Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in a New England where Puritanism was dying and literature was coming to life. Her birthplace was Amherst, a quiet village in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, nearly a hundred miles from Concord and Cambridge in space, and at least half that number of years in time.
Unpublished in her lifetime, unknown at her death in 1886, her poems, by chance and good fortune, reached, at last, the world to which they had been addressed. "If fame belonged to me" she had written in 1862, "I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation of my dog would forsake me."
From her family, Emily had love without understanding. Her father dominated the household. "His heart was pure and terrible" Emily wrote after his death in 1874, "and I think no other like it exists." Her gentle, colorless mother lived in his shadow. Austin, the only son, patterned himself on his father, but lacked the formidable self-righteousness of the old Puritan. Lavinia, crotchety and outspoken, was watchdog and protector of her shy, sensitive and sometimes rebellious sister. The family lived in a brick mansion set in spacious grounds on Amherst's main street and neither sister ever married.
After two years at Amherst Acadamy and one at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Emily Dickinson settled down to the customary life of a New England Village. Many years later a school friend remembered her as "Not beautiful, but she had great beauties." Her eyes were lovely auburn, soft and warm, her hair lay in rings of the same color all over her head, and her skin and teeth were fine. She had a demure manner which brightened easily into fun where she felt at home, but among strangers she was rather shy, silent and even deprecating. She was exquisitly neat and careful in her dress and always had flowers about her.
Into her life during these years came two young men who may have had some slight influence on her career; Leonard Humphrey, principal of Amherst Academy, and Benjamin F. Newton, a law student in her father's office. Both stimulated her interest in books. Both died young and were remembered in the lines:
Sometime during her twenties she had begun seriously to write poetry. By 1858, she was copying her poems in ink and gathering them together in little packets, loosely bound by thread.
The fuse that appears to have touched off the creative explosion of the early sixties appears to have been a Philadelphia clergyman: Charles Wadworth, forty-one years old, a husband and a father when Emily Dickinson met him in May, 1855. Correspondence must have followed since drafts of three letters to him - letters pathetically eager and pleading, in which the writer calls herself Daisy and the recipient Master - were found among Emily Dickinson's papers after her death.
It is known that Wadsworth had called on her in 1860, while visiting a friend in nearby Northampton. And it is conjectured that sometime during the following year he told her that soon he would have "left the land". The shock of separation may account for the prodigious output of 1862. "I had a terror since September, I could tell to none." she wrote in that year, "and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid." And this is the loss to which the last two lines of the poem quoted above must refer:
In that same year, Emily Dickinson must have considered the possiblity of publication, for she sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a rising young man of letters, with a note asking to say "if my verse is alive." The correspondence and interview that followed so illuminate Emily Dickinson, both as poet and person, that they are reprinted in these pages.
In these last years Emily Dickinson tended her garden, baked the family's bread, and watched from her window the passing show of village life.. To her friends she sent gifts of flowers with gnomic notes and poems which vastly puzzled them. She grew obsessed with death, and as her friends departed to "that bareheaded life under the grass" she condoled with the bereaved in letters that are morbidly curious. Long before her death she had become an Amherst legend: the woman in white; the eccentric recluse; the half cracked daughter of Squire Dickinson.
As is inevitable for a poet who worked in solitude and without criticism, her writing is uneven, sometimes baffling in its concision, sometimes provoking in its disregard of rhymes and rules. But at her best she writes as Thoreau wished to live - close to the bone, concentrating on the very essence of what she saw and felt in phrases that strike and penetrate like bullets, and with an originality of thought unsurpassed in American poetry.