destroy the individuality of any one of their three children.

Nothing could have been more alien to any of the Dickinsons than a desire to be peculiar—"queer" they would have called it—or to do what the later generation calls pose. Eccentricity consciously indulged in would have merely been reprimanded as bad manners. Their dignity was of the stiff, reserved type resenting the least encroachment on its individuality in character and privacy in habit—which they insured by conforming handsomely to the sense of their community, the laws of their state and country, and the will of God as expounded from pulpits of the white meeting-house in Hadley and later in Amherst, where the colonial train of Emily Dickinson's ancestors undeviatingly worshipped. There was no allowance made in her family for oddity—temperament had not been discovered yet. There was no exception to what was expected of each of the children alike, her sister Lavinia, her brother Austin, and herself. What Emily did succeed in evading and eluding and imagining and believing, and setting down for those who came after her to profit by, was her own performance, dictated by her own need for the solitude in which to write, and the time necessary for thought. She was spared none of her share in the household duties, nor did she wish to be.

Before one thinks of her as a poet and philosopher or mystic, one must in honesty remember her as an adoring and devoted daughter, a sister loyal to blows, a real nun of the home, without affectation or ritual beyond that of her gentle daily task, and all that she could devise of loving addition to the simple sum. To one who loved her it is unthinkable that she could ever be supposed to have consciously secreted herself, or self-consciously indulged in whim or extravaganza in living, which her fine breeding would have been the first to discard as vulgar and unworthy. It was her absorption in her own world that made her unaware often of the more visible world of those who never see beyond it. It was not that she was introspective, egoistic, and selfish—rather that she dwelt so far out in the changing beauty of Nature, in the loves and joys and sorrows of the dear ones she held closest, in the simple drama of the neighborhood, and most of all the stupendous and sometimes revealing wonder of life and death and the Almighty God thundered at her from the high pulpit on Sundays—and known so differently in her own soul the other days of the week—that she never thought of Emily Dickinson at all; never supposed any one watched her way of living or worshipping or acting. She never had time in all the vivid, thrilling, incessant programme of night and day, summer and winter, bird and flower, the terror lest evil overtake her loved ones, the glory in their least success—never stopped in her flying wild hours of inward rapture over a beauty perceived or a winged word caught and spun into the fabric of her thought—to wonder or to care if no one knew she was, or how she proceeded in the behavior of her own small tremendous affair of life.

Her heredity is distinctly traced for nine generations in America. Her first local ancestor settled in old Hadley and a later generation was one of the founders of the church and town of Amherst. There were Dickinsons mentioned in Hadley among the first letters of the original Indian grants in 1659. And when in 1714 the order was given for five men to superintend the erection of a new meeting-house in the middle of two streets, one of them was a Dickinson. There was also an ancestor in the famous "Shays's Rebellion" in 1786. Before that, in England, the stock from which she came was clear for thirteen generations more. Further than that her father's curiosity or pride had never gone in research.

Her own grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was the first of her direct line in Amherst. His connection with the establishment of Amherst Academy, from which the College later sprang, is familiar local history. In his fervor for "the in-bringing of the Kingdom" he foresaw the universal education of ministers, and calculated the millennium in the near future of "about seven years." He was educated at Dartmouth College, a man of sincere piety, and a generosity that was his financial ruin. In a letter from his sister, Emily's Aunt Lucretia, to his son Edward at Yale, the following passage occurs. It is dated 1821:

Father left in the yellow gig for the Bay Road this morning. He has gone to Boston by coach to see about getting a charter for something they propose to call Amherst College. He looked so fine in his white beaver and new great coat.

Until this ardent enthusiast, almost bigot, lost all the money he had not previously given away in his fanaticism for education and religion, the family throve and were favorably known for this world's prosperity as well as in matters of piety and attainment.

His oldest son Edward, who was the father of Emily, was brought up strictly and with a regard for the needs of the missionaries first. He was sent to Yale College, driven there, too, in the family chaise upon at least one trip mentioned in the family correspondence. The family letters during that period are happily at hand and throw a profound and touching atmosphere about these earlier days of education, when it was a sacred boon possible to the few through fierce sacrifice, often, on the part of those who gave it, and not to be entered into with less than a consecrated spirit of trust for those to whom it was to be returned, transformed into a wisdom that was to help save the world.

In one letter from Samuel, who was a deacon for forty years in the First Church and whose zeal was sleepless, to Edward, his son, this passage strikes its own contrast to modern fathers and sons.

December 17, 1819, he writes:

It is good news to hear of your good health and conduct. I rejoice to hear that the government of the college pleases you—that so much attention is paid to moral and religious instruction. Learning and science without morality and religion are like a man without a soul. They probably would do hurt rather than good. No man is a neuter in the world. His actions, his example, his concepts, his motives are all tending either to that which is good or evil.

He concludes:

Remember the importance of the present time and never forget our hereafter.

Your affectionate parent,
Samuel Fowler Dickinson...