How were Emily Dickinson's poems altered after she passed away? Who were the greatest loves of
this Bard of Amherst? You may have seen a version of her story, but this is her tragic, true life.
Born into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson never left
her family home and was referred to as "The Myth" or "The Lady in White" around town.
Although obviously intelligent and enjoying many close relationships throughout her life,
she was considered at the time to be a classic spinster, that is, a woman who never married. She
was also frequently unwell, suffering at different times in her life from respiratory illnesses and
troubles with her eyesight. There's also evidence that she had a lifelong affliction of epilepsy.
As author Lyndall Gordon wrote in The Guardian in 2010, the frequent references to illness and the
brain in Dickinson's poetry and the prescriptions written for her by her family physician
are in line with 19th century treatments of what was then called the Falling Disease.
This would also explain her frequent absences from school and her reclusive nature. At the time,
epilepsy was still widely misunderstood, and those suffering were often considered to be evil,
violent, or otherwise impaired. If a member of a prominent family had this ailment,
they would likely do their best to conceal it, which might require staying inside and hiding.
Emily Dickinson's love life is a fascinating subject. For someone who was so reclusive and
socially isolated, her poems brim with passion and references to mysterious objects of her affection.
Furthermore, she wrote — though possibly never sent — three infamous and steamy
letters to an unknown person she referred to as her "Master." She forged several very deep
relationships with men over the course of her life, but there's also the possibility that
she was in love with a woman at a time when such relationships were beyond impossible.
As Martha Nell Smith wrote in the book Rowing in Eden,
Dickinson's unusually close relationship with her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson
was very likely romantic in nature, and it's inspired modern tellings of Emily's life.
They lived next door to each other and wore a deep path between the houses with their
frequent visits. They also enjoyed an intense correspondence of letters and passed notes that
The New York Times describes as having "an intensity that some might view as erotic."
It's impossible to know for sure if Emily and Susan truly had a romantic relationship, but the
circumstantial evidence is compelling. If it's true, they would've had to keep their
dalliance a secret from everyone, especially Susan's husband, who was Emily's brother.
"When I'm with you, that is the only time I feel alive."
The world simply wasn't ready for Emily Dickinson's unique brand of poetry,
and she made very little formal effort to publish her work. The level of interest she had in
traditional publication is open to debate, but her disinterest doesn't mean that she didn't want her
poetry to be read. She sent many poems to friends, and even tried her hand at self-publishing with
hand-bound collections, as she produced 40 such books over the course of her life.
But it's a bit of a tragedy that Dickinson died without recognition for her work.
Only ten of the nearly 1,800 poems she wrote were published in her lifetime, and those were
done so anonymously and heavily edited in ways that removed everything that made them hers.
For example, her poem "I taste a liquor never brewed" was printed in The Republican in 1861,
but the editor gave it a different title and introduced a traditional rhyme scheme to replace
her more sophisticated "slant" rhyme. Nothing could be more depressing to a writer than to see
their work so fundamentally changed, which might explain Dickinson's disinterest in publication.
Emily Dickinson is commonly known to have been a recluse, and she wasn't the first
Dickinson woman to behave like that. Her mother, whom she was named after,
also rarely left the house, though there was a crucial difference between the two.
Where the younger Emily was intensely emotional in her poetry and lavished affection on her friends,
the older Emily was more aloof and suffered from a mysterious illness for most of her life.
Emily had few kind words for her mother. In her letters, she wrote such devastating sentiments as,
"My Mother does not care for thought."
And,
"Could you tell me what home is. I never had a mother."
There's speculation that her mother suffered from depression or even bipolar disorder,
which would help to explain her lack of affect and disinterest in her daughter's well-being.
This strained relationship was made even more difficult for Emily when her mother suffered a
stroke and a broken hip and was bedridden for the last seven years of her life. This led to
her depending on Emily and her sister Lavinia to care for her until the end.
For such a recluse, Emily Dickinson had no shortage of intense relationships,
including with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth and Samuel Bowles. As academic Thomas H. Johnson
wrote in American Heritage Magazine, there's plenty of evidence that Dickinson was in love
with Wadsworth, even though she only met him in person twice. However, there's no evidence that
the reverend showed any signs of returning the sentiment beyond a platonic affection.
Her attachment to Wadsworth was obviously very deep. When he moved to San Francisco
to join the Calvary Church, the word "Cavalry" began to appear in her poetry,
and no other place name is used nearly as often in her work.
Wadsworth passed away in 1882, and Dickinson called him "my dearest earthly friend."
And as noted by a 2008 New Yorker article, when Dickinson entered her most reclusive phase, she
would only see an exclusive list of people, one of whom was Samuel Bowles. He died in 1878 when he
was just 52 years old, and Dickinson wrote to his widow expressing her deep sadness at his passing.
Emily Dickinson's love life is an endless source of speculation precisely because of
her spinsterish image, and its contrast with the fiery emotions of her poetry.
When her father died in 1874, his old friend Otis Lord, a judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Court,
maintained his interest in the family, especially Emily. He visited often and asked Emily's sister
Lavinia to report on her health to him. When Lord's wife passed away a few years later,
this friendship erupted into a love affair of sorts. Lord's own family believed rumors
that Emily's sister-in-law walked in on her embracing Otis in an apparently romantic manner.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" "I believe Emily did
have a fondness for the venerable old judge. I think it possible she hoped to marry him."
Furthermore, Dickinson's letters to Lord are practically confessions to the affair. Meanwhile,
Judge Lord's visits to Amherst became so frequent that the locals began to openly speculate about a
wedding despite him being 18 years older than her. Tragedy struck before anything could come of it,
as Lord suffered a debilitating stroke in 1882. This left him largely incapacitated,
and he died two years later, possibly robbing Dickinson of her last chance at love and marriage.
Dickinson's final years were marked by a series of personal losses. As a woman with a very small
social world, she watched helplessly as old friends vanished from her life.
One death in particular appears to have been the final straw for her,
that of her young nephew Thomas Gilbert "Gib" Dickinson of typhoid in 1883.
As Sharon Leiter notes in the Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, Gib was a "remarkable" boy who
was much-loved by his parents and everyone around him, especially his Aunt Emily, who doted on him
and often took part in his adventures. When Gib fell ill with typhoid at the age of eight and lay
on his deathbed, something remarkable happened. Emily, who had not been to her brother's house
in 15 years and who barely left her home at all, went there to sit with the young boy.
Emily fell ill after Gib's death and never fully recovered. She ceased most
of her usual activities, including writing and sending out her poems to friends and family,
and she died just a little more than two years later. While there's no way to know for sure,
her actions in these final years seem like a woman who was broken by this final, terrible loss.
Like some of her loved ones, Emily Dickinson herself died young as well.
After a lifetime of isolation and illness, she passed away in 1886 at the age of 55.
Worse, her last years were marked by steady loss of friends and family, which sapped her desire to
leave the house or even to write and circulate the poetry that had been her lifelong passion.
Dickinson's cause of death was a stroke, which her doctors attributed at the time to Bright's
Disease, an affliction of the kidneys, though modern-day doctors have speculated that it
might've actually been hypertension. Although, according to author John Evangelist Walsh,
the truth is possibly even sadder, as she may have committed suicide.
Walsh's case is circumstantial but persuasive. Dickinson was clearly depressed after the loss
of several loved ones, including Otis Lord, a man many speculated she might marry. She'd
become almost totally reclusive in her last years. She never left the house and stopped sending out
her poems, though she did continue to write. Her poetry from this period is dark, focused on death,
and filled with references to famous suicides. Finally, the symptoms she exhibited in her final
hours are in line with poisoning, indicating that she may have taken things into her own hands.
"Emily's decline was swift."
Nowadays, Emily Dickinson is a famous poet. Her writing is studied, reprinted,
and enjoyed by millions around the world. But one of the most
tragic aspects of her life is that she died unrecognized for the genius that she was.
When Dickinson died in 1886, no one outside o f her immediate circle was aware of her poetry,
and even they didn't have any idea of the scale of her creativity.
She had asked her sister Lavinia to burn her papers, but when Lavinia
discovered almost 1,800 poems in Emily's rooms, she thankfully decided that the
word "papers" didn't mean "poems" and that the world needed to see her sister's work.
The subsequent publishing of these poems finally woke the world up to Emily Dickinson's genius.
But there was one further tragedy inflicted on Emily Dickinson. The process of editing
and publishing her poems was handled by a woman named Mabel Loomis Todd, who had engaged in an
extramarital affair with Dickinson's brother Austin. Todd took the work seriously but faced
challenges. For one thing, there was Dickinson's handwriting, which Todd found difficult to parse.
There was also the fact that Dickinson often worked outside of traditional forms,
using techniques that are quite common in poetry today but were unusual back then.
Todd often substituted words and changed rhyme schemes to make the poems more readable,
but that took away some of their genius in the process.
The most tragic thing that any artist can do is give up on their art. But that is precisely
what Emily Dickinson did in her final years. How much she wanted to publish her work is certainly
up for debate. Only about ten of her poems appeared in print while she was alive, but
anonymously and sometimes apparently without her direct involvement. But she also sent her poems
to many of her friends and assembled them into carefully edited and arranged hand-bound books.
But in her later years, Dickinson stopped making these books. Poems from her final
years appear on scraps of paper, as though they were afterthoughts. Even more tellingly, when she
instructed her sister Lavinia to burn her papers after her death, she left no specific instruction
for the dozens of poetry books she left behind. This left open the possibility that she included
her poems in that request and intended to erase them from the world when she was gone.
Luckily for us, Lavinia didn't listen. She burned Emily's personal letters as instructed,
but she opted to publish the poems, thus allowing her sister's afterlife to be much less tragic.
"The carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality."
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