EMILY DICKINSON

BACKGROUND
A 2 L I T E R AT U R E
 FAMILY
• Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in
Amherst, Massachusetts.

• Her family had deep roots in New England. Her paternal

grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was well known as the founder of
Amherst College.

• Her father worked at Amherst and served as a state legislator in the

U.S. government.

• She had one brother, William Austin and one sister, Lavinia
Norcross. Emily was the middle child.

• Domestic duties like baking and gardening occupied her time along
with attending school, taking part in church activities, reading
books, learning to sing and play the piano, writing letters, and taking
walks
 EDUCATION
• Dickinson’s formal schooling was exceptional for girls
in the early1800s, though not unusual for girls in
Amherst.

• Emily Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy

(now Amherst College) for 7 years and the Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary for 1 year.
– Her single year at Seminary school was the longest
amount of time she had been from home.
– Seminary school = religious studies
• She was an excellent student, despite missing long
stretches of the school year due to frequent illness and
depression.

• Though the precise reasons for Dickinson's final

departure from the academy in 1848 are unknown, it is
believed that her fragile emotional state probably
played a role.
CHILDHOOD & TEEN YEARS
• In youth, Dickinson was very social and outgoing,--something that retreated as she grew older: “I am
growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I
don’t doubt that I will have crowds of admirers at that age” (L6).
• She found delight in numerous female friendships, including that of Susan Gilbert, who later became her
sister-in-law.
• Although Dickinson never married, she had several significant male friends, among them Benjamin
Newton, with whom she shared her love of poetry and some of her own early poetry.
• There is evidence she received at least one marriage proposal, from George H. Gould, a graduate of
Amherst College.
• Dickinson’s youthful years were not without turmoil. Deaths of friends and relatives, including her young
cousin Sophia Holland, prompted questions about death and immortality. Dickinson’s house was located
near the town cemetery and she could not have ignored the frequent burials that later provided powerful
imagery for her poems.
• A wave of religious revivals in Dickinson’s teen years addressed her Calvinist society’s concern for the
disposition of the human soul. Although Dickinson’s friends, sister, father, and eventually brother all joined
the church (her mother had joined the year after Emily was born), Emily never did, acknowledging plainly
to a friend, “I am one of the lingering bad ones” (L36).
EARLY TWENTIES
• In Dickinson’s early twenties, writing became increasingly important to her. In a letter to Austin that teases him
for writing poetry, she reveals something more significant about herself: “I’ve been in the habit myself of writing
some few things, and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent, so you’d better be somewhat
careful, or I’ll call the police!” (L110) Her earliest writings—both are Valentines and uncharacteristic of her later
work–were published anonymously during this period. A letter (“Magnum bonum, harem scarum”) appeared in
the Amherst College student publication The Indicator in 1850, and a poem “‘Sic transit gloria mundi,’” in
the Springfield Daily Republican in 1852.

• During this time, her early twenties, Emily began to write poetry seriously. Fortunately, during those rare journeys
Emily met two very influential men that would be sources of inspiration and guidance: Charles Wadsworth and
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. There were other less influential individuals that affected Emily, such as Samuel
Bowles and J.G. Holland, but the impact that Wadsworth and Higginson had on Dickinson was monumental.

• Dickinson’s letters to her brother also reveal a growing sense of “difference” between herself and others: “What
makes a few of us so different from others? It’s a question I often ask myself” (L118). This sense of distinction
became more pronounced as she grew older and as her poetic sensibilities matured.
 EMILY DICKINSON’S SECLUSION
• Refusing to see almost everyone that came to visit, Emily seldom left her father's house. In
Emily's entire life, she took one trip to Philadelphia (due to eye problems), one to Washington,
and a few trips to Boston. Other than those occasional ventures, Emily had no extended
exposure to the world outside her home town.
• Because of her discomfort and shyness in social situations (agoraphobia), Emily gradually
reduced her social contacts, going out less and less into society. By her late twenties, this has
led to an almost complete seclusion; spending most of her time in the family house, rarely
meeting others from outside a close family circle. Her sister explains this wasn’t a sudden
decision, but a gradual process that happened over a period of time. However, despite the
physical seclusion, Emily still maintained written contact with a variety of thought-provoking
people.
• It is also clear from her poetry that her decision to live life as a recluse did not close her mind,
but in many ways allowed the flow of new avenues of thought and inner experiences—
introspection.
POETIC INFLUENCES
• Emily Dickinson began writing as a teenager.
• Her early influences include Leonard Humphrey, principal of Amherst Academy, and a family
friend named Benjamin Franklin Newton. Newton introduced Dickinson to the poetry of
William Wordsworth, who also served as an inspiration to the young writer.

• In 1855, Dickinson ventured outside of Amherst, as far as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century
England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New
England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to
Christianity. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John
Keats.
THE 1850-65 S —MOVE HOUSE &
AUSTIN’S MARRIAGE TO SUE
• A short but intense period of creativity that resulted in her composing, revising, and saving
hundreds of poems.

• Overlaps with the most significant event of American nineteenth-century history, the Civil War
(1861-65). During this time, Dickinson’s personal life also underwent tremendous change.

• In 1855, the Dickinsons moved back to the family homestead (where her grandparents had
lived), and where Austin and his new wife Susan Gilbert built a house next door in 1856 called
the Evergreens.
EMILY & SUE’S RELATIONSHIP
• The Evergreens was a social gathering for Amherst society, and Dickinson herself took part in
parties there early in the couple’s marriage.
• Their lifestyle eventually would contrast markedly with her own, more reclusive manner. The
couple’s three children—Ned, born in 1861; Martha, in 1866; and Gilbert, in 1875—brought much
joy to Dickinson’s life, even though Susan’s developing role as a mother may have put more
distance between her and the poet.
• Poetic Confidantes = Sue
– Dickinson shared some of her poems with selected friends whose literary taste she admired including
Susan Dickinson who received more than 250 poems throughout the two women’s forty-year relationship
– Susan was supportive of the poet, playing the role of "most beloved friend, influence, muse, and adviser"
whose editorial suggestions Dickinson sometimes followed, Sue played a primary role in Emily's
creative processes. Although Emily never married, she had several significant relationships with a select
few. It was during this period following her return from school that Emily began to dress all in white and
choose those precious few that would be her own private society.
1858-1865—PROLIFIC WRITING PERIOD
• By the time Dickinson turned 35, she had composed more than 1100 concise,
powerful lyrics that astutely examine pain, grief, joy, love, nature, and art. She
recorded about 800 of these poems in small handmade booklets (now called
“fascicles”), very private “publications” that she shared with no one.
• Some events in Dickinson’s life during her intense writing period are difficult to
re-construct. Drafts of three letters, now called the “Master Letters,” survive
from late 1858 and early 1861. They suggest a serious and troubled (though
unidentified) romantic attachment that some scholars believe drove Dickinson’s
creative output. During this time Dickinson also referred to a trauma that she
described in a letter: “I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none”
(L261). The cause of that terror is unknown.
• Significant friendships such as those with Samuel Bowles, Rev. Edward Dwight,
and Rev. Charles Wadsworth changed during this time, and Dickinson began to
feel an increasing need for a “preceptor” to cope with her outpouring of verse
and with questions about publication.
• In 1864 and 1865, Dickinson underwent treatments for a painful eye condition,
now thought to be iritis, with Boston ophthalmologist Henry W. Williams. While
under the doctor’s care (eight months in 1864, six months in 1865), she boarded
with her cousins, Frances and Louisa Norcross. Those trips were to be her last
out of Amherst; after her return in 1865, she rarely ventured beyond the grounds
of the Homestead.
 1865-1886—THE LATER YEARS
• After Emily Dickinson’s visits to Cambridge for eye treatment in the mid-1860s, the poet settled into a quiet, reclusive existence with
her parents and sister. Although she rarely ventured beyond the family Homestead, she did entertain several significant visitors,
including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom she met in person for the first time in 1870 when he visited her at home in Amherst.
– To Higginson she offered her own definition of poetry: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I
know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there
any other way?” (L342a)
• Although Dickinson did continue to write poetry, she appears to have stopped formal assembly of the poems into booklets. Manuscripts
dated to this period appear less finished than those of her intense writing period (1858-1865), though scholars are increasingly intrigued
by what these later manuscripts—some of which are written on scraps of paper—suggest about her writing process. Dickinson’s work
reached the eyes of several writers and publishers who did express interest in publishing her work. In 1875 Higginson read a few poems
by “Two Unknown Poetesses” to the New England Woman’s Club, and one of the “poetesses,” who were not named during the reading,
is believed to have been Dickinson.
• Dickinson’s poem “Success is counted sweetest” does appear in A Masque of Poets (1878), though whether Dickinson actually gave
advance permission is still in question.
• In her later years, Dickinson enjoyed a romance with Judge Otis Phillips Lord, a friend of her father. He and his wife had been frequent
guests at the Homestead. A widower when he began dating Emily Dickinson, Lord lived in Salem, Massachusetts. Drafts of letters to
Lord suggest that the poet even considered marrying him, though she never did.
• Dickinson’s later life is marked by illness and death: her father’s death in 1874, her mother’s stroke in 1875, her nephew Gib’s death at
age eight in 1883, Otis Lord’s death in 1884, Helen Hunt Jackson’s death in 1885. The poet herself became ill shortly after her nephew
Gib died: “The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me” (L873). She remained in poor health until she died of kidney
disease at age 55 on May 15, 1886. She was buried four days later in the town cemetery, now known as West Cemetery.
 PUBLICATION
• A few of her poems were published in newspapers anonymously and apparently without her prior
consent and the few works that were published were edited and altered to adhere to conventional
standards of the time. Unfortunately, much of the power of Dickinson's unusual use of syntax and
form was lost in the alteration.

• After her sister's death, Lavinia Dickinson discovered hundreds of her poems in notebooks that
Emily had filled over the years. The first volume of these poems was published in 1890.
INFLUENTIAL
PEOPLE IN
EMILY’S LIFE
 EDWARD DICKINSON
• Embodied its ethics of responsibility, fairness, and personal restraint to a point that
contemporaries found his demeanor severe and unyielding.
• He took his role as head of his family seriously, and within his home his decisions and his
word were law.
• He attended Yale and later became a lawyer
• He was a very civic person and served the Amherst College and U.S. Congress
• He was a prominent citizen, active in several reform societies, on the board of regional
institutions, and involved in major civic improvements, such as leading the effort to bring
the railroad to town in the mid 1850s.
• Ever respectful of her father’s nature (“the straightest engine” that “never played” [L360]),
Dickinson obeyed him as a child, but found ways to rebel or circumvent him as a young
woman, and finally, with wit and occasional exasperation, learned to accommodate with his
autocratic ways.
• Her early resistance slowly shifted to a mutual respect, and finally subsided after his death
in pathos, love, and awe. Despite his public involvements, the poet viewed her father as an
isolated, solitary figure, “the oldest and the oddest sort of foreigner,” she told a friend
(Sewall, The Lyman Letters, p. 70), a man who read “lonely & rigorous books” (L342a), yet
who made sure the birds were fed in winter.
• Edward Dickinson’s lonely death in a Boston boardinghouse following his collapse while
giving a speech in the state legislature the hot morning of June 16, 1874, was unbearable to
the whole family. The entire town closed down on the afternoon of his funeral, and his
eldest daughter later paid this tribute: “Lay this Laurel on the one\ Too intrinsic for Renown
SUSAN GILBERT DICKINSON
• Susan was an intelligent woman, a great reader, a sparkling conversationalist, and a book collector of wide-
ranging interests. Late in life she traveled in Europe several times before her death from heart disease on
May 12, 1913.
• 1850, Susan and Austin Dickinson, the poet’s brother, began courting. They announced their engagement
on Thanksgiving Day in 1853 and were married three years later on July 1, 1856. At their newly-built
home, The Evergreens, next door to the Homestead, Susan enjoyed entertaining friends and the numerous
literary figures attracted to the town, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the early
years of Austin and Susan’s marriage, Emily Dickinson would often visit The Evergreens
• The Evergreens was the setting for two family tragedies. After a time, Austin and Susan’s marriage
gradually deteriorated, and in the fall of 1882 Austin began a thirteen-year affair with Mabel Loomis Todd
that caused great rancor and bitterness within the family. Then, in the fall of 1883, eight-year-old Gib,
beloved of all the family, died of typhoid fever. The child’s death crippled both houses, leaving Susan
desolated and the poet ill for weeks.
• Susan had become close friends with Emily Dickinson in 1850. Their intimate correspondence,
occasionally interrupted by periods of seeming estrangement, nevertheless lasted until the poet’s death in
1886. Susan, a writer herself, was the most familiar of all the family members with Dickinson’s poetry,
having received more than 250 poems from her over the years. At least once she offered constructive
criticism and advice. Susan wrote the poet’s remarkable obituary, which appeared in the Springfield
Republican on May 18, 1886. After the poet’s death, her sister Lavinia asked Susan to edit the poems for
publication. Lavinia soon grew impatient with Susan’s slow editorial pace, however, and transferred the
poems into the hands of Mabel Loomis Todd, who published three volumes during the 1890s with the aid
of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
• Susan’s friendship helped expand the poet’s horizons, and their sharing of books and ideas was a vital
component of her intellectual life. In her later days, Emily Dickinson wrote to Susan, “With the exception
of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living. To say that sincerely is strange
praise” (L757).
 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
• Thomas Wentworth Higginson, co-editor of the first two collections of Emily
Dickinson’s poems, was a man of astonishingly varied talents and
accomplishments. A lifelong radical, he was an outspoken abolitionist, advocate
of women’s rights, and founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. During the
Civil War, he served as commander of the first Union regiment of freed African
American soldiers. An ordained Unitarian minister, Higginson was also a prolific
writer; his most highly regarded work was a memoir of his war years, Army Life
in a Black Regiment.
• Higginson had a long association with the Atlantic Monthly, contributing a
number of articles, essays and poems. In the April 1862 issue, he published
“Letter to a Young Contributor,” in which he encouraged and advised aspiring
writers. Within a month, he received a note from Emily Dickinson, then 31 years
old, along with four poems, thus beginning a relationship that was to last until the
poet’s death in 1886.
• Although he did not actively urge Emily Dickinson to publish during her lifetime,
Higginson became, in Dickinson’s own term, her “Preceptor.” Written
communication between the two continued after their first letter; about 70 letters
from their correspondence survive, along with about 100 poems. Higginson also
visited the poet twice and attended her funeral in the spring of 1886, reading a
poem by Emily Brontë, “No Coward Soul Is Mine.”
 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN NEWTON
• My earliest friend,” “My dying Tutor” (L265), “my Father’s Law Student” (L750), “The first of my own friends” (L110),
“a gentle, yet grave Preceptor” (L153) “an elder brother, loved indeed very much” (L153) – these were all phrases Emily
Dickinson employed in speaking of Benjamin Franklin Newton, a young man whose effect upon her development as a
poet was early and profound, and to whom she long paid tribute.
• came to Amherst in the fall of 1847, a twenty-six-year-old aspiring law student desiring to study for two years in the
recently formed partnership office of Dickinson and Bowdoin. Like other such law students of Edward Dickinson’s over
the years, Newton became a familiar presence in the Dickinson household, befriending the Dickinson children and often
partaking of family meals. Emily Dickinson met him just as she enrolled in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and she
became acquainted with his love of books during several weeks the following March that she was home nursing a severe
cold. She later wrote: “Mr. Newton became to me a gentle, yet grave Preceptor, teaching me what to read, what authors to
admire, what was most grand or beautiful in nature, and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen” (L153).
• he was widely read, and able to guide Dickinson to poets and authors he esteemed. She spoke afterwards of admiring “the
strength and grace, of an intellect far surpassing my own,” which “taught me many lessons” (L153). Most important, he
recognized Dickinson’s exceptional mind and encouraged her talent for writing. “All can write autographs, but few
paragraphs, for we are mostly no more than names,” he inscribed in her autograph book when he left Amherst for
Worcester in August 1849. (Dickinson’s autograph book is housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)
• Newton corresponded with Dickinson–most notably sending her Emerson’s Poems in January 1850–while he studied for
the bar, opened his own law practice, and then became the District Attorney of Worcester County. He married in June
1851, and while he continued to write and to guide his young protégé, he evidently gave her few indications that his
health was failing. News of his death from tuberculosis on March 24, 1853, shocked Dickinson when she read of it in the
newspaper three days later. Loss of her “gentle, yet grave Preceptor” led her to rely principally on her lexicon (her
dictionary) as her guide to writing poetry for several years to follow (see L261).
• Although it has been suggested that Newton and Dickinson may have been romantically attached, this seems unlikely. The
theory scarcely fits the tone of the three letters the poet wrote to Newton’s minister, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, for
reassurance he had died peacefully. She did, however, regret for the rest of her life that the importance to her of this “first
friend” had “slipped my simple fingers through / While just a Girl at school” (Fr418). She treasured the advice of his
letters, and never forgot him.
EMILY’S VIEWS
 THE CIVIL WAR
• “War feels to me an oblique place,” Emily Dickinson wrote Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson in February 1863
(L280). Higginson was commander of the First South Carolina Regiment, which was comprised of African-American
soldiers, and saw action in Florida and South Carolina. Dickinson had initiated a correspondence with Higginson, and
sought advice about her poems, after his “Letter to a Young Contributor” appeared in the April 1862 issue of the Atlantic
Monthly.
• The years of the Civil War corresponded to Dickinson’s most intense period of productivity as a poet, during which she
is thought to have written roughly half of her total number of poems, and yet her precise relation to the war remains
something of a puzzle. She had friends like Higginson who fought in the war. Her brother, Austin (who paid $500 for a
substitute, the standard way to avoid military service), was particularly close to Frazer Stearns, son of the Amherst
College president. Stearns’s death at the Battle of New Bern, North Carolina, was a blow to the whole town, recorded in
Dickinson’s moving letter above and also, possibly, in the poem “Victory comes late” (Fr195), which she sent to
Samuel Bowles. Dickinson followed the war news closely, and in May 1865 wrote with satisfaction of the capture of
Jefferson Davis and the rumor that he had been disguised in a woman’s skirt (L308).
• Because it is the very nature of Dickinson’s poems to have a range of possible references, it is difficult to say whether a
particular poem was inspired by the war. “It feels a shame to be Alive -” (Fr524) certainly seems like a response to the
Civil War. In another letter to Higginson from the winter of 1863 (L282), Dickinson included the lines from another
poem that could have been inspired by news of the war: “The possibility to pass/ Without a Moment’s Bell -/ Into
Conjecture’s presence -/ Is like a face of steel” (Fr243). But it could just as well have fit Dickinson’s needs at the time, to
share with Higginson her own sense of the danger he faced.
• Though she told her Norcross cousins, perhaps in 1864, “I myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps” (L298),
Dickinson never wrote a poem as explicit in its patriotic fervor as, for example, Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the
Republic.” Her poems tend to assume a less heroic, “smaller” posture. Her most direct participation in the war effort may
have been the three poems that appeared anonymously, during late February and March of 1864, in a Brooklyn-based
newspaper called Drum Beat, conceived for the purpose of raising money for medical supplies and care for the Union
Army. These poems, as Karen Dandurand has argued, “must be seen as her contribution to the Union cause.”
• “Austin is chilled—by Frazer’s murder—He says—his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’—‘Frazer is killed,’
just as Father told it—to Him. Two or three words of lead—that dropped so deep, they keep weighing—”
-Emily Dickinson to Samuel Bowles, late March 1862 (L256)
 THE CHURCH
• Dickinson lived in an age defined by the struggle to reconcile traditional Christian beliefs with newly emerging scientific concepts, the most influential being Darwinism. Dickinson’s
struggles with faith and doubt reflect her society’s diverse perceptions of God, nature, and humankind.
• Brought up in a Calvinist household, the young Emily Dickinson attended religious services with her family at the village meetinghouse, Amherst’s First Congregational Church (the
building now houses Amherst College administrative offices). Congregationalism was the predominant denomination of early New England. Amherst College itself was founded in
1821 by Congregationalists to educate more young men for Christian ministry. During Dickinson’s lifetime, the religious landscape diversified to include Methodists, Baptists,
Unitarians, and, eventually, Catholics.
• Like most Amherst families, the Dickinsons held daily religious observances in their home. Dickinson received her own Bible from her father at age 13. Her familiarity with the Bible
and her facile references to it in letters and poems have long impressed scholars.
• Ministers from the church were regular guests at the Dickinsons’ house, and several became close friends. Dickinson commented on sermons in her letters (“We had such a splendid
sermon from that Prof Park-I never heard anything like it . . . “(L142)), and the influence of church music on her poems is apparent in her use of the common meter on which many
hymns are based.
• In Dickinson’s teen years, a wave of religious revivals moved through New England. One by one, her friends and family members made the public profession of belief in Christ that
was necessary to become a full member of the church. Although she agonized over her relationship to God, Dickinson ultimately did not join the church–not out of defiance but in order
to remain true to herself: “I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die” (L13). By the time the
First Congregational Church moved to a site near the Homestead on Main Street in 1868, Emily Dickinson had stopped attending services altogether.
• Dickinson’s attitude toward spiritual matters was more complex than her poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to church / I keep it staying at home” (Fr236) implies. While her poems
are saturated with the language, ritual, and expectation of traditional religious experience, her tone varies tremendously. Some poems affirm the need for faith: “ Faith – is the Pierless
Bridge / Supporting what We see / Unto the Scene that We do not – ” (Fr978). Irreverence underlies other aspects of her work: “The Bible is an antique Volume – / Written by faded
Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres -” (Fr1577). At times Dickinson’s poetry expresses outright anger with an absent God:
• Of Course – I prayed –
And did God care?
He cared as much as on the Air
A Bird – had stamped her foot –
And cried “Give Me” –
(Fr581)
• Despite her non-participation in public religious life, Dickinson’s poems reveal a keen interest in issues of faith and doubt, suffering and salvation, mortality and immortality. Deaths of
friends and family members, the Civil War, and close observation of nature’s cycles prompted poetic musings on religious themes throughout her life.
• Although Dickinson’s immediate family accepted the poet’s decision to keep the Sabbath “staying at home,” her father once asked Rev. Jonathan Jenkins, minister of First Church from
1867-77, to meet with his daughter and assess her spiritual health. Rev. Jenkins’s diagnosis? “Sound” (Habegger, p. 542).
THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY
• The poet took pleasure in the sweeter culinary arts, baking the family’s bread and cake, but Emily
Dickinson wanted nothing to do with cleaning. She complained of her more willing sister to one girlhood
friend, “I don’t see much of Vinnie—she’s mostly dusting stairs” (L176). “God keep me from what they
call households,” she prayed (L36). Her understanding of the dynamics of women’s work proves more
complicated than these youthful tirades. The poem “How many times these low feet staggered” (Fr238)
both registers the stultifying effect of housework on women’s lives and criticizes a society that fails to
value the work of sweeping cobwebs and washing windows.
• Mount Holyoke Female Seminary Shool: Some believe the poet suffered from religious oppression at the
school; others contend the curriculum was not challenging. Still others argue that she was too homesick to
continue to live apart from her family. One possibility that bears noting is that most young women did not
return to the seminary for a second or third year. Societal attitudes at the time maintained that women did
not need higher education since their primary adult responsibilities would center on domestic life. Less
than 20 percent of the students during Dickinson’s year returned to the seminary for additional study. Many
of them married missionaries or became teachers in the United States, as did the poet’s cousin, or in
schools abroad established by the American Board of Missions. Whatever the reason Dickinson chose to
leave Mount Holyoke, the seminary and its formidable leader, Mary Lyon, left the poet with an enduring
legacy: the belief that women were capable of and entitled to a life of the mind.
 NATURE
• World of plants, as well as the wildflowers, trees, and shrubs that made up Emily Dickinson’s Amherst, provided the poet with a constant
source of inspiration and companionship.
• Emily Dickinson gardened throughout her life. At age 11, she announced to a friend: “My Plants grow beautifully” (L3). In her middle years,
she was able to tend plants year-round in the conservatory her father added to the Homestead: “My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but
to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles” (L315). A letter written just a few years before her death reminds us that Dickinson had to work to
make such magic happen: “I am very busy picking up stems and stamens as the hollyhocks leave their clothes around” (L771).
• Emily Dickinson also learned about plants in botany courses at both Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. During her
school years she assembled an extensive herbarium (a book of pressed plants) that included more than 400 specimens, each labeled by the poet
with its Latin name. The herbarium, now in the collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, demonstrates Dickinson’s intimate
familiarity with her natural surroundings.
• In the Homestead garden, Emily, Lavinia and Mrs. Dickinson grew a great variety of flowering plants: shrubs, climbing vines, annuals,
perennials and bulbs. Dickinson’s poems and letters mention roses, lilacs, peonies, sweet williams, daisies, foxgloves, poppies, nasturtiums and
zinnias, among others. Although the exact location of the flower beds is unknown, Dickinson’s niece Martha remembered that “there were long
beds filling the main garden, where one walked between a succession of daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths in spring—through the mid-summer
richness—up to the hardy chrysanthemums that smelled of Thanksgiving, savory and chill, when only the marigolds . . . were left to rival them
in pungency” (Bianchi, p. 2).
• As a gardener, Emily Dickinson was attuned to the weather, the changing seasons, transitions in times of day, and the populations of bees, flies,
and birds that dwelled among her plants. Her observations made their way into countless poems. An ominous thunderstorm gives notice in
“The Wind begun to rock the Grass” (Fr796):
• As she became more reclusive, both Dickinson’s flowers and her poems served as emissaries for her. She sent both to friends and
acquaintances to acknowledge birthdays, comfort in time of illness, or express condolences: “Intrusiveness of flowers is brooked even by
troubled hearts. / They enter and then knock—then chide their ruthless sweetness, and then remain forgiven. / May these molest as fondly!”