Emily Dickinson’s singular voice comes into focus in a new collection of letters : NPR

A new collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters has been published by Harvard’s Belknap Press, edited by Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell.

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A new collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters has been published by Harvard’s Belknap Press, edited by Dickinson scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell.

Three Lions/Getty Images

Among the great moments in literary history that I wish I had witnessed was the day, shortly after May 15, 1886, when Lavinia Dickinson entered the bedroom of her recently deceased older sister and began opening drawers.

Poems were born, almost 1,800. Knowing that Emily Dickinson had only published a handful of poems during her life, this discovery came as a shock.

“Hope is the feathered thing/That perches in the soul,” begins one of these now-famous poems. Whatever Dickinson’s hopes for her poems, she could never have imagined how deeply they would resonate with readers; nor how curious these readers would be about his life, much of it spent in his father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and, later, in this bedroom.

From time to time, readers’ image of Emily Dickinson changes: for much of the 20th century, she was a fairytale Stevie Nicks-type figure – look, for example, at the 1976 film of the famous one- woman show by Julie Harris, The Beauty of Amherst.

Feminist Emily Dickinson emerged during the Second Women’s Movement, when poems like “I Am ‘Woman'” were celebrated for their avant-garde anger. And, moving to the present, a monumental new volume of Dickinson’s letters – the first in over 60 years – gives us an engaged Emily Dickinson; a woman in conversation with the world, through gossip, as well as remarks on books, politics and the significant events of her time, particularly the Civil War.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell

Harvard Belknap Press

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Harvard Belknap Press

The Letters of Emily Dickinson, by Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell

Harvard Belknap Press

This new collection of The letters of Emily Dickinson is published by Harvard’s Belknap Press and edited by two Dickinson scholars, Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. To accurately date some of Dickinson’s letters, they studied weather reports and seasonal flowering and harvest cycles in Amherst in the 19th century. They also added to this volume some 300 previously uncollected letters, for a total of 1,304 letters.

The result is that The letters of Emily Dickinson reads like the closest thing we’ll probably ever have to an intimate autobiography of the poet. The first letter here is written by 11-year-old Dickinson to her brother Austin at school. It’s a breathless little sister wonder of repeated phrases about yellow chickens and a “skonk” and poor “Cousin Zebina (who) had a seizure the other day and bit her tongue.. .”

The last letter, written by the ill 55-year-old Dickinson – probably the last she wrote before losing consciousness on May 13, 1886 – was addressed to her cousins ​​Louisa and Frances Norcross. It reads:

Little cousins,

“Remember.”

Emilie.

In between is a life filled with visitors, chores, and recipes for donuts and coconut cakes. Mention is made of the racist stereotype of the Jim Crow minstrel, as well as public figures like Florence Nightingale and Walt Whitman. There are also allusions to the death toll from the ongoing civil war.

Carlo, Dickinson’s faithful dog, walks with her, and frogs and even flies keep him company. Indeed, in an 1859 letter about one of these winged companions, Belle of Amherst’s charm alternates with cold-blooded insensitivity. Dickinson wrote to her cousin Louisa:

I enjoy a lot with a fly, during my sister’s absence, not one of your blue monsters, but a shy creature, which hops from window to window of its white house, so very cheerfully, and buzzes and whirs, a sort of speckled piano. …I will kill him the day (Lavinia) returns (home), because I will no longer need him…”

Dickinson’s unique voice takes on its full meaning in the letters of the 1860s, which often coalesce into poems: enigmatic, comic and charged with fear. A simple thank you note addressed to her beloved soul mate and sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, reads:

Dear Sue,

The Last Supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a Vision.

There are 1,304 letters and it’s still not enough. Researchers estimate that we only have about a tenth of the letters Dickinson ever wrote. And, on that memorable day in 1886, Lavinia entered her sister’s room to find and successfully burn all the letters Dickinson herself had received from others during her life. This was the custom of the time. This new volume of Dickinson’s letters, then, feels like both an intrusion and a foiling of the silence of death—something I would like to believe Dickinson would have appreciated.