_Emily Dickinson_
Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original
contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts,
December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a spiritual hermit,
actually spending most of her life without setting foot beyond her
doorstep. She wrote her short, introspective verses without thought
of publication, and it was not until 1890, four years after her
death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry appeared with
an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
“She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a
very few friends,” writes Higginson, “and it was with great
difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime,
three or four poems.” Yet she wrote almost five hundred of these
direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending many of them in
letters to friends, or (written on chance slips of paper and
delivered without further comment) to her sister Sue. Slowly the
peculiar Blake-like quality of her thought won a widening circle of
readers; _Poems_ (1890) was followed by _Poems—Second Series_ (1892)
and _Poems—Third Series_ (1896), the contents being collected and
edited by her two friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel
Loomis Todd. Several years later, a further generous volume was
assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled _The
Single Hound_ (1914)—almost all of the new poems (to which Mrs.
Bianchi wrote a preface of great personal value) being a record of
Emily Dickinson’s romantic friendship for her sister.
The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and clear
imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the later
Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost mystical warmth
brings her closer to the great ones of her time. “An epigrammatic
Walt Whitman,” some one has called her, a characterization which,
while enthusiastic to the point of exaggeration, expresses the
direction if not the execution of her art. Technically, Emily
Dickinson’s work was strikingly uneven; many of her poems are no
more than rough sketches, awkwardly filled in; even some of her
finest lines are marred by the intrusion of merely trivial conceits
or forced “thought-rhymes.” But the best of her work is incomparable
in its strange cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a
box of many jewels, sparkling in their brilliancy, cameo-like in
their delicate contours, opalescent in their buried fires.
Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at Amherst,
May 15, 1886.