How did recluse Emily Dickinson become America’s national poet?
In 1886, at the age of 55 and with her insides destroyed by kidney disease, Emily Dickinson died. As a poet she was almost completely unknown, having had fewer than a dozen poems published during her lifetime. She had lived largely as a recluse, confined to the house, garden and finally the bedroom of her father’s residence in Amherst, Massachusetts. She had instructed her sister to burn her papers.
Yet, in the aftermath of her death, something extraordinary happened. Dickinson’s family found thousands of poems, including 833 sewn into small homemade books and another 1,800 scribbled on the backs of envelopes, sweet wrappers and advertising fliers, and resolved toed it and publish them. A collectionwas printed in 1890. It became a sensation, and sold 10,000 copies.
“The world will not rest satisfied till every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has been published,” wrote one amazed reviewer. And, today, that aspiration has more or less been met. Dickinson has become one of America’s best-loved poets. Schools and libraries are named after her, her face adorns a commemorative stamp and eminent writers list her among their influences.
Widely popular among modern composers, her poems have been set to hundreds of pieces of music. Now the British director Terence Davies has trained his meticulous eye on Dickinson’s mysterious life and made a film, A Quiet Passion, that tries to reconcile her introverted character with her emotional and powerful poetry and explain why she means so much to Americans.
Starring Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City’s Miranda) as Dickinson, it is a moody and stylised piece. Nixon plays the poet as a woman of profound intellect and independent mind. She is quick to become furious with moral injustices, from her brother’s infidelity to his wife to the broader issues of slavery and women’s restricted place in 19th-century society.
Nixon shows Dickinson in youth as playful and friendly but becoming increasingly introverted and troubled as she grows older and physically weakened by an unidentified disease that attacks her kidneys and causes epileptic-style fits.
The film offers no easy answers as to why she became a recluse, but suggests that she grew disheartened by her inability to form relationships, her poems’ lack of success, and her devastation at the deaths of her parents.
Her life, and her unconventional writing style, would seem to make her a surprising candidate for the title of America’s national poet. In life she was no darling of the literary salon. Apart from a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she spoke out against Christianity, she remained at home and gradually withdrew from the world, staying awake at night to write.
After her death, some critics balked at the growing legend that surrounded her, dismissing her as little more than an oddball hermit. A few sniffed at the fact that her poems didn’t rhyme in predictable ways, or that their meaning wasn’t always clear. Some reviewers of her poem Wild nights — Wild nights! were confused that such a passionate work could be written by a woman who, to all appearances, died a virgin: Rowing in Eden — Ah — the Sea! Might I but moor — tonight — In thee!
The modernist poet William Carlos Williams was particularly cruel. In an essay arguing that there had never truly been an American woman poet, he wrote: “Emily Dickinson, starving of passion in her father’s garden, is the very nearest we have ever been — starving. Never a woman: never a poet.” Fellow modernists such as Eliot and Pound felt her to be too puritanical, while traditionalists thought her hard to understand.
The poems aren’t always easy to read. They are distinctive for their lack of titles and their idiosyncratic dashes. Critics still agonise over exactly how long each of her handwritten dashes should be in print, what they mean and how they can be read aloud. But the best clues to her appeal come searing through in her own precise, perfect artistic instruction in one poem to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”.
Dickinson’s fascination with passion and death, especially, led to poems of stunning power. Her life was lived in anticipation of death, realised vividly in one of her most famous works: Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me — The Carriage held but just Ourselves — And Immortality
Her revolutionary unwillingness to conform to the traditional structures of Victorian poetry made her increasingly irresistible to readers and fellow poets in the century after her death.
Philip Larkin marvelled at her inability to be pinned down. “If Emily Dickinson could write 700 pages of poems and three volumes of letters without making clear the nature of her preoccupations,” he wrote, “then we can be sure she was determined to keep it hidden … the price she paid was of appearing to posterity as perpetually unfinished and wilfully eccentric.” Ted Hughes referred in awe to the “naked voltage” of Dickinson’s poems.
Her reputation in America grew, and she became a towering influence on literature there. Tennessee Williams wrote in an admiring essay in 1955 of “Emily Dickinson, that lyrical spinster of Amherst, Mass., who wore a strict and savage heart on a taffeta sleeve.” The academic Camille Paglia wrote: “Wham! Chop! Faster than a speeding spear, the Dickinson ear demolishes a hapless heart, which is like a piece of liver hewn by the cook’s cleaver.”
The noted critic Harold Bloom, in his seminal 1994 book The Western Canon, included Dickinson as one of the 26 most important writers of Western civilisation. He described her as a master of “tough writing and hard thinking”.
But as well as to the critics, Dickinson speaks to the people of America. Dickinson’s poems feel like live, struggling works-in-progress, like the blossoming young country of America itself. Her most famous poem, after all, cuts to the heart of the American dream:
In the aftermath of her death, Dickinson’s family found thousands of poems, including 833 sewn into small homemade books and another 1,800 scribbled on the backs of envelopes, sweet wrappers and advertising fliers.
Hope is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul — And sings the tune without the words — And never stops — at all —
Emily Dickinson is America’s greatest poet, and her poetry continues to touch the world. A Quiet Passion is out on April 7