Emily Dickinson -- Poet

Date: 1830 to 1886
Location: Amherst, Massachusetts USA
Surnames/tags: Dickinson Gunn Montague

Contents 1 Emily Dickinson, 2 American Poet and a descendant of Clan Gunn from the Scottish Highlands 3 Clan Gunn Ancestry 4 Sources

Emily Dickinson,

American Poet and a descendant of Clan Gunn from the Scottish Highlands

Emily Dickinson was a troubled soul; and arguably one today’s best-known iconic poets of the American Romance movement. She and Herman Melville were not well known during the period of their lifetimes; but are the most widely read in the modern age. She was a contemporary of the better-known Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. I was a student of the Romance Movement in American Literature.

The history of this period in the United States, at least by 1818 with William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl", Romantic poetry was being published. American Romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully with the atmosphere and melodrama of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel.

It was the spring of 1969; I was an English Major at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. The class was called “The American Romantics”, taught by Donald Koch, PhD. Before leaving high school (thanks to my teachers Jean Moulton and Alice Kubo), I was a fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne and had read all of his novels and short stories. I had also read most of Edgar Allen Poe’s works. You might call me a fan. The first assignment given us was a semester long research project. Each student was handed a name of one of the authors or poets of the Era. The name on my slip pf paper was Emily Dickinson. My heart sank. I wanted Hawthorne. Alas, I had my assignment and went with it. It was the best assignment for my future. By studying Ms. Dickinson, I learned to appreciate the loneliness of writing, the troubled souls of the writers of that era and of the English Romance Movement. It caused me to look inward and to know that I was living in the wrong time period. Though I never knew my great-grandfather (he was of that era) I got to know him through his journals. This is what Emily Dickinson did for me. This is why I became excited when asked to write a profile by members of the Scottish Clan Gunn for this member of the Clan.

Her poetry transcends time and distance. As a writer, I am always reading my competition. I am currently reading a novel by the English author Martha Grimes. Wouldn’t you know it, the hero carries a book of Emily Dickinson poems around with him at all times. I highly recommend that everyone, at some time in their lives, read the poems of Ms. Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson was a recluse. She rarely went out in public and in her later years rarely left her room in the large house where she grew up. In spite of that she was called the Belle of Amherst and she wrote 597 poems. Each and every one of them can touch the very essence of the human heart, soul, or emotion. For example from her poem “Heaven” – is what I cannot reach:

The Color, on the Cruising Cloud—

The interdicted Land—

Behind the Hill—the House behind—

There—Paradise—is found!

Or her poem “Hope” – is the thing with feathers:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

I like the line, “That perches in the soul—“. I can feel the talons clutching at the strings that bind me together and make me who I am. We all have our doubts, our fears, our superstitions. Ms. Dickinson can put words to those feelings. It is not enough to know the history of who a person was. It is important to understand who he/she was and how they reacted to their environment and those other people with whom they came in contact. With Emily Dickinson, you can only really know who she was by reading her poems. The thesis I submitted to my professor back in 1969 was one-hundred, thirty-six pages in length. I have read through hundreds of histories and biographies of Emily Dickinson and I cannot condense the life of Emily Dickinson any better than what Wikipedia has done on the Internet. It is the best chronological short history of Emily Dickinson I have ever seen. It is the only place that doesn’t jump around the events of her life, making the reader sit back and wonder was this before that or after this. I have, therefore decided to incorporate it in to this profile as being the best timeline of Ms. Dickinson’s life.

by,Scott H. Hendricks, 06 Apr 2014

• NAME: Emily Dickinson

• OCCUPATION: Poet

• BIRTH DATE: December 10, 1830

• DEATH DATE: May 15, 1886

• Did You Know?: In addition to writing poetry, Emily Dickinson studied botany. She compiled a vast herbarium that is now owned by Harvard University.

• EDUCATION: Amherst Academy (now Amherst College), Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

• PLACE OF BIRTH: Amherst, Massachusetts

• PLACE OF DEATH: Amherst, Massachusetts

• Full Name: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

• AKA: Emily Dickinson

|Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite some unfavorable reviews and some skepticism during the late 19th and early 20th century as to Dickinson's literary prowess, she is now almost universally considered to be one of the most important American poets.

Family and early childhood

|

The Dickinson children (Emily on the left), ca. 1840. From the Dickinson Room at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the family's homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a prominent, but not wealthy, family. Two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered. Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, had almost single-handedly founded Amherst College. In 1813, he built the homestead, a large mansion on the town's Main Street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century. Samuel Dickinson's eldest son, Edward, was treasurer of Amherst College for nearly forty years, served numerous terms as a State Legislator, and represented the Hampshire district in the United States Congress. On May 6, 1828, he married Emily Norcross from Monson. They had three children:

• William Austin (1829–1895), known as Austin, Aust or Awe • Emily Elizabeth • Lavinia Norcross (1833–1899), known as Lavinia or Vinnie

By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Emily's Aunt Lavinia described Emily as "perfectly well & contented—She is a very good child & but little trouble." Emily's aunt also noted the girl's affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano, which she called "the moosic".

Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street. Her education was "ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl". Her father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even while away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to "keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned". While Emily consistently described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none."

On September 7, 1840, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia started together at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had opened to female students just two years earlier. At about the same time, her father purchased a house on North Pleasant Street. Emily's brother Austin later described this large new home as the "mansion" over which he and Emily presided as "lord and lady" while their parents were absent. The house overlooked Amherst's burial ground, described by one local minister as treeless and "forbidding".

Teenage years

Dickinson spent seven years at the Academy, taking classes in English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, "mental philosophy," and arithmetic.[19] Daniel Taggart Fiske, the school's principal at the time, would later recall that Dickinson was "very bright" and "an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties". Although she had a few terms off due to illness—the longest of which was in 1845–1846, when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks—she enjoyed her strenuous studies, writing to a friend that the Academy was "a very fine school".

Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the "deepening menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and a close friend, grew ill from typhus and died in April 1844, Emily was traumatized. Recalling the incident two years later, Emily wrote that "it seemed to me I should die too if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even look at her face." She became so melancholic that her parents sent her to stay with family in Boston to recover. With her health and spirits restored, she soon returned to Amherst Academy to continue her studies. During this period, she first met people who were to become lifelong friends and correspondents, such as Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Huntington Gilbert (who later married Emily's brother Austin).

In 1845, a religious revival took place in Amherst, resulting in 46 confessions of faith among Dickinson's peers. Dickinson wrote to a friend the following year: "I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior." She went on to say that it was her "greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers." The experience did not last: Dickinson never made a formal declaration of faith and attended services regularly for only a few years. After her church-going ended, about 1852, she wrote a poem opening: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home". During the last year of her stay at the Academy, Emily became friendly with Leonard Humphrey, its popular new young principal. After finishing her final term at the Academy on August 10, 1847, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which later became Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, about ten miles (16 km) from Amherst. She was at the seminary for only ten months. Although she liked the girls at Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there. The explanations for her brief stay at Holyoke differ considerably: either she was in poor health, her father wanted to have her at home, she rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at the school, she disliked the discipline-minded teachers, or she was simply homesick. Whatever the specific reason for leaving Holyoke, her brother Austin appeared on March 25, 1848, to "bring [her] home at all events". Back in Amherst, Dickinson occupied her time with household activities. She took up baking for the family and enjoyed attending local events and activities in the budding college town.

Early influences and writing

When she was eighteen, Dickinson's family befriended a young attorney by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton. According to a letter written by Dickinson after Newton's death, he had been "with my Father two years, before going to Worcester – in pursuing his studies, and was much in our family." Although their relationship was probably not romantic, Newton was a formative influence and would become the second in a series of older men (after Humphrey) that Dickinson referred to, variously, as her tutor, preceptor or master. Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring". Newton held her in high regard, believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying that he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw. Biographers believe that Dickinson's statement of 1862—"When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned"—refers to Newton.

Dickinson was familiar not only with the Bible but also with contemporary popular literature. She was probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, another gift from Newton (after reading it, she gushed "This then is a book! And there are more of them!"). Her brother smuggled a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Kavanagh into the house for her (because her father might disapprove) and a friend lent her Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in late 1849. Jane Eyre's influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him "Carlo" after the character St. John Rivers' dog. William Shakespeare was also a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote to one friend "Why clasp any hand but this?" and to another, "Why is any other book needed?"

Adulthood and seclusion

In early 1850 Dickinson wrote that "Amherst is alive with fun this winter ... Oh, a very great town this is!" Her high spirits soon turned to melancholy after another death. The Amherst Academy principal, Leonard Humphrey, died suddenly of "brain congestion" at age 25. Two years after his death, she revealed to her friend Abiah Root the extent of her depression: "... some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep – the hour of evening is sad – it was once my study hour – my master has gone to rest, and the open leaf of the book, and the scholar at school alone, make the tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay the departed Humphrey".

During the 1850s, Emily's strongest and most affectionate relationship was with Susan Gilbert. Emily eventually sent her over three hundred letters, more than to any other correspondent, over the course of their friendship. Sue was supportive of the poet, playing the role of "most beloved friend, influence, muse, and adviser" whose editorial suggestions Dickinson sometimes followed, Susan played a primary role in Emily's creative processes." Sue married Austin in 1856 after a four-year courtship, though their marriage was not a happy one. Edward Dickinson built a house for himself and Sue called the Evergreens, which stood on the west side of the Homestead. There is controversy over how to view Emily's friendship with Sue; according to a point of view first promoted by Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin's longtime mistress, Emily's missives typically dealt with demands for Sue's affection and the fear of unrequited admiration. Todd believed that because Sue was often aloof and disagreeable, Emily was continually hurt by what was mostly a tempestuous friendship. However, the notion of a "cruel" Sue—as promoted by her romantic rival—has been questioned, most especially by Sue and Austin's surviving children, with whom Emily was close.

Until 1855, Dickinson had not strayed far from Amherst. That spring, accompanied by her mother and sister, she took one of her longest and farthest trips away from home. First, they spent three weeks in Washington, where her father was representing Massachusetts in Congress. Then they went to Philadelphia for two weeks to visit family. In Philadelphia, she met Charles Wadsworth, a famous minister of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, with whom she forged a strong friendship which lasted until his death in 1882. Despite seeing him only twice after 1855 (he moved to San Francisco in 1862), she variously referred to him as "my Philadelphia", "my Clergyman", "my dearest earthly friend" and "my Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood".

|The Dickinson Family Home where Emily lived nearly her entire life.

From the mid-1850s, Emily's mother became effectively bedridden with various chronic illnesses until her death in 1882. Writing to a friend in summer 1858, Emily said that she would visit if she could leave "home, or mother. I do not go out at all, lest father will come and miss me, or miss some little act, which I might forget, should I run away – Mother is much as usual. I Know not what to hope of her". As her mother continued to decline, Dickinson's domestic responsibilities weighed more heavily upon her and she confined herself within the Homestead. Forty years later, Lavinia stated that because their mother was chronically ill, one of the daughters had to remain always with her. Emily took this role as her own, and "finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it".

Withdrawing more and more from the outside world, Emily began in the summer of 1858 what would be her lasting legacy. Reviewing poems she had written previously, she began making clean copies of her work, assembling carefully pieced-together manuscript books. The forty fascicles she created from 1858 through 1865 eventually held nearly eight hundred poems. No one was aware of the existence of these books until after her death.

In the late 1850s, the Dickinsons befriended Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, and his wife, Mary. They visited the Dickinsons regularly for years to come. During this time Emily sent him over three dozen letters and nearly fifty poems. Their friendship brought out some of her most intense writing and Bowles published a few of her poems in his journal. It was from 1858 to 1861 that Dickinson is believed to have written a trio of letters that have been called "The Master Letters". These three letters, drafted to an unknown man simply referred to as "Master", continue to be the subject of speculation and contention amongst scholars.

The first half of the 1860s, after she had largely withdrawn from social life, proved to be Dickinson's most productive writing period. Modern scholars and researchers are divided as to the cause for Dickinson's withdrawal and extreme seclusion. While she was diagnosed as having "nervous prostration" by a physician during her lifetime, some today believe she may have suffered from illnesses as various as agoraphobia and epilepsy.

Is "my Verse ... alive?"

| Thomas Wentworth Higginson

In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic, radical abolitionist, and ex-minister, wrote a lead piece for The Atlantic Monthly entitled, "Letter to a Young Contributor". Higginson's essay, in which he urged aspiring writers to "charge your style with life", contained practical advice for those wishing to break into print. Dickinson's decision to contact Higginson suggests that by 1862 she was contemplating publication and that it may have become increasingly difficult to write poetry without an audience. Seeking literary guidance that no one close to her could provide, Dickinson sent him a letter which read in full:

Mr Higginson,

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 the mistake – that you dared to tell me – would give me sincerer honor – toward you – I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it's own pawn –

This highly nuanced and largely theatrical letter was unsigned, but she had included her name on a card and enclosed it in an envelope, along with four of her poems. He praised her work but suggested that she delay publishing until she had written longer, being unaware that she had already appeared in print. She assured him that publishing was as foreign to her "as Firmament to Fin", but also proposed that "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her". Dickinson delighted in dramatic self-characterization and mystery in her letters to Higginson. She said of herself, "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." She stressed her solitary nature, stating that her only real companions were the hills, the sundown, and her dog, Carlo. She also mentioned that whereas her mother did not "care for Thought", her father bought her books, but begged her "not to read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind".

Dickinson valued his advice, going from calling him "Mr. Higginson" to "Dear friend" as well as signing her letters, "Your Gnome" and "Your Scholar". His interest in her work certainly provided great moral support; many years later, Dickinson told Higginson that he had saved her life in 1862. They corresponded until her death, but her difficulty in expressing her literary needs and a reluctance to enter into a cooperative exchange left Higginson nonplussed; he did not press her to publish in subsequent correspondence. Dickinson's own ambivalence on the matter militated against the likelihood of publication. Literary critic Edmund Wilson, in his review of Civil War literature, surmised that "with encouragement, she would certainly have published". The woman in white

In direct opposition to the immense productivity that she displayed in the early 1860s, Dickinson wrote fewer poems in 1866. Beset with personal loss as well as loss of domestic help, Dickinson may have been too overcome to keep up her previous level of writing. Carlo died during this time after providing sixteen years of companionship; Dickinson never owned another dog. Although the household servant of nine years, Margaret O Brien, had married and left the Homestead that same year, it was not until 1869 that her family brought in a permanent household servant, Margaret Maher, to replace the old one. Emily once again was responsible for chores, including the baking, at which she excelled. Around this time, Dickinson's behavior began to change. She did not leave the Homestead unless it was absolutely necessary and as early as 1867, she began to talk to visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking to them face to face. She acquired local notoriety; she was rarely seen, and when she was, she was usually clothed in white. Dickinson's one surviving article of clothing is a white cotton dress, possibly sewn circa 1878–1882. Few of the locals who exchanged messages with Dickinson during her last fifteen years ever saw her in person. Austin and his family began to protect Emily's privacy, deciding that she was not to be a subject of discussion with outsiders. Despite her physical seclusion, however, Dickinson was socially active and expressive through what makes up two-thirds of her surviving notes and letters. When visitors came to either the Homestead or the Evergreens, she would often leave or send over small gifts of poems or flowers. Dickinson also had a good rapport with the children in her life. Mattie Dickinson, the second child of Austin and Sue, later said that "Aunt Emily stood for indulgence." MacGregor (Mac) Jenkins, the son of family friends who later wrote a short article in 1891 called "A Child's Recollection of Emily Dickinson", thought of her as always offering support to the neighborhood children.

When Higginson urged her to come to Boston in 1868 so that they could formally meet for the first time, she declined, writing: "Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town". It was not until he came to Amherst in 1870 that they met. Later he referred to her, in the most detailed and vivid physical account of her on record, as "a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair ... in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl." He also felt that he never was "with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."

Posies and poesies

Scholar Judith Farr notes that Dickinson, during her lifetime, "was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet". Dickinson studied botany from the age of nine and, along with her sister, tended the garden at Homestead. During her lifetime, she assembled a collection of pressed plants in a sixty-six page leather-bound herbarium. It contained 424 pressed flower specimens that she collected, classified, and labeled using the Linnaean system. The Homestead garden was well-known and admired locally in its time. It has not survived, and Dickinson kept no garden notebooks or plant lists, but a clear impression can be formed from the letters and recollections of friends and family. Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered "carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansies, platoons of sweetpeas, hyacinths, enough in May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction—-a butterfly utopia". In particular, Dickinson cultivated scented exotic flowers, writing that she "could inhabit the Spice Isles merely by crossing the dining room to the conservatory, where the plants hang in baskets". Dickinson would often send her friends bunches of flowers with verses attached, but "they valued the posy more than the poetry".

Later life

On June 16, 1874, while in Boston, Edward Dickinson suffered a stroke and died. When the simple funeral was held in the Homestead's entrance hall, Emily stayed in her room with the door cracked open. Neither did she attend the memorial service on June 28. She wrote to Higginson that her father's "Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists." A year later, on June 15, 1875, Emily's mother also suffered a stroke, which produced a partial lateral paralysis and impaired memory. Lamenting her mother's increasing physical as well as mental demands, Emily wrote that "Home is so far from Home".

Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from Salem, in 1872 or 1873 became an acquaintance of Dickinson's. After the death of Lord's wife in 1877, his friendship with Dickinson probably became a late-life romance, though as their letters were destroyed, this is surmised. Dickinson found a kindred soul in Lord, especially in terms of shared literary interests; the few letters which survived contain multiple quotations of Shakespeare's work, including the plays Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet and King Lear. In 1880 he gave her Cowden Clarke's Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (1877). Dickinson wrote that "While others go to Church, I go to mine, for are you not my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?" She referred to him as "My lovely Salem" and they wrote to each other religiously every Sunday. Dickinson looked forward to this day greatly; a surviving fragment of a letter written by her states that "Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day".

After being critically ill for several years, Judge Lord died in March 1884. Dickinson referred to him as "our latest Lost". Two years before this, on April 1, 1882, Dickinson's "Shepherd from 'Little Girl'hood", Charles Wadsworth, also had died after a long illness.

Decline and death

Although she continued to write in her last years, Dickinson stopped editing and organizing her poems. She also exacted a promise from her sister Lavinia to burn her papers. Lavinia, who also never married, remained at the Homestead until her own death in 1899.

The 1880s were a difficult time for the remaining Dickinsons. Irreconcilably alienated from his wife, Austin fell in love in 1882 with Mabel Loomis Todd, an Amherst College faculty wife who had recently moved to the area. Todd never met Dickinson but was intrigued by her, referring to her as "a lady whom the people call the Myth". Austin distanced himself from his family as his affair continued and his wife became sick with grief. Dickinson's mother died on November 14, 1882. Five weeks later, Dickinson wrote "We were never intimate ... while she was our Mother – but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she became our Child, the Affection came." The next year, Austin and Sue's third and youngest child, Gilbert—Emily's favorite—died of typhoid fever. As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In the fall of 1884, she wrote that "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come." That summer she had seen "a great darkness coming" and fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed. On November 30, 1885, her feebleness and other symptoms were so worrying that Austin canceled a trip to Boston. She was confined to her bed for a few months, but managed to send a final burst of letters in the spring. What is thought to be her last letter was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply read: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily". On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Austin wrote in his diary that "the day was awful ... she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the [afternoon] whistle sounded for six." Dickinson's chief physician gave the cause of death as Bright's disease and its duration as two and a half years.

Dickinson was buried, laid in a white coffin with vanilla-scented heliotrope, a Lady's Slipper orchid, and a "knot of blue field violets" placed about it. The funeral service, held in the Homestead's library, was simple and short; Higginson, who had met her only twice, read "No Coward Soul Is Mine", a poem by Emily Brontë that had been a favorite of Dickinson's. At Dickinson's request, her "coffin [was] not driven but carried through fields of buttercups" for burial in the family plot at West Cemetery on Triangle Street.

Publication

Despite Dickinson's prolific writing, fewer than a dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime. After her younger sister Lavinia discovered the collection of nearly eighteen hundred poems, Dickinson's first volume was published four years after her death. Until the 1955 publication of Dickinson's Complete Poems by Thomas H. Johnson, her poems were considerably edited and altered from their manuscript versions. Since 1890 Dickinson has remained continuously in print.

Contemporary

A few of Dickinson's poems appeared in Samuel Bowles' Springfield Republican between 1858 and 1868. They were published anonymously and heavily edited, with conventionalized punctuation and formal titles. The first poem, "Nobody knows this little rose", may have been published without Dickinson's permission. The Republican also published "A narrow Fellow in the Grass" as "The Snake"; "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –" as "The Sleeping"; and "Blazing in the Gold and quenching in Purple" as "Sunset". The poem "I taste a liquor never brewed –" is an example of the edited versions; the last two lines in the first stanza were completely rewritten for the sake of conventional rhyme.

Original wording

I taste a liquor never brewed –

From Tankards scooped in Pearl –

Not all the Frankfort Berries

Yield such an Alcohol!

Republican version

I taste a liquor never brewed –

From Tankards scooped in Pearl –

Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense

Such a delirious whirl!

In 1864, several poems were altered and published in Drum Beat, to raise funds for medical care for Union soldiers in the war. Another appeared in April 1864 in the Brooklyn Daily Union.

In the 1870s, Higginson showed Dickinson's poems to Helen Hunt Jackson, who had coincidentally been at the Academy with Dickinson when they were girls. Jackson was deeply involved in the publishing world, and managed to convince Dickinson to publish her poem "Success is counted sweetest" anonymously in a volume called A Masque of Poets. The poem, however, was altered to agree with contemporary taste. It was the last poem published during Dickinson's lifetime.

Posthumous

After Dickinson's death, Lavinia Dickinson kept her promise and burned most of the poet's correspondence. Significantly though, Dickinson had left no instructions about the forty notebooks and loose sheets gathered in a locked chest. Lavinia recognized the poems' worth and became obsessed with seeing them published. She turned first to her brother's wife and then to Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress, for assistance. A feud ensued, with the manuscripts divided between the Todd and Dickinson houses, preventing complete publication of Dickinson's poetry for more than half a century.

The first volume of Dickinson's Poems, edited jointly by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, appeared in November 1890. Although Todd claimed that only essential changes were made, the poems were extensively edited to match punctuation and capitalization to late 19th-century standards, with occasional rewordings to reduce Dickinson's obliquity. The first 115-poem volume was a critical and financial success, going through eleven printings in two years. Poems: Second Series followed in 1891, running to five editions by 1893; a third series appeared in 1896. One reviewer, in 1892, wrote: "The world will not rest satisfied till every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has been published".

Nearly a dozen new editions of Dickinson's poetry, whether containing previously unpublished or newly edited poems, were published between 1914 and 1945. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the daughter of Susan and Edward Dickinson, published collections of her aunt's poetry based on the manuscripts held by her family, whereas Mabel Loomis Todd's daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, published collections based on the manuscripts held by her mother. These competing editions of Dickinson's poetry, often differing in order and structure, ensured that the poet's work was in the public's eye.

The first scholarly publication came in 1955 with a complete new three-volume set edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Forming the basis of later Dickinson scholarship, Johnson's variorum brought all of Dickinson's known poems together for the first time. Johnson's goal was to present the poems very nearly as Dickinson had left them in her manuscripts. They were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and often extremely elliptical in their language. Three years later, Johnson edited and published, along with Theodora Ward, a complete collection of Dickinson's letters, also presented in three volumes. In 1981, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson was published. Using the physical evidence of the original papers, the poems were intended to be published in their original order for the first time. Editor Ralph W. Franklin relied on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the poet's packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient.

Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger wrote in his 2001 work My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson that "The consequences of the poet's failure to disseminate her work in a faithful and orderly manner are still very much with us"

Clan Gunn Ancestry

The Gunns .....................

Lucretia Gunn

Birth: 1775 Place: Death: 1840

Father: Nathaniel Gunn

Mother: Hannah Montague

m. Samuel Fowler Dickinson

.......................................................

Edward Dickinson

Birth: 1803 Place: Death: 1894

Father: Samuel Fowler Dickinson

Mother: Lucretia Gunn

m. Emily Norcross

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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson,Poet

Birth: 1830 Place: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Death: 1886 Place: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

Father: Edward Dickinson

Mother: Emily Norcross

...............................................

Nathaniel GUNN

Birth: Abt. 1748 <Sndrlnd, Frnkln, Mass>

m. Hannah MONTAGUE

Marriage: 8 Dec 1773 .......................................

NATHANIEL GUNN

Birth: About 1748 Of Montague, Franklin, Massachusetts

.....................................

Nathaniel Gunn

Birth: 12 JAN 1752 Of Montague, Franklin, Massachusetts

Death: 06 MAR 1832

m. Hannah Montague

.......................................

Nathaniel Gunn

Christening: 12 JAN 1752 Sunderland, Franklin, Massachusetts

Death: 06 MAR 1832

Father: Lt. Nathaniel Gunn

Mother: Dorothy Marsh

m. Hannah Montague

Marriage: 08 DEC 1773

...................................

Lt. Nathaniel Gunn

Birth: 24 JAN 1726 Sunderland, Franklin, Massachusetts

Death: 22 APR 1807

Father: Nathaniel Gunn

Mother: Esther Belden

m. Dorothy Marsh

Marriage: 21 MAR 1745

Sources

• “The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson, Kindle Edition By Emily Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd

• “Emily Dickinson” A College Thesis by Scott H. Hendricks 1969

• Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia sources:
  • Bianchi, Martha Dickinson. 1970. Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books.
  • Blake, Caesar R. (ed). 1964. The Recognition of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism Since 1890. Ed. Caesar R. Blake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
  • Bloom, Harold. 1999. Emily Dickinson. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-7910-5106-4.
  • Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace.
  • Buckingham, Willis J. (ed). 1989. Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0-8229-3604-6.
  • Comment, Kristin M. 2001. "Dickinson's Bawdy: Shakespeare and Sexual Symbolism in Emily Dickinson's Writing to Susan Dickinson". Legacy. 18(2). pp. 167–181.
  • Crumbley, Paul. 1997. Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-1988-X.
  • D'Arienzo, Daria. 2006. "Looking at Emily", Amherst Magazine. Winter 2006. Retrieved June 23, 2009.
  • Farr, Judith (ed). 1996. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice Hall International Paperback Editions. ISBN 978-0-13-033524-1.
  • Farr, Judith. 2005. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01829-7.
  • Ford, Thomas W. 1966. Heaven Beguiles the Tired: Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson. University of Alabama Press.
  • Franklin, R. W. 1998. The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 1-55849-155-4.
  • Gordon, Lyndall. 2010. Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-02193-2.
  • Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle and Cristanne Miller. 1998. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
  • Habegger, Alfred. 2001. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-44986-7.
  • Hecht, Anthony. 1996. "The Riddles of Emily Dickinson" in Farr (1996) 149–162.
  • Juhasz, Suzanne (ed). 1983. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-32170-0.
  • Juhasz, Suzanne. 1996. "The Landscape of the Spirit" in Farr (1996) 130–140.
  • Knapp, Bettina L. 1989. Emily Dickinson. New York: Continuum Publishing.
  • Martin, Wendy (ed). 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00118-8.
  • McNeil, Helen. 1986. Emily Dickinson. London: Virago Press. ISBN 0-394-74766-6.
  • Mitchell, Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart. 2009. The International Reception of Emily Dickinson. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-9715-2.
  • Murray, Aífe. 2010. Maid as Muse: How Domestic Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language. University Press of New England. ISBN 978-1-58465-674-6.
  • Murray, Aífe. 1996. "Kitchen Table Poetics: Maid Margaret Maher and Her Poet Emily Dickinson," The Emily Dickinson Journal. 5(2). pp. 285–296.
  • Oberhaus, Dorothy Huff. 1996. " 'Tender pioneer': Emily Dickinson's Poems on the Life of Christ" in Farr (1996) 105–119.
  • Parker, Peter. 2007. "New Feet Within My Garden Go: Emily Dickinson's Herbarium", The Daily Telegraph, June 29, 2007. Retrieved January 18, 2008.
  • Pickard, John B. 1967. Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  • Pollak, Vivian R. 1996. "Thirst and Starvation in Emily Dickinson's Poetry" in Farr (1996) 62–75.
  • Sewall, Richard B.. 1974. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ISBN 0-674-53080-2.
  • Smith, Martha Nell. 1992. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-77666-7.
  • Stocks, Kenneth. 1988. Emily Dickinson and the Modern Consciousness: A Poet of Our Time. New York: St. Martin's Press.
  • Walsh, John Evangelist. 1971. The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Wells, Anna Mary. 1929. "Early Criticism of Emily Dickinson", American Literature, Vol. 1, No. 3. (November 1929).
  • Wilson, Edmund. 1962. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-393-31256-9.
  • Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1986. Emily Dickinson. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-54418-8.

• Ancestry.com sources, materials and links were used to put together the Clan Gunn ancestry lineage for Ms. Dickinson.