Emily Dickinson Day: The Poems in the Drawer

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a family of lawyers and civic men. She spent seven years at Amherst Academy, then about ten months at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847 and 1848, and came home. She lived in the family house for nearly all of the rest of her life.

She died in 1886 at fifty-five. The family physician recorded Bright’s disease, a kidney illness he said had run two and a half years. Within days her younger sister Lavinia found the poems in a bureau in Emily’s room, hundreds of them, many sewn into little booklets with needle and thread.

What came next is the strangest publishing story in American poetry, and a writer can learn more from it than from any amount of advice about finding an audience.

How many poems did Emily Dickinson publish while she was alive?

Ten, by the standard count, plus one letter.

Almost all of them appeared without her name, mostly in the Springfield Republican, a newspaper her family read and whose editor knew them. Editors gave the poems titles she never wrote and adjusted the punctuation to look like everybody else’s. A poem that begins with a narrow fellow in the grass ran under the title “The Snake.”

Against those ten, she wrote nearly 1,800. Thomas H. Johnson, the scholar who first gathered all of them, estimated she wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone. That’s a poem a day for a full year, give or take, from somebody the town knew as the lawyer’s quiet daughter. The output was enormous and almost wholly private, and the private part was her choice.

A writer today can read that two ways. One reading says she was a genius the world failed to notice. The other, closer to the evidence, says she looked at what print did to her poems and decided she preferred the drawer. Every published piece had been changed into something more conventional.

She had watched it happen and declined to keep feeding them.

What are Emily Dickinson’s fascicles?

Between about 1858 and 1865 she copied poems out in ink on folded sheets of stationery, stacked the sheets, and sewed them together along the fold. Scholars call these booklets fascicles. There are forty of them, holding nearly 800 poems, and nobody outside the house knew they existed while she lived.

They’re books in every sense except the commercial one, and she made them alone.

She chose which poems went together, in what order, and in many places left alternate words marked in the margins without picking one. That last habit drives editors mad. A single line can carry three possible words, all in her hand, with no sign of which she preferred. For more than a century, editors picked one and printed it. Ralph W. Franklin’s 1981 edition, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, used pinholes, paper stock and smudges to reconstruct the original booklets, so readers could finally see the sequences she’d assembled.

I understand the impulse behind those booklets better than most readers will. Around 1987 and 1988 I spent a year hand-typing a 2,000-page autobiography on a classic Mac, had twelve hardcover copies bound, and mailed them to relatives. My family’s reaction was bad. My sister liked it. Dickinson sewed her own books and kept them in a drawer, and I bound mine and mailed them out, and both of us learned something.

The small audience you pick for yourself is the hardest one there is.

The fascicles stop in the mid-1860s. After that she kept writing on loose sheets, envelopes and scraps, some of them torn into odd shapes. The late manuscripts look less like a book and more like a desk drawer, and editors still argue over how to print them.

What did Emily Dickinson ask Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862?

On April 15, 1862, she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister, abolitionist and critic. He had just published “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly, and she answered it. Her opening question has become famous: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” She enclosed four poems and put her name on a card inside a smaller envelope, unsigned on the letter itself.

Higginson wrote back at once. He also tried to give her advice, and she didn’t take it. He suggested she hold off publishing, and a few years later she reminded him, “I had told you I did not print.” What he gave her instead was a reader who answered. They corresponded for the rest of her life and met in person only about eight years after that first letter. When she died, he traveled to Amherst and read a poem by Emily Brontë at her funeral.

The question she asked is the right one, and almost nobody asks it now.

She didn’t ask whether her poems were good or publishable or likely to find readers. She asked whether they were alive. A writer sending pages to a critic, a coach or an editor should ask exactly that, because “alive” is the thing an outside reader can judge and a writer can’t. Higginson had written his essay for beginners. He got a letter from somebody who was already better than he would ever be.

Was Emily Dickinson really a recluse?

In her last years, yes, to a degree that alarmed visitors. She rarely left the family house, and by 1867 she was speaking to callers from the other side of a door. Her one surviving garment is a white cotton dress, and she was mostly seen in white. The stories built on those details are real enough.

The legend leaves out the letters. She corresponded with Higginson for twenty-four years and with friends, editors and family members across her whole adult life, and the letters are as sharp as the poems. A woman who wouldn’t come downstairs to greet a guest would send that guest a note with a poem folded inside. She didn’t withdraw from people. She withdrew from rooms, and chose paper as the place to meet them.

The difference counts for anyone writing her into a story, and for writers who recognize themselves in her. A private person and an isolated one aren’t the same thing.

The private one wrote nearly 1,800 poems.

How did editors change Emily Dickinson’s poems in 1890?

After her death Lavinia wanted the poems in print and turned for help first to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Emily’s sister-in-law and closest correspondent, and then to Mabel Loomis Todd, a neighbor with editorial ambitions. Todd was also having an affair with Emily’s brother Austin. That explains a lot about what followed.

Todd and Higginson edited the first volume, Poems, published in November 1890. It held 115 poems and went through eleven printings in two years. For a dead, unknown poet, that was an astonishing result. The editors got there by making her look normal. They regularized punctuation and capitalization to late nineteenth-century standards, added titles, and in places changed her words. The poems that made her famous were partly theirs.

Then the households feuded. The manuscripts split between the Todd side and the Dickinson side, and complete publication was held up for more than half a century. Readers knew her for decades through edited, partial, competing selections.

Thomas H. Johnson’s three-volume edition in 1955 finally printed everything known, untitled, numbered in rough chronological order, with her dashes and capitals restored. Franklin’s 1998 edition went further and offered alternate readings. The poet most Americans met in school is closer to the real one than any reader got in 1890.

It took sixty-five years of fighting over a drawer to get there.

What do the dashes in Emily Dickinson’s poems do?

They control the pace and hold words apart.

Her manuscripts are full of short horizontal strokes of varying length and angle, and they sit where commas, colons or full stops would normally go. They also sit in places no punctuation would go at all. The 1890 editors read them as sloppiness and converted them. Johnson read them as part of the poem and kept them, and once you’ve read the poems with the dashes, the cleaned-up versions sound tidy in a way she never intended.

A dash leaves a thought open where a period would close it. It lets a line hang and makes the reader wait, now and then for a word that never comes. Dickinson used that hesitation as a tool, and her capitals did a related job, promoting an ordinary noun into something closer to a name. Typesetters spent a century fighting both. They lost, and the poems are better for it.

How does slant rhyme work in Emily Dickinson’s poetry?

Slant rhyme pairs words that almost rhyme, sharing a vowel or a final consonant without matching completely. Dickinson used it constantly, and she used it inside the most predictable container in English verse, the ballad stanza, with its alternating lines of four and three beats. Many of her poems scan like hymns her congregation would have known. The ear expects a click on the rhyme and gets a near miss.

That near miss unsettles the reader on purpose, and it fits what she wrote about. Her best-known poems handle death, doubt and the limits of what a person can know, in a meter built for certainty. “Because I could not stop for Death” is a carriage ride in hymn rhythm, and the hymn rhythm makes the destination worse. A poem numbered 1263 in Franklin’s edition opens with a line that reads like her whole method compressed: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

The poem argues that truth delivered all at once overwhelms people, the way lightning would blind a child, and has to arrive gradually. Every writer of memoir, essay or fiction runs into that problem eventually. She solved it with rhyme that never quite closes and a dash where the period should be.

What can a writer learn from Emily Dickinson?

First, that publication and writing are separate activities. She did the second at a scale few poets have matched and declined the first almost entirely, and the work survived. A writer who only writes what can sell has handed the editor a veto over the drafts.

Second, that editors will smooth you out if you let them, and the smoothing sells. Her 1890 editors were right about the market and wrong about the poems, and both halves of that are worth carrying into any revision session. A good editor fixes what’s broken. A bad one fixes what’s strange, and those are different jobs.

Third, that compression works. She fits a funeral, a theology and a joke into eight short lines, and the cuts are what make it possible. Read a handful of her poems and then look at your own paragraphs, and the padding becomes hard to miss. The craft side of that is covered in writing poetry and the craft beneath the inspiration, and it applies to prose almost word for word.

Fourth, the question. Ask a reader whether the work is alive. Everything else, from grammar to marketing, comes after that.

How should you mark Emily Dickinson Day?

Read her in Johnson’s or Franklin’s text, with the dashes. If you met her in a school anthology with titles and tidy commas, the restored versions will read like a different poet, and you’ll hear the hesitations she put there deliberately. Then read a few of the letters, because the woman behind the door was funnier and sharper than the legend allows.

If you write, try her exercise. Take a page you’ve finished and cut it to a third of its length without losing the point, then put it away for a week and read it cold.

If it still breathes, keep it.

If you can’t tell whether a manuscript works, a second reader helps, and that’s the work of book coaching.

She shares a season of literary birthdays with writers who took the opposite route to readers. Walt Whitman spent his life rewriting and promoting one book, and Edgar Allan Poe chased magazine readers for every dollar he earned. April brings National Poetry Month, and the full calendar of dates for readers and writers lives on the literature-related holidays page.

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