I'm nobody.

Who are you?

Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell. They'd advertise, you know. How dreary to be somebody. How public like a frog to tell one's name the livelong June to an admiring bog.

I remember sitting in my middle school English class class and reading a poem by Emily Dickinson for the first time. I don't remember the poem we were assigned to read that day but I remember the name Emily Dickinson and that de gereotype the only known image of her in existence. And they were staring back at me from the textbook. My teacher went on to tell the class about how strange Emily Dickinson was, how she would only wear white, how she wouldn't leave her house, and how none of her poems were published until after her death. Claims which are all in part, if not entirely false, but have nevertheless grown into myths surrounding the legend of Emily Dickinson. However, this image of the unconventional lady in white fascinated me. I hope it fascinates you, too. I am Marie Bartlett, director of the Ada May Ivester Education Center here at the Northeast Georgia History Center. You are listening to our museum's podcast. Then again today we are going to be taking a look at the life and legacy of Emily Dickinson and try to separate fact from myth. But be warned, she is a poet of paradox. Today I have with me Dr. Kristan Miller.

Hello. My name is Kristan Miller. I'm the Sunni Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of Buffalo. Sunni. And also an Edward H. Butler professor of Literature. Perhaps it would interest you to know that I taught for 26 years at a small liberal arts college in California Pomona College before coming to the University of Buffalo, UB. And I have spent a good part of my academic career in administrative positions so either as the director of programs like American Studies or Women's Studies, later Gender and Women's Studies or as the chair of English Departments both at Pomona and at UB. And now I serve as the director of Arts management at UB. So I've had both a broad administrative and research and teaching career. So, because we're talking about Dickinson today, it might interest you to know that I wrote my dissertation on Emily Dickinson and I have written on her off and on since that point, which is now a good many years ago. Although I have also written a great deal on modernist literature especially on female modernist poets like Mary Anne Moore. And starting in the early two thousands, two thousand and ten s I became very interested in digital work. And so founded the Marianne Moore Digital Archive which is editing in facing page manuscript and transcription form with Annotation all 122 writing notebooks that Maryam Moore kept during her lifetime and which have never before been published in any form. So Dickinson is an abiding, let's say interest or passion. But she is definitely not the only topic that I've written on during my career.

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, to Edward and emily dickinson. Her father, Edward Dickinson, took his role as the head of his family very seriously. He was just a very serious man in general. Those who knew him found his character and demeanor to be rather severe and at times obstinate. In his youth, he had attended Yale University, and then he returned home to set up his law practice in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Edward and the Dickinson family would become very prominent citizens in that town. He was involved in politics. He was a part of the conservative Whig Party, which, if you think about the characteristics of the Whig Party and of Edward Dickinson, it's rather a perfect fit for edward pretty much embodied the party's ethics for responsibility, fairness, and personal restraint. Emily's mother also named Emily. They obviously share a name. Emily was named after her mother. She had an extraordinary education for a woman of her time, but she had very little interest in writing. She was known to keep an immaculate house and also to be a very good cook. She was interested in gardening, however, especially growing roses. The family lived on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, for most of Emily and her sibling's childhood before moving back to the Dickinson homestead in 1855, which was still located in Amherst, Massachusetts. Emily had one older brother, Austin Dickinson, and one younger sister, Lavinia Dickinson, and she was very close to both of her siblings throughout her life. While Emily did not enjoy most domestic duties, she did enjoy baking and gardening, and she was good at both of those activities. Her round loaf of Indian and rye bread won second prize in the Amherst Cow Show in 1856, and she was also very exceptionally well educated for a girl of her time, I think that.

Nothing explains genius, right? So no formative influences or anything else. On the other hand, Dickinson had there were many elements of Dickinson's childhood that provided very important support to her. One is that she grew up in a family where she knew she was deeply loved by her parents, by her siblings, loved and supported. And in part, that meant that her father, by the time she was in her young adulthood, had achieved an income that enabled her not to have to marry and not to have to work, so she could stay at home, write her poetry, help support the household through working at home and nursing her mother, and so on. And that's a huge privilege not to have to marry with the distractions of wifehood and motherhood and so on, and not to have to work. She was also very well educated, so she first attended coeducational school called Amherst Academy, where not only many of her female friends were students, but also many boys, who later went on to Amherst College and then on to professional schools and became ministers and lawyers and doctors and missionaries and so on. So those were all great privileges, right? Great education, loving, supportive family and financial stability that enabled her to focus her life on what she cared most about, which I think was a writing. I would say one other thing that is perhaps not so commonly thought about Dickinson, which is that I believe she was not pressured to conform by any of the people or institutions in her life. So she was encouraged to think independently, use language in ways that revealed her kind of individual bent. So although many people would have preferred had she joined the church or had she declared herself to be saved in a religious form, she was never made to feel as though she was a real outcast or made to feel a kind of external pressure that would weigh heavily on her for the decisions that she did make. And again to go back to the Amherst Academy and Mount Julio Female Seminary, which she attended for a year. The instruction there encouraged original composition, so she chose topics for things she wanted to write about. Research on that education indicates that she was encouraged to use language that was not conventional, it wasn't formulaic. I think that she read a lot of poetry as part of her schooling, again at Amherst Academy and at Mount Holyoke at the Amherst Academy. I believe that at least during her last few years there, she was writing weekly compositions. And one of her teachers comments on the originality of her compositions, she wrote for a local, for a school paper. We don't think about people in the early or middle 19th century doing that, but she did, and one of her friends said that she was one of the wits, one of the humorists of the school paper. So in her early years, she was writing mostly pros, but she was encouraged to use language that expressed her own ideas. And I think she eventually went from there to developing a style of poetry that enabled her to do that even more pointedly and more intensively.

There was a surge of religious revivals in Massachusetts that took place when Emily Dickinson was a teenager. This coincided with the end of the Second Great Awakening. Dickinson's friends, sister and father all eventually joined the church along with her brother. During these revivals, Emily's mother was ahead of the crowd and had joined their local church the year after Emily was born, but Emily never did. Yet she had faith and a great knowledge of the Bible.

This is one of the elements of Dick and his life that it's maybe most difficult for us in the 21st century to understand, because we have more, in some ways, perhaps more categorical notions of religion than she did. So she grew up in the church, and she was baptized in her early childhood or infancy. She attended church regularly. She commented on sermons she knew her Bible forwards and backwards. She quotes the Bible or alludes to it constantly in poems and in letters, playfully, seriously, and so on. There's no doubt in my mind that she believed in a God. She addresses God sometimes in anger, sometimes in criticism, sometimes challenging, but sometimes in praise, sometimes more conventionally. So for her, the choice not to be saved or the language that they use most often during her lifetime, was that the decision not to join the church, not to become a member of the church, didn't mean she wasn't attending. It just means that she wasn't a member. So to give an example, when she was in the Mount Oligo Female Seminary, 1840 718, 48, her father was not yet a member of the church. Her brother Austin was not yet a member of the church. So it's not as though she was isolated in her family or even among the students at the school. There's a mistake in the notion that she was the only student who had no hope at Mount Holyofemale Seminary. Not true. You know, it was a small group that was designated as without hope. But she was not the only one. And as I said, her family included people who had not yet become members of the church. Her father became a member of the church in 1850s, so he must have been in his gosh, at least his 50s, mid 50s by then. Her brother didn't become a member of the church until 1856, and I think that was partly under the influence of his wife, or soon to be wife, susan Dickinson, who was a very active church believer and member. So anyway, the First Congregational Church in Amherst was very much a part of the family life, whether or not one was a member. And so saying that Dickinson didn't become a church member is not to say that she rejected the church outright. I think what she rejected was impart, the idea that you would testify in a kind of public way, that there was some power in the world that provided the absolute answer to profound questions, which she didn't believe and she was never willing to believe. So, again, this is some element of her independence of thought that she treasured. I think that perhaps she was also not interested in becoming a member of the church because she became and this is a question I know we'll get to later, but she did become increasingly reclusive, and after the age of about 30, she stopped attending church services. So she was no longer a part of that social world, although she liked to look out her window and watch the people walking by on their way to church and sometimes commented on them in letters. And a minister who became the primary pastor at the first church in, I think, 1867 or something like that, he and his family became very close family friends, and at one point, Dickinson's father asked the referendum Jonathan Jenkins, to examine Dickinson and determine whether or not her faith was sound. And so Jonathan Jenkins, again, this family friend, had a conversation with Dickinson and he emerged and he said, yes. I think that for Dickinson and for many theologians, faith necessarily includes the concept of doubt, because faith isn't knowledge, right? Faith is what we believe, and therefore it's impossible to know what will happen after death. She writes a great deal about immortality and eternity and what happens after death. At the moment of dying. One really marvelous poem begins, this world is not conclusion period.

Right?

Absolute statement. But then the rest of the poem goes on to say, but really, we didn't know anything about what happens after this world, and we can't know and nobody can tell us. There are strong voices from the pulpit, strong hallelujah's role. But then she concludes, narcotics cannot steal the tooth that nibbles at the soul. So almost like Carl Marx, religion is the opiate of the people, that we cannot stop that tooth of doubt from nibbling at us. Or it's another lovely poem that goes, faith is a fine invention for gentlemen that see, but microscopes are prudent in an emergency. So Dickinson, like many people of her time, balanced her trust in science with some kind of faith. And it wasn't a rote or easy or absolute faith, but it was faith. And faith is an invention. We need it, we make it up. But it's an important one.

When we talk about the church, when you're saying the church, what kind of church are we talking about?

This is the congregational church. So her family was a member of the first congregational church in Amherst. People mistakenly claimed that she grew up in a puritan atmosphere. It wasn't puritan, and it was also not puritanical. So this was, let's say, a more modern 19th century form of church and belief. There were many religious revivals, especially during the first, let's say, 30 years of her lifetime, and they rolled through Amherst as well as through other parts of New England. And it was often these revivals that were the impetus for people like her father to at some point become members of the church. So there certainly was a lot of religious fervor, but there were also very important men. So, for example, Edward Hitchcock, who was the president of Amherst College for a while, who wrote about the fact that a belief in God and a faith in Christianity were entirely compatible with scientific evidence. That is to say, you didn't have to believe in a six day creation or something like that in order to be fully Christian, fully a believer, and fully a person of science. So in that sense, again, she was very much a part of her time and a part of what was accepted within her church.

It is hard for us to imagine, but Emily Dickinson was probably better known as a gardener in her time than as a poet in her community. Edward Dickinson had a conservatory added to the homestead where the family could raise climatesensitive, plants year round. She also composed a book about some of her favorite plants.

The lilacs bending many a year will sway with purple load. The bees will not despise the tune their forefathers have hummed. The wild rose redden in the bog, the astor on the hill, her everlasting fashioned set and covenant gentians frill.

We know Emily started writing poetry in her late teens. Writing became incredibly important to her in her early 20s. From 1855 to 1865 are identified by scholars as the writing years, years that overlap with growing dissent and the breaking apart of the union that eventually led to the Civil War. A handful of her poems were published in the pro union magazine Drumbeat. During the Civil War, drumbeat was published to raise money for Union soldiers. Our next question is, would you consider Emily Dickinson's riding during the Civil War years linked to the national conflict?

So the simple answer is yes, it's definitely linked. I guess the more complicated answer begins with the fact that during the war so between 1861 and 1865, dickinson wrote more poems than Far and away, more poems than at any other moment in her life. So of those that we know she wrote during that period, there were well over 800. And I didn't look up the numbers, so I can't give it to you precisely. But this was a period during which she was at the height of her construction of manuscript booklets. So she would write a poem, or imagine a poem, copy it out in fair hand on a folded sheet of paper, stack sheets of paper on top of each other, and then stick holes through them and bind them into booklets. So she was doing a lot of it. She wrote at least 75 poems that were about the war. Allude to the war, in some ways, seemed to be responding to the really horrific deaths, really the absolute carnage of that war beyond what we can imagine now. There were individual battles where ten or 20,000 men were killed. So really mind boggling. Most of them she never sent to anyone. She did not circulate them. Dickinson sent many people what we now call letter poems. So just a poem that you would sign with her name and other letters. She quoted poems that she was writing, but most of the poems about the war, she did not circulate. Why is that? We don't really know. But there's some sense, maybe, in which these poems felt profoundly, I don't know, private to her. Many of them are about death. They're about pain, they're about suffering. At the same time, there's a kind of public element in the discourse. So, for example, she writes a lot of poems that resist the very popular discourse of heroic martyrdom. So far better that you die in the war than that you stay home and take care of me, your aging mother. It's like Dickinson is saying no. She writes a poem that begins, a toad can die of light. Death is the common right of toads and nats and men. So she say, Death is not so great, right? What matters is how you lived your life. And it's not that she opposed the war, but she opposed this notion that martyrdom was in and of itself a good. But she also wrote other poems that were more, let's say, that did have more of a conventional flavor. So one poem begins, they dropped like flakes. I'm not quoting it exactly. They dropped like flakes. They dropped like stars, like petals from a rose. And when her first editors published this poem, they gave it the title The Battlefield. So it's it's very clear that they understood this to be a poem about just the myriad of deaths during many, many battles. And that poem ends with the fact that these people perished in the seamless grass, so you couldn't see where individuals have died. But God can summon every name on his repealless list. That is to say, God knows where you've died, even if we can't see it or don't know. So that would be a far more conventional kind of war poem. But she never mentions the words civil war. She never writes about Union or Confederate or Rebel or Yankee soldiers. She never writes a poem about any babble. Instead, she writes so, for example, a poem that I think could very well be a dramatic monologue begins, it was not death, for I stood up, and all the dead lie down. It sounds very much like someone who has survived a battle and looks around and thinks, what kind of world am I in? Or maybe this person is suffering, wounded, whatever, but it's not death because the dead are lying down and I'm standing up. But deep sense of grief and sorrow and sometimes even despair about the extent of this carnage. Or another poem that begins, it feels a shame to be alive when men so brave are dead. Right? So a lot of people now write about survivor guilt. Well, she was writing about it in 1862. So anyway, yes, she wrote a lot of poems about the war and about suffering and about pain. And they aren't necessarily about the war, but there are enough that seem clearly to point at the war that one could at least speculate that many of the others also have that point of reference. And if I could just give one other example. She writes a couple of poems about nature in which she reveals that just when she's looking out at the world, what she's seeing is colored by literally colored by news of the war. So she writes about a sunset. She says, whole gulfs of red and fleets of red and crews of solid blood, or another poem that begins, the name of it is autumn. The hue of it is blood. So the leaves are piling like great globules in the alley. The falling leaves just look like masses of bloody waste. And it seems to me that that has to be, in some sense, a reference to the news that she's reading every day in the newspapers about the war. So, yeah, I guess I didn't say in my introduction that I have edited a collection of Dickinson's poems. And I have submitted to the press a co edited new collection of Dickinson's letters. The last time the letters were edited was in 1958. And that editor, very famously and totally outrageously, said that Dickinson knew nothing of history and did not live in it. Well, nonsense. She lived absolutely in her world and was responding to it all the time in all kinds of ways. And the Civil War was a major part of that.

By the time Dickinson had turned 35, she had composed more than 1100 concise, powerful lyrics that truly examined the human experience of pain, grief, joy, love, nature, and art. She recorded about 800 of these poems in small handmade booklets, which are now called fascicles. And in a way, these small handmade booklets are a very private form of publication, as she never truly showed them to anyone that we know of. Dickinson did continue to write poetry after her intense writing period, just not at the same pace. But it appears that she stopped formally assembling these little handmade booklets after 1865. Manuscripts dated to this later period appear less finished than those of her intense writing period. Those colors are incredibly intrigued by these later manuscripts, some of which are written on scraps of paper, like chocolate wrappers or the insides of envelopes, just any scrap piece of paper she could get her hands on. Also in this later period, one of Dickinson's poems was published anonymously in a Mask of Poets in 78, Dickinson's poem was called Success is Counted Sweetest. Whether Dickinson gave advance permission for this poem to appear in print is still a little bit in question. Emily Dickinson has a very unique style of writing and voice in her poems that made her different from other writers of her time. And today.

I have to say, it's the language. So Dickinson uses language in a way that uses extraordinary metaphors that are sometimes so surprising that they just take your breath away, or that you say, what on earth does that mean? And that often we compress different metaphors in such a short space that, again, you get that sort of surprise of the unexpected. And for me, it's just pure pleasure. So I love it that Dickinson's poems immediately give us some sense of wisdom or fun or descriptive accuracy, but they also leave a kind of playful, or not always playful mystery in the mind. So if we think just even a little bit harder about the language that she uses, what does it tell us that we wouldn't otherwise have known? So, for example, one of my favorite examples is a simple poem that begins, a bird came down the walk he did not know I saw. He bit an angle worm in half and ate the fellow raw. Okay, so this is an earthbound bird, a little comic, a little awkward, walking around on its 2ft. And then at the end of the poem, the bird takes flight, and the language changes from this kind of comic portrait of an earthly creature to something that is entirely magical. But she never uses the word magic or mystery or anything like that. Instead, she says that the bird unrolled his feathers and rode him softer home. Then oars divide the ocean two silver for a seam or butterflies off banks of noon leap flashless as they swim. So, wow. We've all looked at birds and thought, that is so cool, that kind of flight. But what on earth does two silver for a seam mean, right? Or the idea of butterflies leaping off a bank of noon, right? As though the air and heat or light or something you can hop off of, and that a bird's flight is doing the same kind of thing. Anyway, just I love the language, but I would say the if. What if you could only pick one thing that made her utterly different from most 19th century poets or even novelists. I would say it's the compression of her language. So Dickinson used as few words as possible to express what she wanted to express, and sometimes that meant she left out articles of speech, sometimes she left out verb forms or parts of a verb, or sometimes it meant she used a metaphor to say something in a way that communicated a thought but didn't map it. So, for example, there's a really lovely poem that begins, pain has an element of blank, right? Okay, so when we think an element of blank, does that mean you can't remember, or does it mean it wipes out all other feeling? Or what is an element of blank? Well, she doesn't interpret for us, right? She just uses this metonomy or figure of speech or metaphorical phrasing that both gives us a profound sense of what she's talking about and doesn't interpret it for us. Or another one of my very favorite examples of compression is in a poem that begins, essential oils are rung the adder from the rose. Be not expressed by sons alone. It is the gift of screws. So poetry, like perfume, doesn't exist, as it were, in nature. It's not just about the way we use language every day. So instead, it's expressed lovely pun, right? Both on the expression of oil through screws, but also through the expression of poetry through is it a painful process of composition? Well, sometimes it might be, but then this poem goes on, so be not expressed by sons alone. It is a gift of screws. And then it says, the general rose decay, but this in lady's drawer make summer when the lady lie in ceaseless rosemary. So all the verbs are in infinitive form. The general rose decay, but this make summer. And instead of makes summer, right? Or would make summer or might make summer. So the verb is kind of bare. And again, it leaves us to interpret precisely what kind of verb form might be most appropriate. Is it subjunctive? Is it truncated? Present tense or past tense? But it also gives it a kind of expansive sense, this make summer like it just goes on and on. Or when the lady lie and ceaseless rosemary anyway and so on. So that's a kind of multifold instance of ways that she uses compression in her poems. So she was never pious and she was rarely sentimental. There's a critic who died a few years ago, Jed Deptman, who argues that Dickinson created a new genre of lyric poem. And he calls it the trying to think genre. And I think that that's just exactly right, that Dickinson understood poetry and in particular, the compressed lyric poem, to be the most powerful and also the most conducive way to try to figure things out, right? To engage in the process of thinking. So that for her, a poem was not where you say what you already know or say what you've already concluded, but it's the place where you try to work things out. So, like that poem that I mentioned earlier, this world is not conclusion. Well, it sounds like she's beginning with a conclusion, but in fact, then the rest of the poem shows that this is really all in doubt, right? And so it's trying to Think. Or there's a famous poem that begins, I tried to think a lonelier thing than any I had seen. A polar expiation, an omen in the bone of death's, tremendous nearness. And then it goes on and on. I tried to think a lonelier thing than any I had seen. So it's sort of like she gives herself an assignment, okay, what's the loneliest thing I could possibly imagine? And then to get there, she has to make words up, right? A polar expiation sounds like expedition, but it's not expedition. And if it was an expiation, how could it be polar? And so on. So what you see in that poem is her thinking toward something. And I think you see this in a lot of her poems. She begins with a particular observation or idea or question or even definition. Faith is a fine invention, crisis is a hair, or hope is the thing with feathers. And then where is that going to take me? Well, she works it out in a way. You could say the fiction of the poem is that she's just working it out right as we are reading the poem itself. Whereas in fact, these are crafted poems, right? But the poem is about trying to think or about that process, and that's very unusual in the 19th century. So those are the things I would say.

While Diggington never had an incredible interest in being widely published or even widely read, she did allow a few people to read her work. The first one that we know of was Benjamin Newton. Benjamin Newton gave Emily a beloved copy of Everson's poems, and she shared some of her early poetry with him. Another one of the trusted few was Susan Dickinson, who received more than 250 poems throughout the two women's 40 year relationship. And then there was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who authored an article in an 1862 issue of Atlantic Monthly that encouraged young people to write and publish. Emily read this article, and the two began a correspondence. Dickinson sent him about 100 of her poems. She did meet Higginson in person for the first time in 170 when he visited her home in Amherst. In her youth, Emily had many meaningful friendships and was rather sociable. She had many friends from school. George H. Gould was one who she had a rather special relationship with, it seemed, for he did offer at least one marriage proposal. He was a graduate of Amherst College, but Emily did not accept this proposal. There was also Susan Gilbert, who was a good friend from her childhood and school days, and Susan would later become her sister in law. When Susan married Emily's brother Austin in 1856, the couple then built a beautiful Italianate style home next to the Dickinson's house. Austin and sue called their house the Evergreens. The Evergreens became a fashionable gathering place for Amherst society. Family took part in these social gatherings at the Evergreens early in the couple's marriage. In her later years, Dickinson enjoyed a romance with Judge Otis Phillips Lord, who was a friend of her father. He and his wife had been frequent guests at the homestead, but once his wife passed away and he was a widowerer, he began courting Emily Dickinson. There are drafts of letters to Lord suggests that the poet even considered marrying him. She never did. Of course.

The evidence that we have for Dickinson's love life exists in her letters. And there is no question but that Dickinson writes passionate letters to her sister in law, right first, her good friend Susan Gilbert, who becomes her sister in law Austin's wife. And the kind of overt passion of those letters dims somewhat with the years. But there's no question but that Susan remains a person of utmost intimacy and significance to Emily Dickinson to the end of her life. And she writes Susan beautiful letters also in her latest years. She's also, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, writing passionate love letters to Otis Lord, judge, who was on the Massachusetts Supreme Court and had been one of her father's very close friends. So he was considerably older than Dickinson. After his wife died, he was a frequent visitor to Amherst. I mean, not like, every week, but with some frequency. He and his wife would visit, and after his death, he continued visiting. And at some point, he and Dickinson moved from having a friendly relationship to a more romantic and passionate one. Did she ever have intercourse with anybody? Absolutely impossible to know. Was Susan Dickinson the defining love of her life? Some people say yes. Some people say maybe. But I would say yes, maybe. But I don't know what that means. I don't know what it would have meant to her, and I don't know what it would have meant at that point in time. So there's no question. But there were also many, let's say, romantic friendships among women in the 19th century in which passionate language was accepted. And she does write expressing love for other friends from high school or college or to yeah, well, to other friends. Let's say none to the same degree as Susan. So no question about Susan's importance. There have also been years and years of speculation about Dickinson's falling in love with a minister who she would have probably heard preach once when she was visiting in Philadelphia, Charles Wadsworth. You know, if if that was a passionate relationship, it really had to be mostly in her mind, I think, because she would have heard him preach, maybe met with him, although there's no indication that they met when she was in Philadelphia. Probably corresponded with him, but no indication that that was utterly passionate. Wadsworth apparently visited her twice during her life. So, yes, again, a powerful friendship. But Dickinson also knew dickinson was a great friend. I mean, she knew how to have intimate, powerful friendships, and I think with men and with women. So there is no conclusive evidence about any single person as the love of her life. There is clear evidence that at some point she was, I'm going to say deeply in love with Susan and also deeply in love with Otis Lord.

Increasing withdrawal from social situations began in her mid 20s. This withdrawal coincided with the beginning of her intense writing period in 1864 and 1865, digging underwent treatments for a painful eye condition, which is now thought to be artist. Her doctor was in Boston, an ophthalmologist named Henry W. Williams, and while under the doctor's care for eight months in 1864, and then for six months in 1865, she boarded with her cousins there in Boston. When her eye condition seemed to have been cured, she returned home. Those trips were to be her last out of Amherst. After her return in 1865, she rarely ventured beyond the grounds of the homestead. She saw people less and less, but remained open for visits from close friends and from family first.

I think that in the popular imagination, dickinson was far more reclusive or hermetic than she, in fact, was in her life. So until the age of, I don't know, around 30 she saw people. She traveled, you know, not a lot, but most people in the 19th century didn't travel a lot. But she did she, you know, she had, let's say, not an excessively active social life, but she had a social life. She saw young men, went out riding and so on and so on. Sometime around 1860, a little bit later, she gradually stopped being so socially engaged. Her sister Lavinia says, it's not as though this happened overnight. It sort of happened gradually, so it wasn't like she just made a decision, okay, that's it. I've had it. On the other hand, this is also, not coincidentally, I think, about the time when she really starts taking her writing very seriously and writing a lot of poems. So there are a number of years between 1862 and 1865, she is writing at least a poem every other day and sometimes close to a poem a day. That's an extraordinary output of poetry. And that doesn't happen just by, like, going about your daily life, right? You need some period of focus and concentration, if nothing else, just to write things down. And we know from later drafts of poetry that she keeps mostly with these early poems. We have no drafts, so we don't know if things came full blown from her mind all at once. Seems unlikely, or, you know, if they went through a draft or two, you know, and that as soon as she copied it out in clean form and put it into a booklet, then she threw away the drafts because she had preserved the poem and she wanted to keep it anyway. So, in part, she may just have been thinking she wanted more time for her poetry, and she didn't care so much about the social round of visits and so on that engaged most 19th century women. She didn't want to go visiting. She refused to see some number of visitors. Not all, but many. On the other hand, her sister Lavinia saw everybody. She was a town busybody. She gossiped. She loved seeing people. So Dickinson got all the news, and she often sent letters to people, some of whom she never saw face to face in her life, consoling them on a miscarriage or a death or sending them flowers or whatever it might be. So she maintained a kind of presence in the town that wasn't based on personal visiting or going to other people's houses. When she says, I never left my father's house or grounds. Those are pretty expansive grounds. She spent a lot of time in the garden. She spent a lot of time with her brother's family, or at least they were frequently in and out of the house. She saw the servants who worked inside the Dickinson house and in the barn and in the garden. So she was saying, Those people. Every year until his death. Her father hosted a very large reception at the time of the Amherst College commencement festivities. So all kinds of people came to the house, and Dickinson was one of the hosts of that reception, especially because her mother was somewhat frail and I think didn't much enjoy this. So she and her sister Lavinia, and sometimes their younger cousins, Francis and Louisa and Norcross, helped them. So she was seeing a lot of people then, and there were guests who always came for the commencement festivities. So Louise and Francis, Norcross, Samuel Bowles, who is the editor of the Springfield Republican, josiah and Elizabeth Holland, who were dear friends, and so on and so on. So she was not a total recluse, but she did pull back more and more from society. I'm also thinking, okay, I'm getting older, and I actually have less and less of a desire to go out at night and more satisfied with a kind of smaller scope of world. Dickinson was a very active correspondent, so in her later years, she was writing many people, and hundreds of her letters, we also know were destroyed. So we, you know, we actually don't know how many letters she was writing, how many people she was writing, but she was keeping up a very active correspondence. And part of that correspondence, especially in, let's say, the last five or six years of her life, were engaged in gift exchange. So she was sending people flowers or baked goods or other kind of food, and they were sending things back to her. So she would thank them for flowers or little painting they'd made for her or for bread and would you give me that recipe? Very kinds of exchange that showed an active relationship with people beyond her family and outside of her house that was not based on needing to see them. In a way, I'm saying, yes, she did become more reclusive, but it wasn't out of dislike of people or anything like that. I think she was protecting her own time, also her mother. So after her father's death in 1874, her mother had a very serious stroke, and for the next seven, maybe almost eight years, dickinson was very involved in nursing her mother, who was ill at home, right? People didn't go to the hospital, so she was involved in nursing. She herself was ill for much of the last three years of her life. So those kinds of things also interfered, of course, with going out and about.

As time went on, she withdrew more and more such unusual behavior as her startled flight from the doorbell or an increasing inability to see or visit her true friends. Sometimes it was said that she would speak with select visitors from behind a darkened door rather than face to face. As time went on, she hardly left her room in the house, but she still found ways to interact in her own way with the outside world. She had always loved baking and sometimes would even lower a basket full of gingerbread to the neighborhood children from her bedroom window.

So it's hard to know how apocryphal these stories are, but there has to be some truth to some number of them. So people would come over and play the piano for her, and she would sit at the top of the stairs, and then she would go down a backstair to the kitchen and send them some cake, but she would never see them. Or yes, there seemed to have been instances in which she was on one side of a door and somebody else was on another. Or again, she was at the top of the stairs and they were at the bottom. And they conversed. And there's one famous letter, or, let's say story, when her close friend Samuel Bowles came to see her and she refused. She said, no, I'm not coming down. And so he stood at the bottom of the stairs and he yelled up there, come down here, you damn rascal. And she evidently went down and was utterly charming and witty and whatever. And then she later writes him a note in which she says something about which she signs your rascal, and then says, I washed the adjective, so she's not going to repeat. So we don't really know if he said damn rascal, but that's the assumption that she wasn't repeating or she washed his adjective. So yes, she did refuse to see some people. And of course, once these stories get started, you don't know how much they get perpetuated, especially over the years or decades, by people who've read other stories and say, oh yeah, that happened to my mother, too, or whatever it would have been. But yes, there's no doubt that she was eccentric.

Legend has it that later in her life Dickinson wore white all the time. We know that this is not completely true as the one surviving photograph of her from earlier in her life, she's not wearing white. So she obviously did not do this throughout her life, but in her older years, it seems to have perhaps been a little bit more of a prominent color that she wore. When Thomas Higginson met her in 1870, she was indeed wearing a white dress. Her one surviving dress is white, and she's even buried in white. During digginson's lifetime, townspeople who had truly never seen or met her continued to spread this myth of her only wearing white. Now, another argument for perhaps why she liked the color white or wearing it. The heroine of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Lee, one of Dickinson's favorite books, also wore white. Yet if we look at it from a practical standpoint, white is just an easy to care for color in a time when bleaching was considered the most reliable solution for cleaning white, solid garments.

Okay, so again, this is something that started I don't know when, but definitely after she was in her thirty s. And of course, there are all kinds of speculations about what this meant or what it was about or what choices she was making. And the thing that I have read that makes the most sense is that she was receiving a regular prescription for a kind of hand cream that prevented eczema. And it could be that she was allergic slightly, or maybe more than slightly, to clothing dyes, and that wearing white helped to prevent this eczema. And that, to me, just makes a great deal of sense, because she often wore brightly colored shawl over her dress, so she wasn't rejecting color. It seemed instead that she was maybe protecting her skin. Would she have enjoyed the drama of wearing a white dress and being thought of as some kind of queen recluse or whatever it was? Yeah, she probably would have, because she had that very performative streak. In fact, one of her cousins, I think it was Louis and Norcross, tells the story that Dickinson would sometimes recite her poems to the family. So, like, she would pull back the curtain and she'd say, a bird came down the walk. He did not know I saw. In other words, she would perform a poem that she'd written as though it was something that she was seeing right then, or something like that. I think she had a great sense of fun, a great sense of humor, and there was, I'm sure, some dramatic element to all of this, so nobody really knows. But I like the idea that she might very well have had a skin condition that was exacerbated by clothing dyes, especially because a lot of clothing dyes were fairly harsh still at that time, and still are. And because we have no photographs and we don't have reports, we don't know how other parts of her skin may have been affected. Yeah, Dickinson has always imagined as being really quite tiny. And when you see the dress, it does look like she was very small, but often it's because the dress is kind of cinched in the back, you know, to fit a particular form, and because it's presented close to the floor. And so you look at it and you think, oh, that wouldn't fit me. But in fact, I'm about five foot one, and Dickinson was almost certainly taller than I was. And it does not appear that she was overly thin. She wasn't heavy, but she wasn't skinny, let's say. So, yeah, she wore white dresses, and yes, she was small by today's standards, but not extremely petite.

Emily Dickinson's father died in 1874, and Edward Dickinson's death was unexpected. He was away from home at a boarding house in Boston. He had collapsed the day before while giving his speech in the state legislature. The morning of June 6, 1874, had been very hot indeed and is thought to have contributed to his collapse and demise. His death was a great shock and grief to the whole family, as well as to the town, which closed down on the afternoon of his funeral. The year after her father's death in 1875, emily Dickinson's mother had a stroke, and the stroke left her paralyzed for the next seven years until her mother's death on November 14, 1882. Her daughters Lavinia and Emily took care of their mother the year after that, in 1883, emily's nephew Gibb died at the age of eight. Otis Lord, whom Emily had a romantic relationship with, died the year after that, in 1884. The poet herself became ill shortly after her nephew Gibb died, and she remained in poor health until she died at age 55 on May 15, 1886, with Austin and Lavinia at her side as she passed away. She was buried four days later in the town cemetery, now known as West Cemetery. Whatever the reason for her color choice, dickinson was buried in white and enclosed in a white casket.

Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

After Emily's death, her devoted sister, with whom she had lived with her entire life, except for one year at boarding school, vinny Lavinia, but they called her Vinny burned her sister's correspondence, as Emily had requested. But letters were not all that Vinnie found in Emily's room. Going up to Emily's room, the place where she had spent a fair amount of her time throughout her entire life, and especially in her last years in ill health, vinny found hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of poems about which Emily had given no instructions on what to do with. Her family knew that she wrote for hours and hours at a small desk in her bedroom, but the scope of her work was a bit of a surprise. Lavinia approached two of the poet's friends, sister in law Susan Dickinson and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson for help. Susan did not pursue publication quickly enough for Lavinia, though, and Higginson was otherwise occupied. So Lavinia turned to Mabel luma's todd. Todd was the vivacious young wife of an Amherst College professor who also had a romantic relationship with Lavinia's brother Austin. Todd never met Emily Dickinson, but, of course was friends with Austin and Lavinia. Todd was a good choice, perhaps because her artistic and literary sensibilities made her able to organize Dickinson's poems in a great way. But she was perhaps a very poor choice in terms of family relationships. While Austin was not directly involved in the editing of his sister's poetry, his affair with Todd, who served as the principal editor of Dickinson's work, created additional tensions with his wife and surviving sister. After finally listing Thomas Wentworth Higginson as co editor, todd completed Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1894. Years after her death in 1890, that book of poetry would appear before the American public.

Okay, so first of all, ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, and to our knowledge, she did not object to any of them. And she and Susan seemed to have been very excited and kind of happy about at least the first one. So I don't think that she absolutely objected to the idea of publication altogether. I think she had no interest in being a, as it were, professional poet. That is to say, someone who was publishing and had in any way to be responsible for a kind of public career that did not interest her at all and probably went against the family mores because her father was not big on what we would now call women's rights. And I think this is something Apple TV Plus does get right, I think would have disapproved of Dickinson's publishing. Does he ever say that to her? Not that we know of. Does she ever say he said that? Absolutely not. Again, that we know of. But he probably wouldn't have approved. A lot of the most recent research indicates that Dickinson was probably interested in posthumous publication. She was very carefully preserving her poems, and she mailed her poetry to a lot of people, including very important people thomas Higginson, Samuel Bowles, and so on. So people who had significant roles in the editorial world. Late in her life, she corresponded fairly actively with Niles, who was the director editor in chief of Roberts Brothers Press, where her poems were eventually published, and at one point even asks her for a manuscript of her poems. And she doesn't send it to him, but she sends him two or three poems. So, like enough to keep him really interested, but not enough so he could actually publish a book while she was still alive. It was only four years after her death that the first volume of her poems was published, so that was in very short order. And then within the next decade so between 1890 and 1900, there were two other editions of the poems and an edition of the letters published, and there were over 500 reviews published of those poems. And according to the person who has edited those reviews and commentaries, one of the words used most often in those reviews and commentaries was the word genius. So I would say the response to Dickinson's poetry was extremely positive, but it was positive in a way that framed her as a kind of 19th century, innocent, pure writer of a child like nature and so on and so on. I think for that reason, probably there was a hiatus then in the popularity of Dickinson's work, so that in 1917, there was another edition of her poems that catered a little more to modernism. And then although, as you say, there were many other editions and competing editions of letters and poems published by different Susan's Family and Lavinia and maybe Todd, wasn't until the mid 1950s that Thomas H. Johnson published what you could call a kind of complete poems. That is to say, that he managed to see, or at least accumulate material from all of the parties and put it together into one major volume. But at that point, Dickinson was not a famous poet in the way that Whitman already had become a famous poet. And when I was in college, when I was in high school in the 1960s, I never read Dickinson when I was in college, although I was an English major. We read Dickinson only a few of her poems in one course, even though I was taking lots of poetry courses. She wasn't that famous. And when I was writing my first book on Dickinson. So in the 1980s, most people like me were still feeling the need to make the argument that she was a great poet, and in particular, that she was a poet who would be of interest to feminists because she did deal with issues of gender and femaleness and female being in the world, let's say. So now, nobody would even imagine that that argument had to be made, right? She is so famous and she's being translated all over the world, and thank heavens, but it came relatively late.

Over the years, Emily Dickinson has only grown in popularity. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the writer herself, and several biopics were made. There was a movie made about her life in 2016 called A Quiet Passion. Another movie came out in 2019 called Wild Nights with Emily. There was also a TV show that premiered in 2019 and ran over a three season arc called Dickinson, which was produced by Apple TV.

Plus, its primary intended audience is not Dickinson scholars. Whereas I might get worked up about anachronistic elements of presentation or with factual matters that seem to me to misrepresent some important element of Dickinson's life, I also understand what it is that the TV series wanted to do, and that is, in a way, to bring Dickinson into a 21st century kind of lifestyle. I'm going to say so it makes her the rebel in part by making everybody else highly conforming and repressive. And that's, as you can tell from some of my earlier answers, what I must object to. So, sure, her mother was more conventional than she was, but was she constantly hounding Dickinson to marry or to go out with suitors or whatever? No, I don't think so. There's no evidence for that. None. Zero. So do I therefore object to the series? No, because it is fun, and I know that it has brought a large number of people to read Dickinson or think about Dickinson. And my hope is that they are also then wanting to find out more accurate information about how she lived and 19th century life and so on. So nobody watches that and thinks that there was really a rapper named Death who came by in a carriage or whatever else, right? Or that they really did hip hop dancing. Nobody would think that. On the other hand, maybe those sort of fun elements would lead people to ask other kinds of questions and I have had people write to me and say, just found your edition of the poems. I'm embarrassed to admit that I got interested in Dickinson because of the Apple TV series. And I think, don't be embarrassed, however it works, that's good.

I'll admit I was one of those people who really got interested in Emily Dickinson after watching that TV show. The TV show is kind of odd, but it is really well done and incredibly fascinating. It made me want to know more about Emily Dickinson and what her life was really like. There was so much I did not know about her, and she is even more complex and just so interesting, even more interesting than the legends about her. Lead one to believe.

A final thought would be that Dickinson seems to me to be beloved by very ordinary people who may not care a lot normally for poetry, because the poems are short, they're easily held in the memory. They have the rhythms of hymns or ballads, right? So they are kind of catchy and sweet in that way, and they always immediately give you something. So they appeal to scholars and they appeal to people who love modernist and experimentalist poetry because they can be so difficult and challenging and mysterious. But they also appeal to I don't know how many lectures I've given to or not lectures, how many conversations I've had with people in church basements or high schools, because people are just fascinated by the work and they want to hear more about particular poems or the poet's life. And I think that that is an extraordinary quality. It's one of the things that makes her so great, and then it just makes working with the poetry and reading it such fun.

If you are interested in more scholarly works on Emily Dickinson, her life, and her writings, please see the links in the description for different publications from today's. Guest speaker, Dr. Kristan Miller.

I've published two critical books on Dickinson. One is called Emily Dickinson. A poet's grammar. And this is a study of the poet's Language that was published in 1987. Then the other monograph, so single book that I authored on Dickinson's work came out in 2010, and it's called Reading in Time Emily Dickinson in the 19th Century. I've edited different collections of essays that have to do with Dickinson. The most recent is an Oxford University Press Handbook on Emily Dickinson, I don't know, six or 700 pages very long. It was co edited with Karen Sanchez Epler. And then probably my most recent work on Dickinson has been Emily Dickinson's Poems as she Preserved them. So an edition of The Complete Poems that came out in 2016 and won a Modern Language Association Editing prize, and now The Complete Letters, which is also coming out with Harvard University Press and should be published in the spring of 2024. That's being coedited with Donald Mitchell. So a lot of joint work and independent. Work.

Unable are the loved to die for love is immortality. Emily dickinson. Then again is the production of the Cattral digital studio at the northeast georgia history center. Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. It really helps other people discover the show. There are a few great ways to support the history center. Make a donation online by clicking the donate button on our website at www. Dot necahg. Become a Digital member to receive exclusive invites to members only live streams every Friday at 02:00 p.m. Eastern, and you can register on our membership page at www dot n e gahc.org. We also have an online gift shop with lots of great items for all ages. Use promo code Then Again for 15% off your online order. Valid on anything except memberships and handmade items. We'll see you next week for another episode of Then Again. Thanks y'all you.