By Dr. Stephen Haven, Professor of English
Many writers are known at least as fully by their popular
reputations as they are by their own work. Yet writers, like most people, are
usually more complex and contradictory in their personal lives and in their
work than the reputation that precedes them. Emily Dickinson is one good example. She is often viewed as an idiosyncratic
recluse, the nun of Amherst, the “Queen of Calvary,” as she sometimes refers to
herself in her own poetry, as if she were the sexless Monarch of Divine Suffering. Dickinson seemed to invite this
reputation in her later life, dressing in her later years always in white and
behaving in such theatrical ways as refusing to come out of her bedroom to
greet a family friend, sending out on a plate instead a single red rose. Possibly this was her way of drawing
public attention to herself, a provincial form of self-promotion, a way of
saying that something unusual was taking place in what might otherwise seem a
dull, sheltered life. Still,
Dickinson was a grown woman—36 years old—before she went into seclusion. By then she had already written more
than half of her 1700+ poems. During
her vintage years, from 1860-1865, when she was writing a poem nearly every
other day, some of them among the greatest poems ever written by an American,
she was regularly attending a literary salon hosted by her sister-in-law and
next-door neighbor, Susan Gilbert Dickinson.
Susan Gilbert Dickinson was Emily Dickinson’s childhood
classmate, intellectual companion, and often during these vintage years the
first reader of Dickinson’s poems. The editor of the Springfield, Mass. newspaper,
Samuel Bowles, often attended these literary gatherings, with Emily Dickinson
in attendance too, though she shyly chose to stay away the night Ralph Waldo
Emerson graced Susan Dickinson’s home. Samuel Bowles published at least a few
of Emily Dickinson’s poems in the Springfield
Republican. Judith Farr, one of Dickinson’s critical biographers, believes (in The Passion of Emily Dickinson) that
Samuel Bowles was the object of Dickinson’s attention in the many love poems
she wrote to a male lover, some of them overtly erotic. Farr believes too that Susan Gilbert Dickinson
was the object of attention in the many love poems Dickinson wrote to a female
lover, many of them equally erotic.
Some of Dickinson’s love poems are so radical, even by contemporary standards,
that I would hesitate to quote them here.
If Emily Dickinson likely died a virgin, deprivation in her intimate,
physical love life drove her imagination.
My hope is that all Ashland English majors will read
Dickinson deeply and widely before they graduate, and will continue to read
her, over and over again, for as long as they love literature.
