EMILY

1 DICKINSON’S POETRY

EMILY DICKINSON’S POETRY (before, during, and after the 1860s)

1. QUESTIONS

1 Read each poem out loud in order to learn to hear the poet’s voice and to tune
your ears to her rhymes, rhythms, and syntax. How do they match what you
think she is saying?

2 What kind of voice is she using in each poem? How does that voice stand in
relation to authority?

3 Dickinson’s poetry is very dissimilar to poetry being published at the same time.
Where do you think the originality of her themes and the innovativeness of her
style resides?
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2. BIOGRAPHY

1830 Emily Dickinson is born in Amherst, a small college town in Massachusetts, to a

family of Calvinist background.

“She shared her family’s household with her younger sister Lavinia, her mother,
Emily Norcross Dickinson, and her father, Edward Dickinson, a lawyer,
Congressman, and Treasurer of Amherst College. Her brother Austin, one year
older, a lawyer like his father, lived for most of his life in the house next door,
after marrying Dickinson’s friend Susan Huntington Gilbert” (McIntosh and
Hart 2870).

One year “away” in college at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, a few miles
distant, during her seventeenth year.

She left her native land never, her home state apparently only once, her village a
small handful of times, and, particularly after 1872, her house and yard scarcely
at all.
Dickinson rarely, if ever, left her family’s house and ground during the last
twenty years of her life.

1886 Emily Dickinson dies in the same house where she was born.

3. WORKS

- We have 1,775 poems by Emily Dickinson. When Emily died, her sister Lavinia
found a cherry-wood box in the bottom drawer of her bedroom bureau, which held
814 poems bound into 40 packets, as well as 333 poems ready for binding, and
numerous worksheet drafts.

- In the early 1860s she wrote on the average a poem a day. Three hundred and sixty-
six poems in the year of her fullest power (1862).

- Dickinson collected her poems into packets, identified words for revision, sent
poems to various recipients, and apparently avoided publication during her lifetime.

- “The Atlantic Monthly [was] the most prestigious, influential magazine of the day.
Revered by readers and writers alike, the great of the time, Emerson, Thoreau,
Lowell, Stowe, Holmes, Whittier, appeared regularly in it. But it also published odd
things, new things; had indicated it would welcome material dealing with ‘real life’;
and had shown friendliness to women – rights and writers –. To Emily Dickinson it
was ‘a temple’. To appear in it was a true accolade, and guaranteed a wide and
distinguished audience. It was the first to use the expression ‘realism’. One of its
editors, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a great and influential male champion of
women’s rights, actively promoted the development and publication of women
writers. An Atlantic article of his – ‘Women and the Alphabet’ – was credited with
resulting directly in the founding of Smith College and the opening of the University
of Michigan to women” (Tillie Olsen. Silences 64).
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- At the age of 31, Dickinson sent several poems to writer and reformer Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, whom she called her “Mentor”. She asked, “Are you too
deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Higginson’s response gave “deep
pleasure”, and the correspondence developed into a lasting friendship. Despite
Dickinson’s admiration for her “teacher”, she never seems to have taken any of his
advice.

- Though seven of her poems were published during Dickinson’s lifetime, none
appeared with her full knowledge and consent.

- “Emily Dickinson’s first editors thought they were doing her a favor by changing
certain words, repunctuating her poetry, and standardizing the line breaks”
(McIntosh and Hart 329).

- “We have no evidence that she sought, desired, or welcomed their publication, and
considerable evidence that she did not [...]. One poem begins: ‘Publication is the
Auction of the Mind of Man’. She enclosed many poems in letters, but no member
of the family guessed how seriously she took herself as a poet until after she died,
when it was realized that over a period of years, she had engaged in what is
probably the most remarkable instance of private publication in American letters.

- “Her public career as a poet did not begin until 1890, when Mabel Loomis Todd and
Thomas Wentworth Higginson selected and edited 115 poems for publication. Six
additional volumes of selections (edited with varying degrees of faithfulness) were
published between 1890 and the appearance of the Johnson edition.

- Because of complex family feuds which separated the manuscripts, Dickinson’s

complete poems and all known variant readings were not published until 1955,
when Thomas Johnson produced a three-volume variorum edition. The majority of
existing manuscripts of Dickinson’s letters and poems can be found in the libraries
of Amherst College and Harvard University.

4. TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

4.1. The Author

- There exists a powerful myth about her as an eccentric recluse. Local gossips
referred to her as “The Myth” and were fascinated by her habit of wearing white.
She carried on conversations with visitors from behind a screen or from the next
room. “In the last years of her life she retreated to a tighter and tighter circle of
family and friends. In those later years she dressed in white, avoided strangers, and
communicated even with intimates chiefly through cryptic notes and fragments of
poems. The doctor who attended her fatal illness was permitted to ‘examine’ her
only by observing his patient in the next room walk by a partially opened door. A
quasi-mythical figure in Amherst when she died from Bright’s disease on may 15,
1886, Emily Dickinson was essentially unknown to the rest of the world. Only seven
of her poems had appeared in print, all of them anonymously” (Baym et al. 2370-
2371).
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- Biographers have insisted in her having been in love with Benjamin Newton, a
young lawyer in her father’s law office, with Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a
married, middle-aged minister, and with Judge Lord. Those same biographers have
contributed to the myth of the spinster who remained in the house because of
unhappy love affairs.

- The male chauvinism, oversimplifying and stereotyping, that results from ignorance
of social history as well as insistence on heterosexism of literary historians is
evident in their dismissal of Dickinson as an “old maid” or as a woman who “missed
out on life” by not marrying.

- “A step like a pattering child’s entry & in glided a little plain woman with two
smooth bands of reddish hair & a face a little like Belle Dove’s; not plainer – with
no good feature – in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net
worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of
childlike way into my hand & said ‘These are my introduction’ in a soft frightened
breathless childlike voice – & added under her breath Forgive me if I am frightened;
I never see strangers & hardly know what I say” (Letter from T.W. Higginson to His
Wife, August 16, 1870).

- Higginson wrote his wife that he was struck by an eccentricity that he could not
understand: “she was much too enigmatical a being for me”.

- The author’s life was determined by her class, class consciousness, and social
customs for families like the Dickinsons and their circle of friends in nineteenth-
century New England.

- The Dickinson daughters were expected to take considerable domestic responsibility

for the family and the family’s servants, and much of the household management
seems to have fallen to Lavinia. “Lavinia protected that privacy, and said after
Dickinson’s death that Emily was the one of the family who had thinking to do”
(McIntosh and Hart 2870).

- “Her sister dedicated herself to the everyday domestic labors which would free
Dickinson to write” (Rich 52).

- “How do most people live without any thoughts. There are many people in the
world (you must have noticed them in the street). How do they live. How do they
get strength to put on their clothes in the morning” (Dickinson in conversation with
T.W. Higginson).

- “To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations...”
(conversation with Higginson).

- “A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without
corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral
power in thought that walks alone” (conversation with Higginson).
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- “All her life, Emily Dickinson seems to have felt she was encumbered by structures
that did not fit her, whether structures of religion, belief, value, language, thought,
manners, or institutions” (McIntosh and Hart 327).

- Dickinson wrote to a friend: “He [father] buys me many Books – but begs me not to
read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind”.

- “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever 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”
(Dickinson in conversation with T.W. Higginson).

- “Her letters indicate that she found life exhilarating and sufficient [...] and that for
her, heaven was embodied in familiar surroundings, in nature, in love, and in the
power of thought” (McIntosh and Hart 2870).

- “I find ecstasy in living – the mere sense of living is joy enough” (Dickinson in
conversation with T.W. Higginson).

- “My friends are my estate”.

- “Emerson visited next door, but she did not go to meet him” (Rich 52).

- “Explaining her decision to remain at home, Austin wrote, ‘As she saw more and
more of society [...] she could not resist the feeling that it was painfully hollow. It
was to her so thin and unsatisfying in the face of the Great Realities of Life”
(McIntosh and Hart 2871).

- Her withdrawal made it possible for her to apprehend life more fully and with
greater concentration of purpose. Questioned by Higginson about her reclusive life,
she said of “shunning men and women”, “– they talk of hallowed things, aloud, and
embarrass my dog. He and I don’t object to them, if they’ll exist their side”.

- “Existence with a wall / Is better to consider / Than not exist at all –” (Poem #
1652).

- And then – the size of this “small” life

The Sages – call it small –
Swelled – like Horizons – in my vest –
And I sneered – softly – “small”! [J. 271]

- “One critic – Richard Chase – has noted that in the 19 th century ‘one of the careers
open to women was perpetual childhood’” (Rich 58).

- From a letter to her old friend Judge Lord, who about 1880 seems to have wished to
marry her: “You ask the divine Crust and that would doom the bread”.
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- “Does it become very clear what Melville’s Pierre so bitterly remarked on, and what
literary history bears out – why most of the great works of humanity have come
from lives (able to be) wholly surrendered and dedicated? How else sustain the
constant toil, the frightful task, the terrible law, the continuity? Full self: this means
full time as and when needed for the work (That time for which Emily Dickinson
withdrew from the world)” (Tillie Olsen. Silences 13).

- “Suppose Jonathan Edwards had been born a woman; suppose William James, for
that matter, had been born a woman? (The invalid seclusion of his sister Alice is
suggestive.) Even from men, new England took its psychic toll; many of its geniuses
seemed peculiar in one way or another, particularly along the lines of social
intercourse. Hawthorne, until he married, took his meals in his bedroom, apart from
the family. Thoreau insisted on the values both of solitude and of geographical
restriction, boasting that ‘I have travelled much in Concord’. Emily Dickinson –
viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as ‘partially cracked,’ by
the 20th century as fey or pathological – has increasingly struck me as a practical
woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices” (Rich 52).

- “In the last century, of the women whose achievements endure for us in one way or
another, nearly all never married (Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti,
Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett) or married late in their
thirties (George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Olive
Schreiner)” (Tillie Olsen. Silences 16).

- “It took family deaths to free more than one woman writer into her own
development. Emily Dickinson freed herself, denying all the duties expected of a
woman of her social position except the closest family ones, and she was fortunate
to have a sister, and servants, to share those” (Tillie Olsen. Silences 17).

- “It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few
have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative
integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body”
(Paglia 660).

- “Modern scholarship is revealing Sue more and more as one of Dickinson’s two
crucial muses – the other being the man to whom she wrote what are known as the
‘Master’ poems (probably Samuel Bowled, editor of a prominent local newspaper)”
(Harvey 137).

- “[...] the emotional intensity to the one person with whom she was passionately
involved: her sister-in-law Susan. By every standard except the genital, the stormy
thirty-five-year relationship between the two women must be called a love affair”
(Paglia 670).

- “One whom Dickinson loved was the sister-in-law Susan, a woman with whom she
was closely connected from her late teens until her death. [...] From the time that
Dickinson’s writing was first published, numerous attempts have been made to
suppress the evidence of this relationship, and during our time, anthologies and
selections from Dickinson’s work have omitted love poems and letters to Susan.
Apparently Austin Dickinson, with the knowledge of his mistress, Mabel Loomis
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Todd, who was editing the poems for publication, mutilated manuscripts, erasing his
wife’s name and scissoring out references to her. One poem sent to Susan [...] was
completely scratched out, line by line.
It seems that Susan, too withheld information. Only after her death in 1913
did she allow her daughter Martha Dickinson Bianchi to publish poems and letters
she had received from Dickinson, and it is possible that this writing to be shared
with the world was carefully chosen, while other work was destroyed […]. Susan
and Emily’s relatives went to unusual lengths to mutilate and destroy evidence of
the women’s relationship” (McIntosh and Hart 2872).

- “[...] Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and
kiss me as you used to? Shall I indeed behold you, not ‘darkly, but face to face’ or
am I fancying so, and dreaming blessed dreams from which the day will wake me? I
hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that
now I must have you – that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes
me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast – I go to sleep at night, and the
first thing I know, I am sitting there wide awake, and clasping my hands tightly, and
thinking of next Saturday, and ‘never a bit’ of you” (Letter to Susan Gilbert
Dickinson, 27 June 1852).

- “I must wait a few Days before seeing you – You are too momentous. But
remember it is idolatry, not indifference” (Letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, about
1878).

- “Susie knows that she is a siren – and that at a word from her, Emily would forfeit
righteousness” (Letter quoted in Harvey 137).

- “It is significant that it was Susan’s daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who,
perhaps in attempts to protect images of both her aunt and her mother, began to
construct one of the most enduring legends in Dickinson studies, the story that the
love poems were written to the man Dickinson addressed in several passionate
letters as ‘Master.’ […] Bianchi argued that ‘Master’ could be identified as the
Reverend Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia, and claimed that it was Wadsworth
who ‘broke the poet’s heart’. Her biography set off the search for ‘the one true
[male] love’ of Dickinson’s life, which has extended into many contemporary
readings of Dickinson” (McIntosh and Hart 2873).

4.2. The Form

- “What might, in a male writer – a Thoreau, let us say, or a Christopher Smart or

William Blake – seem a legitimate strangeness, a unique intention, has been in one
of our two major poets devalued into a kind of naiveté, girlish ignorance, feminine
lack of professionalism, just as the poet herself has been made into a sentimental
object. (‘Most of us are half in love with this dead girl,’ confesses Archibald Mac
Leish. Dickinson was fifty-five when she died)” (Rich 58-59).

- The poems are without titles. Different printers have used different methods, from
numbers never used by the poet to a less artificial way of referring to a poem by the
use of the first line.
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- Brevity and conciseness, high condensation: Most of Dickinson’s poems are short –
many are only four lines long – and compact, compressed.

- Dickinson used traditional hymn meter. Her chief prosodic and formal model was
the commonly used hymnals of the times with their simple patterns of meter and
rhyme, but her poems are not like traditional hymns.

- “Singsong rhythms and neat rhymes are always spurious in Dickinson, the first
modernist master of syncopation and atonality. Metric regularity means naive
credulity in the speaker” (Paglia 638).

- Dickinson used dashes in the place of more traditional marks, such as periods,
commas, colons, and semi-colons, and some see it as significant that the dashes vary
in length and that some slope upward, some downward. “In her handwriting, they
vary in length and angle up or down from horizontal and may have been used
systematically for rhetorical emphasis or musical pointing”.

- “Even those famous dashes – meant, we have speculated, to indicate rifts and
rendings, hesitations and pauses – appear neater and more soigné in manuscript than
in type. Tiny and clear, they are elegant as ‘Tucks – of dainty insterspersion.’ Fine
stitches joining split thoughts seam to seam. It is almost as if, in the absence of
editor or printer, Dickinson had both edited and printed herself, like some late-
blooming scribe” (Gilbert and Gubar 641).

- Dickinson used space between letters, words, and at the end of a line. Her line
breaks are as idiosyncratic as her punctuation and capitalization. All this visual art
has been lost in the print transcriptions of her poems.

- Grammatical elisions and riddling ellipses.

- She used strategies to free language from traditional structures and expectations. She
rearranged word order, ignored rules of punctuation, evaded rhyme schemes while
suggesting them. “Her meter suggests not certainty or regularity, but mobility,
unfinished business, life in motion” (McIntosh and Hart 2875).

- Dickinson used pun and paradox, enigmatic images and cryptic phrases to explore
the conundrum of Puritan dichotomies.

- Dickinson’s work requires unusually high tolerance for ambiguity.

- The poems continue to invite research and intense discussion of their appearance
and their meaning more than one hundred years after their discovery.

- Organic relationship of contents and form: Dickinson was a poet who truly
questioned authority and whose work defies authoritative readings.

- Dickinson’s work challenges traditional notions of the boundaries of genre by

exposing the line between poetry and prose and the complex and integral
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relationships between letters that can be read as poems and poems that can be read
as letters.

4.3. The Subject Matter

- “Emily Dickinson’s is the only poetry in English by a woman of that century which
pierces so far beyond the ideology of the ‘feminine’ and the conventions of
womanly feeling” (Rich 66).

- “In poem after poem Dickinson notes that male poets, whose ‘Summer – lasts a
Solid Year,’ have always inhabited such a realm of gold (J. 569). But the female
spider artist’s ‘Continents of Light’ were inevitably swept away by puritanical
brooms” (Gilbert & Gubar 642).

- Her poems are fully innovative thematically, since they run against the Calvinist
precepts of her family but also against Emersonian optimism and Transcendentalism
as well as against sentimentalism.

- In the middle of powerful evangelistic religious revivalism, Dickinson “refused to

think badly of ‘the world’ or believe that greater pleasures could be found in heaven
than on earth. Of her family’s habits of traditional prayer and churchgoing she
wrote, ‘[They] are religious – except me – and address an Eclipse, every morning –
whom they call ‘Father’” (McIntosh and Hart 2870).

- “Dickinson was heretical, heterodox, in her religious opinions, and stayed away
from church and dogma” (Rich 62).

- Many of her religious poems seem unorthodox or surprising by using the vocabulary
of a religious tradition in an unusual way. “She is by turns satirical, skeptical, awed,
reverent, speculative, outraged, tantalized, ironic, or God-like herself. She scorns
theological portraits of ‘God’ but aligns herself personally with divinity, sometimes
as Jesus and sometimes as co-creator” (McIntosh and Hart 2874).

- “Dickinson wrote a remarkable number of poems on pain, a taboo subject in her

time and place. She refused to accept the Calvinistic teaching that she had earned
pain, through original sin, or the Transcendentalist habit of transcending it, through
denial or euphemism” (McIntosh and Hart 2874). Her treatment of pain is not of
pain as punishment from God, but something that is real.

- “Her letters suggest that she refused to profess a sense of sin; such a refusal required
an astonishing degree of originality and courage. Her poems and letters indicate that
throughout her life she felt she had a direct route to the Infinite, especially through
the world of the mind, and that churches, sermons, preachers, revival meetings, and
theological vocabulary did not express her sense of eternity, tremendousness, awe,
or spiritual center, which she also named Circumference. Attention to her own
experience was her great route to the Infinite” (McIntosh and Hart 2871).

- “Reverse cannot befall

That fine prosperity
10 EMILY DICKINSON’S POETRY

Whose Sources are interior” (#395).

- “Her niece Martha told of visiting her in her corner bedroom on the second floor at
280 Main Street, Amherst, and of how Emily Dickinson made as if to lock the door
with an imaginary key, turned and said: ‘Matty: here’s freedom’ (Rich 49).

- “Here in this white-curtained, high-ceilinged room, a redhaired woman with hazel

eyes and a contralto voice wrote poems about volcanoes, deserts, eternity, suicide,
physical passion, wild beasts, rape, power, madness, separation, the daemon, the
grave. Here, with a darning-needle, she bound these poems – heavily emended and
often in variant versions – into booklets, secured with darning-thread, to be found
and read after her death” (Rich 53).

- Her topics range from faith to doubt, from tenderness to spite and irreverence. Some
of her recurrent themes are death, life after death, and the voyage of the soul.

- Her topics are based on her imagination and often detached from historical events
around her (there are few references to the Civil War, for example).

- Many of her poems are based on a single image or symbol, and are always
ambiguous. The poems may often do not quickly display a central, controlling
metaphor or an easily identifiable narrative theme. Hers was a radically original
imagination and therefore readers need to be able to speculate. “Many of
Dickinson’s poems are not so much about ideas or themes, as about the process of
seeing or coming to see, or guess, or know” (McIntosh and Hart 327).

- Dickinson was a poet who truly questioned authority. Note her recurrent use of the
term “Circumference”.

- Dickinson is a distinctively modern poet. Typically, “her poems begin with assertion
and affirmation only to end in qualification and question, if not outright denial”
(Baym et al. 2372).

- Dickinson uses a variety of voices in her poems, writing as a child (often a boy), a
wife-to-be, a woman rejected, and as a voice of authority which we often associate
with maleness.

- “She knew her poems were unacceptable by her world’s standards of poetic
convention, and of what was appropriate, in particular, for a woman poet” (Rich 51).

5. LITERARY BACKGROUND

- American and British writers publishing at this time, and whom Dickinson read, are
Emerson, Longfellow, Stowe, Helen Hunt Jackson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
George Eliot, Dickens.

- Dickinson’s letters indicate that she read newspapers and periodicals, following
closely local and national events, and reading contemporary poetry and fiction as
soon as it came into print. She seems to have learned much of the classic myths, the
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Bible and Shakespeare by heart; her letters are filled with scriptural and literary
allusion. “After long disuse of her eyes she read Shakespeare & thought why is any
other book needed” (from Higginson’s letter to his wife). Among the English
Romantics, she valued John Keats especially; among her English contemporaries
she was particularly attracted by the Brontës, the Brownings, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
and George Eliot. “She read women writers with particular passion, including
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, the Brontës, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and
her own friend, Helen Hunt Jackson, who urged her vehemently, and in vain, to
publish her poems” (McIntosh and Hart 2872). Thoreau and Emerson, especially the
latter, as we know from her letters, were perhaps her most important contemporary
American intellectual resources.

- “You speak of Mr. Whitman – I never read his Book – but was told that he was
disgraceful” (Letter to Mr. Higginson, 25 April 1862).

6. DICKINSON’S IMPACT

- Understood now as a distinctly modern poet, Dickinson has been claimed by

William Carlos Williams as his “patron saint” and acclaimed in verse and prose by
such fellow poets as Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur,
and Adrienne Rich.

7. CRITICAL RECEPTION

- “Psychoanalytic readings are slowly making their way, but the academic view of her
remains too genteel. The horrifying and ruthless in her are tempered or suppressed.
Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison drama of a self-
incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American
Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and
diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent” (Paglia 624).

- “Dickinson’s iconography of suffering, with its sexualized pleasure-pain,

Catholicizes austere American Protestantism” (Paglia 629).

- “Dickinson does wage guerilla warfare with society. Her fractures, crippling,
impalements, and amputations are Dionysian disorderings on the stable structures of
the Apollonian lawgivers” (Paglia 652).

- “Dickinson was a woman of abnormal will. Her poetry profits from the enormous
disparity between that will and the feminine social persona to which she fell heir at
birth. But her sadism is not anger, the a posteriori response to social injustice. It is
hostility, an a priori Achillean intolerance for the existence of others, the female
version of Romantic solipsism” (Paglia 653).
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8. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrés, Rodrigo. “Emily Dickinson o la libertad de crear y desear.” Homo. Vol. 8.

Barcelona: Salvat, 1999. 19-20.

Baym, Nina, Ronald Gottesman, Laurence B. Holland, David Kalsontone, Francis

Murphy, Hershel Parker, William H. Pritchard, and Patricia B. Wallace, eds. “Emily
Dickinson.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Norton,
1989. 2370-2373.

Bennett, Paula. “The Pea that Duty Locks: Lesbian and Feminist-Heterosexual Readings
of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. Ed. Jay,
Karla, and Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Burbick, Joan. “Emily Dickinson and the Economics of Desire.” American Literature.
Vol. 58.3 (October 1986).

Dickie, Margaret. “Dickinson’s Discontinuous Lyric Self.” American Literature. Vol.

60.4 (December 1988).

Dickie, Margaret. “Dickinson in Context.” American Literary History. Vol. 7.2

(Summer, 1995): 320-333.

Erkkila, Betsy. “Emily Dickinson and Class.” American Literary History. Vol. 4.1
(Spring, 1992): 1-27.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “A Woman – White: Emily Dickinson’s Yarn of
Pearl.” The Madwoman in the Attic (The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, eds. The Emily Dickinson
Handbook. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Harvey, Andrew. “Emily Dickinson.” The Essential Gay Mystics. Edison, New Jersey:
Castle Books, 1997. 136-141.

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson (1985). New York: New Directions, 2007.

Martin, Wendy. An American Tryptich: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne

Rich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

McIntosh, Peggy, and Ellen Louise Hart. “Emily Dickinson.” The Heath Anthology of
American Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. Paul Lauter. Lexington, Massachusetts: Heath, 1994.
2869-2876.

McIntosh, Peggy, and Ellen Louise Hart. “Emily Dickinson.” Instructor’s Guide for the
Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. John Alberti. Lexington, Massachusetts:
Heath, 1994. 323-329.

McNeil, Helen. Emily Dickinson. London: Virago Press, 1986.

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Miller, Cristanne. “Whose Dickinson?” American Literary History. Vol. 12.1/2 (Spring-
Summer, 2000): 230-253.

Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delta, 1989.

Paglia, Camille. “Amherst’s Madame de Sade.” Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence
from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991. 623-673.

Rich, Adrienne. “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” Parnassus:

Poetry in Review. Fall / Winter 1976. 49-74.

Runzo, Sandra. “Dickinson, Performance and the Homoerotic Lyric.” American

Literature. Vol. 68. 2 (June 1996): 347-365.