EMILY DICKINSON

Imagination Was Her Domain

by Debra Conner

“Is not the imagination the most glorious domain?” Emily Dickinson once asked in a letter. For Dickinson, the imagination was her ship and her carriage, transporting her far beyond the village of Amherst, Massachusetts, beyond the walls of her home and the heather in her garden. “To shut our eyes is travel,” she wrote. Her interior world was so meticulously wrought that she compared it to a finely crafted house, able to stand alone, without exterior support. She called it “the perfected life.”

Dickinson has been called the greatest American poet, an eccentric, and a genius. More than 123 years after her death, her poetry and her odd life of seclusion continue to fascinate readers and provoke discussion. Her place in the pantheon of literary greats is secure, yet when she died in 1886, leaving behind 1789 poems, she died in obscurity.

She came from a family of achievers, relatives who were stern and practical, not given to flights of fancy. She claimed that her father “never played.” A graduate of Yale, he bought her books, but begged her “not to read them—because he fears they will joggle the Mind.” Her mother, plagued with ill health, seemed so remote that as a child Emily ran to “awe” [her brother, Austin] when she was troubled, not to her mother. Without parental encouragement, Dickinson’s imaginative life flourished.

Her younger sister Lavinia, like Emily, would never marry and never reside outside the family home. Eventually, after Emily’s death in 1886, Lavinia Dickinson would uncover her sister’s poems in a dresser drawer and see them into publication.

Emily began life in “The Homestead,” a house built by her grandfather. After graduating from Amherst Academy, Emily Dickinson briefly left Amherst to attend college some thirty miles away at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mt. Holyoke College.) But after one year, she grew so homesick that she returned to Amherst, announcing that she never intended to leave its “blessed portals” again.

She stayed true to that promise, gradually deepening it to such an extreme that by the time she reached her early thirties, Emily Dickinson had become completely devoted to her poetry and to a life of solitude and withdrawal. She began writing prodigious amounts of verse, sometimes more than a poem each day. She also began, as she described it, “shunning men and women.” Thus was born the two most distinctive traits of Dickinson’s life: genius poet and eccentric recluse.

Dickinson’s poetry was radically different from the poetry of her time. As scholar Cynthia Griffin Wolff says, “She approached language like an explorer in new lands.” Her poems were so unconventional that she was ridiculed for her “spasmodic” meter and clumsy rhyme. In truth, Dickinson’s skills with meter and rhyme were so innovative that the sole critic she trusted to evaluate her work, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, like the handful of others who read her work, simply failed to appreciate it. The few poems that she did publish appeared, for the most part, in the Springfield, Massachusetts, newspaper. Most appeared without her name. Virtually no one, not even her family members, recognized or appreciated her extraordinary imaginative gifts.

In addition to the innovations she made with poetic form, Dickinson’s treatment of familiar poetic subjects—death, nature and the anguish of loss—heralded more radical departures. Unlike popular verse of her time, Dickinson acknowledged doubt over certainty. Nature did not necessarily bring comfort: “There’s a certain slant of light/Winter afternoons/That oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.”

Instead of recasting the accepted wisdom of a secure afterlife, Dickinson admits doubt: “Faith is a fine invention/for gentlemen who see/but microscopes are prudent/in an emergency.” What happens when we die, she wondered. The need to question her faith, she wrote, was akin to the need one has to probe a painful tooth. Her desire to return again and again to the question of an afterlife again led her to say that immortality was her “flood subject.” The poems she wrote about anguish—those that compare it to a funeral in the brain or the process of freezing to death—are among her greatest achievements.

As endlessly fascinating as Dickinson’s verse is, her personal life remains just as compelling. In addition to sequestering herself in the family home and refusing to see visitors, she began dressing exclusively in white. Although there is no definitive answer to the question of why, scholars and biographers theorize that she may have been announcing her decision to become the bride of poetry or the nun of poetry.

A related, and equally tantalizing, mystery arises from a group of three, undated love letters that Dickinson wrote to a person whom she addresses simply as “Master.” In them, Dickinson expresses an almost obsessive love for the recipient. It also appears that the “Master” does not, for unknown reasons, return her affection. Many scholars believe that the object of Dickinson’s affection was a married minister, Charles Wadsworth. Some argue that these love letters were fictions, purely an imaginative exercise. While the identity of the Master will probably never be known, Dickinson’s poetry of that time gives solid evidence that she was undergoing a personal crisis.

Questions about Dickinson’s life are legion. Was she mentally ill? Was she victim of a psychological condition known as agoraphobia? Or was her decision to withdraw from the world a conscious choice, one that would enable her to sequester herself in the imaginative world, undisturbed? The truth is, we can only speculate. What matters are the poems, her most enduring imaginative legacy.