From The Poetry Foundation:
Forget the Emily Dickinson you think you know, that hermetic author of bedeviling sense, “So Anthracite, to live – // For some – an Ampler Zero -.” Say goodbye to the Belle and Recluse of Amherst, Mythic Emily, and every other epithet that scholars, biographers, and critics have coined to stoke the public’s fascination with a human sphinx. Behold, instead, a woman who baked—a lot—for friends, family, and neighbors; who lamented that she didn’t receive any valentines at school (“I have not quite done hoping for one”); who was very often funny and used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family (“Your welcome letter found me all engaged in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!”); and who, until age 35, traveled and visited friends, before poor health made traveling impossible. Toward the end of her life, in 1884, she sent 86 letters to 34 recipients: the majority express thanks, others include a gift of flowers or food, and a handful convey condolences or congratulations. Her supposed withdrawal from the world—and readers’ continued interest with such a narrative—has an apocryphal dimension we must be willing to forego in order to see and hear the poet clearly, perhaps for the first time .
Edited by the scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024) promises to be the definitive edition of the poet’s 1,304 letters, expanded, revised, and annotated for the first time in more than 60 years. At least 80 letters have been discovered or re-edited since Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward published their edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1958 . As Miller and Mitchell make plain, “Editorial standards have changed dramatically. And Dickinson scholarship has exploded. Scholars were still debating the significance of Dickinson’s oeuvre in the 1950s, but her position in the pantheon of great writers is now secure.” In other words, there has never been a better time to revisit and restore the author’s charismatic, sensitive, and characteristically brilliant prose.
The new book’s extensive and considered introductory essay establishes Miller and Mitchell’s modus operandi, and carefully outlines the ways this version distinguishes itself from its predecessors. Among the editors’ contributions to Dickinson scholarship is a painstaking effort to correct the chronology of the letters that Johnson and Ward previously published. Even poems dated by R.W. Franklin, the leading scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, are identified only by year, or season and year. As Miller and Mitchell explain, “A collection of letters that proceeds chronologically, however, requires greater precision than a year to establish a likely sequence of correspondence. Our redating, together with our annotation, indicates that Dickinson was writing in response to local and world events and to the visits of her friends, and we attempt to recreate that sequence of response.”
To undertake this delicate work, Miller and Mitchell set out on an investigation of poetic observation, relying on Dickinson’s own attention to the natural world:
Because Dickinson wrote so often about plants, birds, bees, and other insects, we attend to the typical New England season of bloom for arbutus, apple blossoms, or roses, and to migratory patterns. … Much of her correspondence was occasional. Even if a poem was composed months or years earlier, her sending it to a particular person is likely to respond to something immediate—whether a weather event or event in a correspondent’s life or in the world. In assigning a placement or date to the letters, we consider their sequential relationship to known occasions. We also consider them holistically, in relation to the narrative of relationships illuminated by other letters.
Relying on a local record of weather patterns in Amherst (not available to Johnson and Ward) and the Williston Seminary catalogue, the editors were able to assign, for instance, the precise date of October 14, 1844 to a letter previously dated “Autumn 1844.”
Along the way, Miller and Mitchell provide invaluable contextual annotations and restore material that previous transcribers omitted—“even where the omissions themselves seem innocuous,” as they write. We learn that hundreds of Dickinson’s letters were destroyed, which was customary in the 19th century after a person died. But Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of two volumes of Dickinson’s poems, had the foresight to begin collecting letters in the early 1890s, preventing the further loss of these precious artifacts. Among the newly included letters are two to Elizabeth Seelye, whose husband Julius was inaugurated as president of Amherst College in 1877 (the family noted having burned 75 Dickinson poems they received, an act of shocking sacrilege to modern readers) and another to Ellen Dickinson, the wife of Emily’s cousin, who reports having destroyed “a considerable number” of Dickinson’s poems. This edition expeditiously illustrates the race against the ravages of negligence and time that such scholarship requires.
The larger consequence of these efforts is to show, once and for all, that Dickinson was never isolated from the world, but rather sensitively engaged with local and national events. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a distinguished family with a wide social circle, she was an active member of her community, comfortable initiating correspondence with even famous individuals of her time—among them the Civil War colonel, abolitionist, author, and advocate of women’s rights Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship. Her reluctance to see visitors as she grew older—but not to bake them gingerbread or correspond with them—can be explained at least in part by the time she spent caring for ill family members or navigating her own poor health. She was socially adept and flexible, naturally modulating in her correspondences, easily and willingly engaging with people from all social classes. Her letters to family members buzz with local and personal news. An 1850 letter to Abiah Root, a close friend Dickinson met at Mount Holyoke, captures the poet’s playfulness:
The circumstances under which I write you this morning are at once glorious, afflicting, and beneficial, glorious in ends , afflicting in means , and beneficial I trust in both . Twin loaves of bread have just been born into the world under my auspices, fine children, the image of their mother , and here my dear friend is the glory.
Dickinson’s older brother, Austin, especially relied on her to be kept abreast of happenings at home whenever he was away. “While she may not have seen some of these correspondents, or seen them only rarely, Dickinson understood friendship and repeatedly showed herself to be a loving friend,” Miller and Mitchell write.
She is also frequently funny , capable of making quick, wry assessments alongside her casual profundity. When Dickinson was 10 years old, her father Edward was forced to sell part of the Dickinson homestead out of financial necessity, moving the family to a smaller house on West Street where they would stay for 15 years. Edward repurchased the house in 1855, whereupon 25-year-old Emily commented in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland: “They say that ‘home is where the heart is.’ I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.” A later letter to Holland concludes with her typical warmth and tenderness, “Pardon my sanity Mrs. Holland, in a world insane, and love me if you will, for I had rather be loved than to be called a King in Earth, or a Lord in Heaven.” Dickinson’s life as a poet was shaped by these mundanities and everyday upheavals, as well as by larger historical undercurrents, which she sensed with stunning perspicacity. In spring 1861, she sent a letter-poem to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson that, portentously, alluded to the forthcoming Civil War:
A slash of Blue – A sweep of Gray – Some scarlet patches on the way, Compose an evening sky – A little Purple – slipped between – Some Ruby Trowsers hurried on – A Wave of Gold – A Bank of Day – This just makes out the morning sky!
But it’s this edition’s underlying scope that will truly win over the poet’s admirers. “Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” the introduction begins.
Link to the rest at The Poetry Foundation
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