Emily Dickinson is surely the most familiar poet no one has read. (Followed by Gertrude Stein.) Or at least read in any depth. Everyone seems to have ideas about her, propagated by distorted plays and romantic pop culture misconceptions. She was not a recluse except perhaps at the end of her life. She corresponded frequently with several important literary figures of her time. She interacted with friends and family. She fell in love, with both men and women. But much of the world believed what her father believed, which is that a woman should not be a writer but should serve the household. She stubbornly resisted that in an astonishing way, even though she made her family home her primary world—especially her garden
Over her lifetime she wrote almost 1800 poems, which she neatly bundled together and tied up with string. She published only ten poems while alive.
Despite the sentimentality attached to her image, what she wrote was easily as innovative and challenging as the work of Gertrude Stein or any other modernist. This is particularly clear when you read a collection of her poems that preserves her original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, with its varying sizes of dashes, such as the R.W. Franklin edition of1998.
Her poems are like three-dimensional bees made out of tightly-bound tapestry thread. The only poetry that is as compact as hers would be the work of Paul Celan. Her meaning is so condensed that a reader has to periodically stick their head out of a window and take deep breaths of fresh air. She is as radical today as when she died in 1886.
Here’s a great example of the way she builds meaning in tight, halting steps. It’s poem number 372 (she did not title her poems):
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Because of the power compressed into each poem, her collected works feels nearly endless. It is an inland sea that cannot be exhausted. And a great example of how an artist can give over to their own idiosyncratic meaning-making if they resist trying to “fit in” to the photography heralded as “successful” and instead follow the small voice that leads them into a strange and unfamiliar garden.
Find out more about Dickinson and read some of her poems at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson#tab-poems. And consider buying The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin.
Another rare treat are the lectures by the poet Robert Duncan on Dickinson at New College of California, recorded in 1981 by my friend David Levi Strauss. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php
Also, the poet Susan Howe (blog post 3) wrote a marvelous book, My Emily Dickinson (1985).