Eternity Only Will Answer

Forget the Emily Dickinson you think you know, that hermetic author of bedeviling sense, “So Anthracite, to live - // For some - an Ampler Zero -.” Say goodbye to the Belle and Recluse of Amherst, Mythic Emily, and every other epithet that scholars, biographers, and critics have coined to stoke the public’s fascination with a human sphinx. Behold, instead, a woman who baked—a lot—for friends, family, and neighbors; who lamented that she didn’t receive any valentines at school (“I have not quite done hoping for one”); who was very often funny and used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family (“Your welcome letter found me all engaged in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!”); and who, until age 35, traveled and visited friends, before poor health made traveling impossible. Toward the end of her life, in 1884, she sent 86 letters to 34 recipients: the majority express thanks, others include a gift of flowers or food, and a handful convey condolences or congratulations. Her supposed withdrawal from the world—and readers’ continued interest with such a narrative—has an apocryphal dimension we must be willing to forego in order to see and hear the poet clearly, perhaps for the first time.

Edited by the scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024) promises to be the definitive edition of the poet’s 1,304 letters, expanded, revised, and annotated for the first time in more than 60 years. At least 80 letters have been discovered or re-edited since Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward published their edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1958. As Miller and Mitchell make plain, “Editorial standards have changed dramatically. And Dickinson scholarship has exploded. Scholars were still debating the significance of Dickinson’s oeuvre in the 1950s, but her position in the pantheon of great writers is now secure.” In other words, there has never been a better time to revisit and restore the author’s charismatic, sensitive, and characteristically brilliant prose.

The new book’s extensive and considered introductory essay establishes Miller and Mitchell’s modus operandi, and carefully outlines the ways this version distinguishes itself from its predecessors. Among the editors’ contributions to Dickinson scholarship is a painstaking effort to correct the chronology of the letters that Johnson and Ward previously published. Even poems dated by R.W. Franklin, the leading scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, are identified only by year, or season and year. As Miller and Mitchell explain, “A collection of letters that proceeds chronologically, however, requires greater precision than a year to establish a likely sequence of correspondence. Our redating, together with our annotation, indicates that Dickinson was writing in response to local and world events and to the visits of her friends, and we attempt to recreate that sequence of response.”

To undertake this delicate work, Miller and Mitchell set out on an investigation of poetic observation, relying on Dickinson’s own attention to the natural world:

Because Dickinson wrote so often about plants, birds, bees, and other insects, we attend to the typical New England season of bloom for arbutus, apple blossoms, or roses, and to migratory patterns. ... Much of her correspondence was occasional. Even if a poem was composed months or years earlier, her sending it to a particular person is likely to respond to something immediate—whether a weather event or event in a correspondent’s life or in the world. In assigning a placement or date to the letters, we consider their sequential relationship to known occasions. We also consider them holistically, in relation to the narrative of relationships illuminated by other letters.

Relying on a local record of weather patterns in Amherst (not available to Johnson and Ward) and the Williston Seminary catalogue, the editors were able to assign, for instance, the precise date of October 14, 1844 to a letter previously dated “Autumn 1844.”

Along the way, Miller and Mitchell provide invaluable contextual annotations and restore material that previous transcribers omitted—“even where the omissions themselves seem innocuous,” as they write. We learn that hundreds of Dickinson’s letters were destroyed, which was customary in the 19th century after a person died. But Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of two volumes of Dickinson’s poems, had the foresight to begin collecting letters in the early 1890s, preventing the further loss of these precious artifacts. Among the newly included letters are two to Elizabeth Seelye, whose husband Julius was inaugurated as president of Amherst College in 1877 (the family noted having burned 75 Dickinson poems they received, an act of shocking sacrilege to modern readers) and another to Ellen Dickinson, the wife of Emily’s cousin, who reports having destroyed “a considerable number” of Dickinson’s poems. This edition expeditiously illustrates the race against the ravages of negligence and time that such scholarship requires.

The larger consequence of these efforts is to show, once and for all, that Dickinson was never isolated from the world, but rather sensitively engaged with local and national events. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a distinguished family with a wide social circle, she was an active member of her community, comfortable initiating correspondence with even famous individuals of her time—among them the Civil War colonel, abolitionist, author, and advocate of women’s rights Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship. Her reluctance to see visitors as she grew older—but not to bake them gingerbread or correspond with them—can be explained at least in part by the time she spent caring for ill family members or navigating her own poor health. She was socially adept and flexible, naturally modulating in her correspondences, easily and willingly engaging with people from all social classes. Her letters to family members buzz with local and personal news. An 1850 letter to Abiah Root, a close friend Dickinson met at Mount Holyoke, captures the poet's playfulness:

The circumstances under which I write you this morning are at once glorious, afflicting, and beneficial, glorious in ends, afflicting in means, and beneficial I trust in both. Twin loaves of bread have just been born into the world under my auspices, fine children, the image of their mother, and here my dear friend is the glory.

Dickinson's older brother, Austin, especially relied on her to be kept abreast of happenings at home whenever he was away. “While she may not have seen some of these correspondents, or seen them only rarely, Dickinson understood friendship and repeatedly showed herself to be a loving friend,” Miller and Mitchell write.

She is also frequently funny, capable of making quick, wry assessments alongside her casual profundity. When Dickinson was 10 years old, her father Edward was forced to sell part of the Dickinson homestead out of financial necessity, moving the family to a smaller house on West Street where they would stay for 15 years. Edward repurchased the house in 1855, whereupon 25-year-old Emily commented in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland: “They say that ‘home is where the heart is.’ I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.” A later letter to Holland concludes with her typical warmth and tenderness, “Pardon my sanity Mrs. Holland, in a world insane, and love me if you will, for I had rather be loved than to be called a King in Earth, or a Lord in Heaven.” Dickinson’s life as a poet was shaped by these mundanities and everyday upheavals, as well as by larger historical undercurrents, which she sensed with stunning perspicacity. In spring 1861, she sent a letter-poem to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson that, portentously, alluded to the forthcoming Civil War:

A slash of Blue -
A sweep of Gray -
Some scarlet patches on the way,
Compose an evening sky -
A little Purple - slipped between -
Some Ruby Trowsers hurried on -
A Wave of Gold -
A Bank of Day -
This just makes out the morning sky!

But it’s this edition’s underlying scope that will truly win over the poet’s admirers. “Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” the introduction begins. Any fan of Dickinson would rightfully line up for a glimpse of her poems in the letters, and indeed, the cadence of her poems is evident in thrilling flashes throughout. But what proves even more enjoyable than the fragmentary phrases idiosyncratically housed between em dashes is the inverse, moments of dilated thought that might later be essentialized in a poem. “How swiftly summer has fled & what report has it borne to heaven of misspent time & wasted hours? Eternity only will answer,” she writes to Abiah Root in an early letter dated September 8, 1846. Miller and Mitchell remark on the similarities between Dickinson’s poetry and prose, noting that “her process of composition in both genres may have been similar at its earliest stages: a retained metaphor or sequence of language might serve as the germ of a letter, or it might linger in her workshop until a letter seemed just right to house it, just as a poem might begin with a resonant phrase.”

This illustrates the porous boundary between the poet’s two modes of thinking on the page. Those closest to her knew she kept notes on language that stirred her and that could be later adapted as the phrases of a letter or the lines of a poem. In fact, she even insisted on receiving intriguing details in a letter to Austin dated June 15, 1851: “Wont you please to state the name of the boy that turned the faintest, as I like to get such facts to set down in my journal, also anything else that’s startling which you may chance to know – I dont think deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young – woman’s journal.” In another later letter to Austin from June 11, 1854, she admits to writing without her usual reserve of material: “John Emerson just went away from here – he has been spending the evening, and I’m so tired now, that I write just as it happens, so you must’nt expect any style. This is truly extempore, Austin – I have no notes in my pocket.”

Perhaps the most evident slippage between her poetry and prose is delivered in her “letter-poems.” Dickinson was locally recognized as a poet and sent more than 500 poems, or stanzas and lines, to those she corresponded with across her lifetime.  The letters sent without accompanying prose are known as “letter-poems,” and Miller and Mitchell have added an additional 214 such examples to the 24 already cataloged, providing readers with a far deeper understanding of how poems—like the missives themselves—served as a form of communication for Dickinson. As the editors explain, “Dickinson quoted poems by other writers; sometimes sent a poem to one correspondent as verse and to another lineated as prose; and at times wrote passages in intermittent or continuous metered prose—that is, prose with the metrical rhythms of verse, and sometimes even rhyme, but lineated as prose. In one form or another, the rhythms of poetry recur throughout her letter writing.” In a letter to her cousin Louisa Norcross dated May 29, 1863, the two modes blend, as a prose summary of Dickinson’s visit ends in a distilled couplet:

Jennie Hitchcock’s mother was buried yesterday, so there is one orphan more, and her father is very sick besides. My father and mother went to the service, and mother said while the minister prayed a hen with her chickens came up, and tried to fly into the window. I suppose the dead lady used to feed them, and they wanted to bid her Good-bye.
 
Life is death we’re lengthy at,
Death the hinge to life.

Elsewhere and throughout, lines of poetry and prose blur in a dynamic, vital measure, drawing out the inherent creativity of address inspired by the addressee. Indeed, Dickinson’s best correspondents offered teeming soil for a teeming mind, a space to think, for Dickinson to be Dickinson. An 1850 valentine, likely sent to George H. Gould, a student at Amherst Academy, reveals Dickinson's natural modulation from quick wit to offhand profundity. “Our friendship sir, shall endure till sun and moon shall wane no more. ... That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite!” In the next paragraph, she offers a perennial assessment: “But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing-cocks, and singing-larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we’ll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place.”

Certainly, scholarship has made leaps and bounds since its earliest attempts to categorize an uncategorizable talent—still, I cannot help wondering what has taken so long, and if there’s isn’t more at play than a portrait unintentionally skewed by historic shadows. When faced with genius that is sui generis, that invites no immediate comparisons, there is an understandable urge to lean on the biography for answers. Surely something must explain such insistent originality, the poet’s enigmatic, compulsively absorbing cadence, textured diction, and time-bending syntax in poems that anticipate T.S. Eliot’s charge that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Johnson and Ward’s 1958 edition proclaimed that Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it, past or current.” Her letters, richly detailed and relishing their present, prove decidedly otherwise. Somewhere along the way, scholars accounted for Dickinson’s psychic complexity and epigrammatic vision by turning her into a steely, nightgown-wearing spinster, a mind alternately cooled by the language of the stars or agitated by death. We’ve looked away as she baked gingerbread and pressed flowers. We have framed her genius in the way that is comfortable to imagine: the result of an intensity exclusively achievable in a vacuum, acquired in seclusion hinged on temperamental proclivities. What selfishness, what loneliness—we might achieve some genius ourselves, but at what cost? All along, it is our vision that has been too small, not Dickinson’s.

What is made plain in these letters is that the reality is far more wondrous than the prefab myth of Dickinson that has so long existed, in part, to rationalize how so extraordinary a mind could come by its power. What if Dickinson’s vision wasn’t arrived at through hermetic seclusion but in company? Is it not, perhaps, the ancient refusal to acknowledge women in their fullness that has denied Dickinson her social life, diminishing her inherent playfulness, renouncing the warmth of her intimacies in favor of otherworldly fevers? Might it have seemed incongruous to past scholars to wrestle with a picture of a person as at ease on earth as on Parnassus—a poet who could toggle her vision from wide to atomic, traveling the reverberations of a single word and following that mental thread to its essential, unknowable nature? When we deny Dickinson a chance at triviality, we deny her the fullness of existence, the very material from which she drew her strength. Can we accept that being a loving friend was at least as important to her as her poetry? Can we imagine a person whose social life unfolded on her own terms, and who, in fact, turned to it for inspiration? In doing so, we honor Dickinson not as a myth but as a flesh-and-blood woman who once walked—and wrote—among us. We let in the richness of life for which Dickinson stood.