Emily Dickinson — an icon for all ages
If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that staying in can be incredibly cool (not to mention, necessary for survival). But long before isolation was a mandate of the times, Emily Dickinson had discovered the reason for its greatness. For one of America’s (and the world’s) greatest poets spent a large chunk of her life in self-imposed isolation, leaving her town as few as only 3 times between 1847 and 1886. Even in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, she rarely left her house and any chance sighting of her would quickly become a matter of town news.
“I do not cross my father’s ground for any house or town.”
I was first introduced to Emily Dickinson’s poetry during my first year of college. On the way between our hostel and the college campus in Pune was a small second-hand bookstore. Well, bookstore might be a stretch — it was barely a shop where one could rent old, used and often, torn books for very affordable prices. But it served just as well. For the most part, what you could find in there were discarded copies of Mills and Boon, some thrown out editions of the classics and a lot of textbooks. One day, from under a pile of ridiculously chiseled abs on several Mills & Boon covers, I picked up a copy of a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
After that chance encounter with Ms Dickinson, I spent a lot of time reading copious amounts of her work and falling completely in love with her poetic prowess.
As I grew fonder of her poetry, I began to read up about her life and times. To say that I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. Not only was Dickinson an immensely talented poet, she was also, a rather interesting woman.
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
One of the reasons I love Emily Dickinson so much is that she lived her life with an amazing amount of independence and had the support of a lot of family members and friends while she did that. And considering that she spent a large part of her life in a self-imposed isolation, she wasn’t cut off from society. She corresponded with friends and family heavily through letters and poems she wrote regularly. Critics and historians later suggested that she may have been agoraphobic although there is no mention of such fears in any of her letters.
She decided at some point in her life, after her education was complete, that she needed to be alone in order to write. Her decision to be isolated was an act of freeing herself and in turn, becoming the poet she aspired to be. Over the course of her life, she wrote nearly 1800 poems, mostly untitled and with just less than 10 poems published in her lifetime. It was only after her death in 1886 that her sister Lavinia found her poems in her room and decided to publish them. Since they were untitled, editors and publishers later assigned her poems numbers. In 1890, a complete collection of her poems was published and went on to become immensely successful, making Emily Dickinson one of the most prominent poets to come out of America.
So unique and groundbreaking was her style that one of her closest friends Thomas Higginson, despite being co-editor of her first two published collections, never actively encouraged her to publish while she was alive. The difficulties of her life found their way into her writing and gave birth to a new, extremely imaginative style of poetry that went on to occupy a permanent place of importance in the history of English literature.
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and die
In a world that encouraged women to write about topics such as love and marriage, Emily Dickinson’s poetry is important because of her refusal to comply with these norms. A majority of her works speak of death, loneliness (two themes that she was preoccupied with in real life) and often shone a light on the patriarchal practices of her time.
“They shut me up in Prose–
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still”
Emily Dickinson’s life is a lesson in the idea of women being free of societal expectations. The notion that women who spend their lives holed up at home, and take up household responsibilities do not have something important to say is rendered useless in the face of her staggeringly original work. While worldly experiences and travelling can be greatly stimulating to a writer, it is quite evident here that a woman can spend her entire life in a small house in a small town, only wear white, collect bird nests and rarely venture out, and still be wildly imaginative, authentic and have a voice that affects change.
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me —
The simple News that Nature told —
With tender MajestyHer Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see —
For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen —
Judge tenderly — of Me
