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Teresa Gallagher reads
The Great Poets –
Emily Dickinson for
Naxos AudioBooks

The Great Poets – Emily Dickinson
Notes by Roy McMillan

Emily Dickinson is often imagined as a kind of rare, delicate porcelain creation, fragile to the point of untouchability: dressed all in white, fearful of strangers, almost as fearful of friends, living her life like a hermit, hermetically sealed in a New England house, her poems – tiny, fragmentary – being released like wisps of air from someone trying to hold their breath. In part, this image is wholly deserved – she was indeed reclusive; she did dress all in white; she hid when someone she had corresponded with for years came to play the piano. She published almost no works during her life; and that life was essentially hidden from view. As a result, the ambiguity of her poetry is seen as a mirror of her enigmatic life, and the verses seen as gnomic, almost visionary. An enigmatic life is a positive boon to myth-making, of course; and ambiguous poetry maintains the need for critical re-evaluation. But Emily Dickinson’s works have merited their 120 years of attention because of their idiosyncratic place in the history and development of American verse; and the expressive beauty of the poems themselves.

She was born in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a wealthy, prominent Calvinist family, with a father who was a lawyer and Congressman. She had an older brother, William Austin (known as Austin; he would later marry one of her dearest friends, Susan Gilbert, and have an affair with another one, Mabel Loomis Todd), and a sister, Lavinia. She was a bright, eager, even exceptional student at the Amherst Academy, and a popular, witty member of her school. But she lasted only a year when she moved on to the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and – as with almost every other aspect of her life – the reasons for this are debated. Homesickness? Illness? A refusal to make a public pledge of her allegiance to Christ? Humiliated by the response to this refusal? Whatever the reason, it meant that she was back at home, and her life from then on was centred almost exclusively there. She was not anti-social, though – the local children would come and play in their house, and she enjoyed baking and tending the garden. Most significant, though, is the effort she put into her letters. Her correspondence is as vivid, intimate and profuse as her poetry; and she was a close and loving friend through these letters, which are brimming with fun, interest and in-jokes, advice, concern and passion.

But she started to withdraw physically if not emotionally, becoming more and more the observer of life rather than a liver of it; and even observation became a problem after the mid-1860s, when she was advised on medical grounds not to read or write. She also developed Bright’s disease, a condition that (quite apart from the vomiting, back-pain and fever) can bring on oedema to such an extent that it distends the whole body, and this may well have contributed to her desire for seclusion. Her father died in 1874, and Emily and Lavinia cared for their mother, who had been an invalid from the early 1870s, until her death in 1882. Emily herself died four years later, in May 1886.

When she was going through her sister’s possessions, Lavinia discovered a box. In it were some 900 poems, hand-stitched into 60 small volumes (known as fascicles). Further researches have since brought the total Emily wrote up to an astonishing 1775, the majority written between 1858 and 1865. Three small collections of her work were published in 1890, 1891 and 1896, but these had been significantly corrected by the editors to try and diminish the idiosyncrasies of style and punctuation, to even out the rhythms and normalise the rhymes. But they introduced the public to a voice that had deliberately kept itself silent while alive, and over the next sixty years, more collections were published – with much less editorial intervention – and the myth of ‘The Belle of Amherst’, the solitary versifier, the reclusive porcelain figurine, began to grow.

The curious aspect of this myth is the fact that Dickinson seems to have realised that she was a major poet, but also seems to have decided not to do anything about it, a contradiction evident in the works themselves and her attitude towards them. They are almost all short (several are only two, and many just four, lines long); but these are not simple mottoes. They are intensely delicate, like a tuning fork on a glass rim, but as a result pure and powerful; and because they are so compact and allusive, they are filled with linguistic and emotional ambivalence that is belied by their apparent simplicity. The rhythm is generally that of the common metre hymn-form (a four-beat opening line, followed by a three-beat second one, such as in the beginning of the 23rd Psalm or Amazing Grace); the language initially almost as docile as a homily. But Dickinson is dealing with passions, not platitudes, and her poetry incorporates sudden and unexplained shifts in metaphors, abrupt endings, unexpected images, and the ever-present dash, which could be a comma, an ellipse, a full-stop, a colon or all of them at once, managing to both link and divide the ideas on either side of it. And her themes were the great concerns - life, death, nature and love.

There seem to have been at least two men who were particularly close and significant friends, and several women have been proposed as her lovers as well – but there is no certainty about it. There is a continuing argument over whether the love she expresses in her poetry is the visionary’s for her God or unrequited desire, either heterosexual or lesbian. It is naïve to say that it doesn’t matter, since it clearly mattered to her and to the development of feminist thought, religious poetry and the vast cannon of love poetry generally. But it is also true that it is never explicit, and even those that appear straightforwardly erotic (Wild Nights, for example) can be reread with a metaphorical eye and reveal a completely new interpretation; and one that again is ambivalent. Such uncertainty could diminish the works, making them seem either over-obscure or meaningless; but in Dickinson it allows greater possibilities and potentials rather than limiting them. Both – all – readings are not just valid so much as invited and accommodated together.

The poems flew from her – scribbled on envelopes, on the backs of grocery lists, on scraps of paper – over 360 of them in 1862, according to Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson; but they were subject to repeated revision, sometimes over a period of years. They looked extraordinary, with almost every punctuation mark reduced to a variation of a dash; but were often meticulously reworked. She took the trouble to bind them, and sent some fascicles to friends – but she never looked for publication. Some poems actually discussed publication and fame; but she quite deliberately did not have any of them circulated. She seemed to know their worth, but did not wish to parade them.

She was writing poetry from her teens and had had a very few poems published anonymously in local papers. Then in 1862, she contacted Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a literary figure who had written for a magazine asking for work from new writers) to ask if he thought her work had any merit. He was sufficiently impressed to continue as her correspondent all her life, encourage her to continue writing, and co-edit the first two volumes of her poetry after she died; although not impressed enough to publish them when she was alive. This seems to be because he recognised their astonishing difference from the standard poetical fare of their time, and also explains why he made so many alterations to the texts in the published works – he wanted them to be acceptable to the average reader. He need not have worried. Dickinson’s work stands comparison with Blake, Shelley, Keats and Shakespeare, as well as Emerson and Thoreau. Her work is unique in its style and expression, and she became a figurehead for the twentieth century as a poet, a woman and an artist: complex, individual and unconventional; passionate, breathing and real.

A note on the text
It is impossible to know exactly when Emily Dickinson wrote all her poems, so arranging them in the order they were written is a matter for conjecture. Some editors group the works according to themes, which can be slightly limiting or misleading, since many works are not just about one thing. Some use the numerical system adopted for the complete works. In this selection, to prevent over-proscriptive editorialising, and to allow some unexpected happenstance of juxtaposition, they are arranged alphabetically by first line (none had titles).

Roy McMillan

List of Works included on this title

A drop fell on the apple tree
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
A poor torn heart a tattered heart
A something in a summer's day
A still - Volcano - Life
A thought went up my mind to-day
A toad can die of light!
A word is dead
A wounded deer leaps highest
Adrift! A little boat adrift!
After great pain a formal feeling comes
All the letters I can write
Alter? When the hills do
Ample make this bed
Apparently with no surprise
As imperceptibly as Grief
Beauty - be not caused - It Is
Because I could not stop for Death
Come slowly Eden!
Dear March come in!
Death is a dialogue between
Drab habitation of whom
Drowning is not so pitiful
Each that we lose takes part of us
Eden is that old fashioned House
Exultation is the going
Fame is a fickle food
Finite to fail but infinite to venture
Forbidden fruit a flavor has
Forever - is composed of Nows
Glee! The great storm is over
He ate and drank the precious words
He fumbles at your Soul
He touched me so I live to know
Heart not so heavy as mine
Heart! We will forget him!
Heaven is what I cannot reach!
Her final summer was it
Hope is a subtle glutton
Hope is the thing with feathers
How happy is the little Stone
How the old Mountains drip with Sunset
I asked no other thing
I bring an unaccustomed wine
I can wade grief
I cannot live with you
I died for beauty but was scarce
I dreaded that first Robin so
I dwell in Possibility
I envy seas whereon he rides
I felt a Funeral in my Brain
I gave myself to him
I had no cause to be awake
I had no time to hate because
I have never seen "Volcanoes"
I have no life but this
I heard a fly buzz when I died
I hide myself within my flower
I know a place where summer strives
I know some lonely houses off the road
I many times thought peace had come
I meant to find her when I came
I meant to have but modest needs
I never saw a moor
I should not dare to leave my friend
I stepped from plank to plank
I taste a liquor never brewed
I think the hemlock likes to stand
I took my power in my hand
I went to heaven
If I can stop one heart from breaking
If I may have it when it's dead
If recollecting were forgetting
If you were coming in the fall
I'll tell you how the Sun rose
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Is Heaven a physician?
It might be easier
It sounded as if the streets were running
It tossed and tossed
It was not Death for I stood up
It's such a little thing to weep
Like Rain it sounded till it curved
Love is anterior to life
Luck is not chance
Mine by the right of the white election!
Mine enemy is growing old
Much madness is divinest sense
My life closed twice before its close
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun
Nature rarer uses yellow
Not knowing when the dawn will come
Not with a Club the Heart is broken
Of all the souls that stand create
On this wondrous sea
One blessing had I than the rest
One need not be a chamber - to be Haunted
Pain has an element of blank
Proud of my broken heart since thou didst break it
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
She died -- this was the way she died
Some keep the Sabbath going to church
Success is counted sweetest
Surgeons must be very careful
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
That after Horror
That I did always love
That Love is all there is
The brain within its groove
The day came slow till five o'clock
The Dying need but little Dear
The grass so little has to do
The grave my little cottage is
The heart asks pleasure first
The leaves like women interchange
The moon is distant from the sea
The one that could repeat the summer day
The pedigree of honey
The rat is the concisest tenant
The Soul has Bandaged moments
The soul should always stand ajar
The spider as an artist
The waters chased him as he fled
The way I read a letter 's this
The wind begun to rock the grass
There came a Wind like a Bugle
There is no frigate like a book
There's a certain slant of light
There's been a death in the opposite house
They might not need me – yet they might
They say that 'time assuages'
This is my letter to the world
This World is not Conclusion
'T is little I could care for pearls
'Tis not that Dying hurts us so
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee
'Twas like a Maelstrom with a notch
Unable are the Loved to die
We never know how high we are
We never know we go -- when we are going
What if I say I shall not wait?
What inn is this
Where Thou art - that
While I was fearing it it came
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Will there really be a morning?
You left me sweet two legacies

Review by Rachel Redford, The Observer, 17 February 2008

Teresa Gallagher gives Emily Dickinson a New England voice that succeeds in conveying the poet’s distinctive duality: her gentle, mystical other-worldliness underscored by a resolute strength. In these 99 poems, recurring words – sea, Heaven, sun – chime mantra-like, along with the lyrical assonance and rhyme. Dickinson is acutely sensitive to the beauty of light and nature – ‘the colour on the cruising cloud’ – while her metaphors and personification intrigue. Does the 'door ajar' shut her out or invite her in? Is the ‘realm of you’ Heaven or some paradise of earthly love? Even though recurrent themes are death and self-denial, the mood is airy and buoyant, like the angel’s wings Dickinson imagines she wears.

Review from Waterstone’s Quarterly, Spring 2008

Emily Dickinson is remembered as a 19th-century New England recluse, but she is reaching a wider audience than she could ever have expected via this Great Poets audio series. A wide range of the poet’s work is here and, as read by the charismatic Teresa Gallagher, the problem of how to turn dashes into pauses is managed with aplomb. To quote the great lady, ‘Beauty be not caused – it is’; and this is beautiful.

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