The Enigma of Emily Dickenson

Originally presented at the Lakewood and Hudson Public Libraries

The first word of the first poem she ever wrote was “awake.” Almost two centuries later, Emily Dickinson is still jolting us into consciousness.

The legendary recluse in white, who spent most of her life hidden from the world in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote poetry for 37 years and yet allowed only a handful of her poems to be published in her lifetime. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century, decades after her death in 1886, that all 1,789 of them were discovered and gathered into one book and published in their original, unedited form.

But, according to recent scholarship and new biographies, the myth of the shy, virginal woman in the white dress hidden away in a room in her father’s house, writing poems on scraps of paper, is just too simplistic. The Dickinson of these books is, what would be considered in her own time as “naughty” — a fiercely passionate poetic pioneer with a withering wit and yearnings that, like a good poem, can lift the top of your head off. Dickinson’s avoidance of public life, it has been hypothesized, might have had a less romantic cause: epilepsy. She and her family knew the safest and most practical way to deal with her condition would have been for Emily to simply remain at home.

The debate rages on, but, whatever the case, ever since her work first came to light, Dickinson and her work have never suffered from a shortage of fans and admirers; she is now widely considered one of the United States’ greatest poets. WordStage examines her life and literary legacy through her own poems, letters and diaries and the music of her time.