Emily Dickinson

“ Emily, of course, attended church with her family and heard the long sermons of her day on "foreordination—whereby"—etc. The incident of her dear friend and parson, Dr. Dwight, attempting to convert her, remains as a cherished family annal, for she could never be brought to consider God as an enemy, or herself as hateful in his sight. What a contrast her own cry: "Could pathos compete with that simple statement, — "Not that we first loved Him, but that He first loved us'?" But the contribution to Faith that Emily Dickinson made to the world will some day be definitely recognized. ”

“ To what further rigorous pruning her verses would have been subjected had she published them herself, we cannot know. They should be regarded in many cases as merely the first strong and suggestive sketches of an artist, intended to be embodied at some time in the finished picture.
Emily Dickinson appears to have written her first poems in the winter of 1862. In a letter to one of the present Editors the April following, she says, "I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter."
The handwriting was at first somewhat like the delicate, running Italian hand of our elder gentlewomen ”

“ In the portrait Emily holds a book, but if her gaze was sibylline, it was beyond the vagrant artist's power to portray, and she stares out as frankly as her younger sister, who clutches a stiff rose, and leans against her rather indifferent red-lipped brother with his jaunty air of superior pleasure in being the boy of the trio. Just the real New England family, one sees them, a young father and mother, with perhaps a degree more of prosperity and education and noble ideals to bless themselves with than the majority of those about them, and an endowment of native refinement deeply engrained. ”

“ The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called "the Poetry of the Portfolio,"—something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. ”

“ Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson many years since into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life. The lines which formed a prelude to the first volume of her poems are the only ones that have yet come to light which indicate even a temporary desire to come in contact with the great world of readers ”

“ Much of Emily Dickinson's prose was rhythmic, —even rhymed, though frequently not set apart in lines.
Also many verses, written as such, were sent to friends in letters; these were published in 1894, in the volumes of her Letters. It has not been necessary, however, to include them in this Series, and all have been omitted, except three or four exceptionally strong ones, as "A Book," and "With Flowers."
There is internal evidence that many of the poems were simply spontaneous flashes of insight, apparently unrelated to outward circumstance. ”

“ The intellectual activity of Emily Dickinson was so great that a large and characteristic choice is still possible among her literary material, and this third volume of her verses is put forth in response to the repeated wish of the admirers of her peculiar genius. ”

“ On these occasions his daughter Emily emerged from her wonted retirement and did her part as gracious hostess; nor would any one have known from her manner, I have been told, that this was not a daily occurrence. The annual occasion once past, she withdrew again into her seclusion, and except for a very few friends was as invisible to the world as if she had dwelt in a nunnery. For myself, although I had corresponded with her for many years, I saw her but twice face to face, and brought away the impression of something as unique and remote as Undine or Mignon or Thekla. ”

“ It is a happy circumstance that this volume should begin with Emily Dickinson, whose work, posthumously printed, was unknown as late as 1890 and scarcely noticed until several years later. For here is a forerunner of the new spirit—free in expression, unhampered in choice of subject, penetrative in psychology—to which a countryful of writers has responded. No longer confined to one or two literary centers, the impulse to create is everywhere. There is scarcely a state, barely a township, that has not produced its laureate. ”

“ She stopped — a Traveller's privilege — for Rest —
And there upon
I gazed — as at a stranger —
The Lady in the Town
Doth think no incivility
To lift her Glass — upon —
But never Stranger justified
The Curiosity
Like Mine — for not a Foot — nor Hand —
Nor Formula — had she —
But like a Head — a Guillotine
Slid carelessly away —
Did independent, Amber —
Sustain her in the sky ”

“ To do a magnanimous thing and take oneself by surprise, if one is not in the habit of it, is precisely the finest of joys. Not to do a magnanimous thing, notwithstanding it never be known, notwithstanding it cost us existence, is rapture herself spurned.
The Church dominated all life, social and public, in Amherst in the mid-century, but the religion of Emily Dickinson was not a blend of any she received by inheritance or instruction. ”

“ Toward her family and her daily circle, servants, friends, chance comers, she was the spirit of loveliness incarnate. "Whatever it is, Emily will get it for you!" she vowed dramatically to her weeping children adorers, who fled to her in dismay in any incredible panic. The fruit of her religion was incessant sweet ministration; she was incarnate devotion, service; wanting nothing for herself except to give to some one else.
There must have been the most lofty, holy inspiration, indeed, to perfect such fragrant living. ”

“ HELEN JACKSON. The "portfolios" were found, shortly after Emily Dickinson's death, by her sister and only surviving housemate. Most of the poems had been carefully copied on sheets of note-paper, and tied in little fascicules, each of six or eight sheets. While many of them bear evidence of having been thrown off at white heat, still more had received thoughtful revision. There is the frequent addition of rather perplexing foot-notes, affording large choice of words and phrases. ”

“ That "irresistible needle-touch," as one of her best critics has called it, piercing at once the very core of a thought, has found a response as wide and sympathetic as it has been unexpected even to those who knew best her compelling power. This second volume, while open to the same criticism as to form with its predecessor, shows also the same shining beauties.
Although Emily Dickinson had been in the habit of sending occasional poems to friends and correspondents, the full extent of her writing was by no means imagined by them. ”

“ The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her 4time. “An epigrammatic Walt Whitman,” some one has called her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her art. Technically, Emily Dickinson’s work was strikingly uneven; many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly filled in ”

“ Whenever stirred, by whatever cause, she trapped her mood, then waited for her messenger, as vigilant as any spider.... Emily Dickinson differed from all the women letter-writers of France and England in her scorn of detail, scarcely hitting the paper long enough to make her communication intelligible.
The following brief note is quoted from the same source:
Opinion is a flitting thing
But truth outlasts the sun,
If then we cannot own them both,
Possess the oldest one. ”

“ To believe is enough and the right of supposing.
She had never told her family of her writing and they never dared ask. She never showed what she wrote to them. Her timidity awed their love and New England reserve completed the deadlock. Once and only once her sister-in-law published a poem of hers incognita, and when she showed it to Emily, in the darkest, entirest privacy, was terrified for the result of her experiment—the little white moth being almost fluttered to death, all a-tremble and ready to die of the experience and be found on the floor next morning a mere hint of winged dust! ”

“ In her innocent love of mystery and intrigue Aunt Emily reminds one of Stevenson. She would have played at "lantern bearers" with him, and given the stealthy countersign under her breath, as no other living urchin!
She was "eternally preoccupied with death" as any of Pater's giant Florentines, but though the supernatural had the supreme hold on her imagination and conjecture, every lesser mystery was a panic and an ecstasy. If she could contrive to outwit domestic vigilance and smuggle a box of fresh-laid eggs to my Mother, on the sly, it savored to her of piracy and brigandage. ”

“ What they talked of none can ever know, for the door was shut upon their hours together, and not one member of the family ever dared invade. Their partings overheard were like those of desperate final sundered souls; but both were dramatic of temperament and to Emily the darkness was denser always after the radiant passage of one of her chosen. Helen always preferred Emily in genius and power, and considered herself but a small spark beside her. ”

“ MARIA WHITNEY
true as steel to friend or conviction, who turned to Emily to probe for her deeper than the schools had been able, and out-soar the obstacles that hindered her own mind. Grey-eyed, pale, keen, crisp of tongue from the habit of clean thought and the study of languages other than her own, their apparent contrast mated unerringly, and they never missed a chance to match discoveries or compare revelations. In those days a free-thinker, a materialist, was almost a felon. For a woman to profess such scepticism was daring beyond credibility. ”

“ As is well documented, Emily Dickinson's poems were edited in these early editions by her friends, better to fit the conventions of the times. In particular, her dashes, often small enough to appear as dots, became commas and semi-colons.
In the second series of poems published, a facsimile of her handwritten poem which her editors titled "Renunciation" is given, and comparing this to the printed version gives a flavor of the changes made in these early editions. ”

“ Emily Dickinson had more than a message, more than the charm of unexpectedness, more than the gift of phrase,—she had (and of how many Americans can this be said?) an intense imagination.
Fertility.—This selection appears in the collected poems of Maurice Thompson (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1892) , under the title of "A Prelude." ”

“ I had no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.
Nor had I time to love; but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me. ”

“ Whatever may in after years have been supposed or surmised was but the idle gossip of any country village provoked by any woman unmarried—especially a gifted girl like Emily Dickinson, whose family were so warmly included in all the society of her time. ”

“ PREFACE The eagerness with which the first volume of Emily Dickinson's poems has been read shows very clearly that all our alleged modern artificiality does not prevent a prompt appreciation of the qualities of directness and simplicity in approaching the greatest themes,—life and love and death. ”

“ I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, — the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names. ”

“ Later, with her little niece, and the golden-haired arch-darling of both houses—the transitory child, Gilbert, who only came and flashed a mere eight years and went on—Emily was just another child like them, only endowed with subtle powers of the high gods to produce unexpected rewards and avert disastrous consequences. No treat could be offered any one of the three like that of being left in her care while the grown-up family wandered. As they grew older, she made companions of them, talked to them as equals, trusted them with her choicest interests. ”

“ I took my power in my hand.
And went against the world;
'T was not so much as David had,
But I was twice as bold.
I aimed my pebble, but myself
Was all the one that fell.
Was it Goliath was too large,
Or only I too small? ”

“ I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl —
I read that Foreign Lady —
The Dark — felt beautiful —
And whether it was noon at night —
Or only Heaven — at Noon —
For very Lunacy of Light
I had not power to tell —
The Bees — became as Butterflies —
The Butterflies — as Swans —
Approached — and spurned the narrow Grass —
And just the meanest Tunes
That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer —
I took for Giants — practising
Titanic Opera —
The Days — to Mighty Metres stept —
The Homeliest — adorned
As if unto a Jubilee
'Twere suddenly Confirmed —
I could not have defined the change — ”