Focus: Emily Dickinson Dec. 10,1830 May 15,1886

"People say a word dies when it is written by the pen, but for me that word's
Life is just about to begin."

by: Bea Tan

On Dec. 10,1830 at Amherst, Massachusetts, Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson was blessed with a baby daughter. She was their second child. They named her Emily after her mom, unknown to them that history would eventually call her "a literary legend".

Together with his older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia, Young Emily was brought up to be a cultured Christian. The whole family was religious except for Emily. Emily was freethinking and did not allow herself to be dependent on the beliefs of her father. Although she claimed that her respect for her father was tinged with fear. She even confided to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she was already fifteen years old when she learned how to tell time. This was because her father was the one who taught her to tell time when she was younger and she was so afraid to ask when she did not understand. She did not tell this to anyone then because she feared that her father would know about it.

Emily's father was a public figure during those times. He was the treasurer of Amherst College, which her grandfather was one of the founder, and he was an active town official and worked in the General Court of Massachusetts, the State Senate and U.S. House of Representative. But unlike her father, she lived a reclusive life. Emily started her reclusive years when she was in her early thirties. She was rarely seen in public and she was always wearing a white dress. Her solitude later became almost complete that at times she does not even face her visitors and only talk to them through an ajar door. The only time she was lively was the short time she attended Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College (formerly known as South Hadley Female Seminary). She confines herself in her home, writing poetry and attending to household chores.

Emily lived a very simple life yet her words in her poetry were written as if she experienced everything that a person could feel in a lifetime. Her words were so real that researchers were baffled as to whom she was constantly referring to when she writes poems and where the inspiration came from. There were no records of Emily having a romantic relationship with anyone nor did she ever got married. It seemed impossible that her family inspired her. Emily believed that her mother had no interest in literature and her father although bought her tons of books discouraged her to read them because he believed that it "joggle" her mind and beliefs. It is truly amazing to note how passionate her words are. One of her poems entitled "Consecration" is an excellent example of this mysterious motivation that surrounds her writings.

As to whom she was referring to that broke her heart, nobody really knows until now. She corresponded to a few of her male friends but there were no hints that would prove that she ever had any romantic relationship with them. She spoke of love as if she felt it over and over again. She defined it in one of her poems entitled Love. " Love is anterior to life. Posterior to Death. Initial of Creation, and the exponent of breath." Her works revolved on Love, hope, life, death, faith, passion and covers a wide range of topics. Her poems were not consistent and mostly depended on her feelings at the time.

Bless God, he went as soldiers,
His musket on his breast;
Grant, God, he charges the bravest
Of all the martial blest.

Please God, might I behold him
In epauletted white,
I should not fear the foe then,
I should not fear the fight.

Although she spent most of her life at home, she did communicate to friends by sending them letters and her poetry. One of her closest friends was the wife of her brother Austin, Susan Huntington Gilbert. She was the person whom Emily sent most of her poems. Even before Susan and Austin were married, Susan and Emily already shared an intimate friendship. Their communication stopped for awhile when Susan and Austin got married and resumed only when the couple moved next door to Emily. Another friend of Emily was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In an article, Higginson wrote about Emily five years after she died, he claimed that he was not only her confidant but her literary counselor as well. In a letter Emily sent him, she wrote, "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. Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude. If I make a mistake, that you dared tell me would give me sincerer honor toward you." She valued his thoughts towards her work and sent him letters and poems constantly. Although he rejected her poems at first, he was the first one to publish her work after she died.

Dickinson was unable to submit her poems for publication herself. Only six or seven of her poems were published during her lifetime and without her permission. It was estimated that Dickinson wrote about 1700 poems. On her deathbed, she asked her sister Lavinia to burn all her poems. After publication Lavinia burned all the originals. Her style is somewhat personal and direct. She saw the very essence of things and wrote about as if she does not care for conventional style or traditional format. She often used dashes and capitalization's to emphasize her point in both her letters and poems. Her work was probably so ahead of her time that people then were not yet ready for it. Literary editors of the 19th century attempted to alter her style by changing dashes into basic punctuations, using conventional grammars, editing the capitalization and even assigning titles. It was only through Thomas Johnson's publication of Emily's work in 1955 did people really saw her style.

Emily Dickinson once wrote "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation of my dog would forsake me then. My barefoot rank is better." True enough she did not escape fame that even her death on May 15,1886 did not become a hindrance. She became the posthumous fame of the 19th and 20th century. Perhaps her reclusive life contributed to her popularity because people wanted to know more about her and her source of inspiration. Her mysterious life led to many speculations and intrigues regarding her true personality. Some are even baffled with regards to her sexual preference. Some feminist scholars speculated that she had romantic feeling towards Susan Gilbert. The letter Emily sent to Susan brought about this speculation.

Speculations based on this of course depend merely on interpretation. She might be truly in love with Gilbert or just affection for a close friend or she might be speaking of a totally different person. Whatever her sexual preference might be or who her true inspirations were, is irrelevant. What's important is that she left a legacy for all the readers. Nobody caught the true essence of life in writing more than Emily Dickinson did. She was truly a master poet.

"People say a word dies when it is written by the pen,
but for me that word's Life is just about to begin."
- Emily Dickinson