today we look at the life of american poet emily dickinson she was born in december of 1830 and died of may of 1886 that entire time she was born and she lived and she has been buried in amherst massachusetts now she has strong attachments to her family specifically her brother austin and her sister lavinia who is known as vinnie she did have a more complex relationship with her parents however she got along well with her brother and sister but not so much with her father and mother in some of her letters she wrote about her father quote his heart was pure and terrible and i think no other like it exists as for her mother she wrote quote my mother does not care for thought so what she wrote was my mother does not care for thought and father too busy with his briefs to notice what we do he buys me many books but begs me not to read them because he fears they joggle the mind so her life itself has some tragedy in it uh the deepening menace that she wrote of death especially the death of her cousin sophia traumatized her in 1844 just as she became a young adult so this might have led to emily's religious revival a year later in 1845 in a letter to a friend she wrote i never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which i felt i had found my savior shortly after that she started writing a poem some keep the sabbath going to church i keep it staying at home now emily would choose a solitary lifestyle and again in one of her poems she would write she selected her own society and then shut the door because she spent so much time at her home she had plenty of time to write her journals and so with all these poems and letters that she had been writing and collecting over the years in 1858 she began to write clean copies of her work into journals she would actually produce 40 bundles and journals comprising nearly 800 poems but nobody knew of these compilations or these journals until they found them after emily's death so her formal education well emily attended amherst academy for seven years and then for only 10 months she attended mount holyoke female seminary now emily's reasons for leaving early is not known either she was in poor health maybe she rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at the school perhaps she was simply homesick we know that she does like her home and she missed her brother and sister terribly in her letters so then what are her formative influences if it's not school well she did read quite a bit and benjamin f newton introduced her to a lot of poets specifically the poems of wordsworth of coleridge and of course of her local hero emerson and then she wrote when a little girl i had a friend who taught me immortality but venturing too near himself he never returned now her sister-in-law susan as austin is now an adult and he marries she becomes a great friend of her sister-in-law susan matter of fact in one of her letters she writes my most beloved friend influence muse and advisor susan would go on after emily's death actually to go through the papers and actually start putting a lot of the poems into poetry compilations her other important influences in her life include charles wadsworth she would call him my philadelphia because that's where he was from but she would also call him my clergyman she would look to him for advice she would also be highly influenced by samuel bowles who is the owner and editor of the springfield republican even though she lives in amherst massachusetts springfield would be the largest closest city and so he would write what emily called the master letters as she would write to him to ask for advice to to show off some of her poetry he would write back and that's where she would get his the advice about her poetry and she'd like to call them the master letters so what is the life of a writer and you can actually see part of emily's bedroom here on the right on the summer of 1858 she started revising her poems like we said making clean copies and writing in earnest by 1860s she had withdrawn from all social life and she concentrated much of her time working on these letters and specifically her poetry and in the first half of the 1860s is her most productive writing period so a couple of the earliest pieces that she wrote in 1860 would be they shut me up in prose as when a little girl they put me in the closet because they liked me still still could themself have peeped and seen my brain go round they might as wise have lodged a bird for treason in the pound so as we look at her life of a writer as she has becoming more and more introverted in going into her writing in april 1862 thomas wentworth higginson the general editor of the atlantic monthly a huge newspaper at the time in in america wrote a letter to a young contributor it's thought that this letter was for emily or at the very least writers like her and would certainly influence her matter of fact she would reply to atlantic monthly by saying is my verse alive now in 1874 emily's father suffered a stroke and died she only opened her door crack for the funeral and she did not attend the service we do know that she was quite fond of her parents uh specifically her father but she did a lot of times in her letters right that he was not very caring towards her and so it's not surprising that with emily's want to stay alone and away from people that she only opened her door a crack for the funeral a year later her mother suffers a stroke and was left in a bad physical and mental state so around this time emily just stopped going out in public completely she still however would have visitors at her home and would write to close friends so she still was being social she's just not going out into the public areas one of the poems from this time period is a psalm thing it was i said a woman white to be and where if god should count me fit her blameless mystery so after her mother's decline we'd look at this as the late period for emily dickinson's poetry so her later life decline and then her eventual death we have some influences otis phillips lord could he be a late life romance uh we have letters from emily that point to the desires that she had to perhaps have a romance with him however that would have made her leave her home which she was not looking for but she certainly did seem to have a romantic attachment to otis phillips lord then austin's affair with mabel loomis todd made emily question love in relationships remember she was really close to hi to her his wife her sister-in-law susan so him having an affair made her question why would you get in a relationship at all and in the death of emily's mother and her nephew gilbert had emily writing that there was a great darkness coming so late in life people did start realizing that emily is writing quite a bit and so people started asking and helen hunt jackson convinced emily to publish success is counted sweetness sweetest now she did publish it anonymously and in a small journal called a mask of poets so this was the last of the seven poems that she published in her entire lifetime and the only one that seemed to have any sort of success but remember it was also published anonymously so emily died at the age of 55 of bright's disease her coffin was carried through daffodils and higginson red no coward soul is mined by emily bronte which was emily's favorite poem she is buried at west cemetery on triangle street in amherst massachusetts so she has her sister lavinia promising that she would burn emily's correspondence after her death and perhaps much if it was we do still have some of her letters surviving now no instructions were left regarding the 40 notebooks and loose sheets that emily left in her chest so vinnie took one look and said this is a lot of poetry it looks good she sought to have them published now when you read about dickinson's life there is no critical consensus as to the cause for emily's withdrawal and extreme seclusion maybe she just actually had a fear of going outside it could be because of romances that had failed it could be that her parents her family members were all that she felt she needed in life to have companionship we're not exactly sure everybody has their own theory so one of the theories is that judith thar claims that she was just a combination of profound shyness and a bit of art and artistic ambition that motivated the poet's choice of life far quotes by turning the key of her bedroom door she avoided having to meet others while being free to write poetry maybe it was just an artistic choice emily ford has attributed the poet's retirement to an aesthetic sensibility dickinson's choice of life was related to the romantic idea that the life of an artist should be a life apart and according to gilbert and gubar dickinson's radical seclusion was a necessary strategy to free her from the feminine obligations which might otherwise have hindered her art in the 19th century after all most women by the time emily is writing in the middle of the 19th century in america would have had a difficult time getting themselves published simply because they were female however we do see after emily dickinson's death the beginnings of the publishing uh the first edition poems of emily dickinson appeared in 1890 and they were edited by the family friends mabel lou miss todd and t w higginson and then after that that poetry book would be edited again and again in 1894 it is once again edited by a family friend mabel lumus todd in 1924 more are being added in and it's called the complete poems of emily dickinson and that is by martha dickinson which would be austin's granddaughter and in 1955 the poems of emily dickinson with her original slashes and dashes are put out by thomas johnson and those are the poems that we kind of look at today so in 1894 going away from the poems for a minute we can see that we have two volumes of emily's letters they are highly edited because there are still people in them that would have been alive at that time but two volumes do appear and susan dickinson austin's wife published some of her poems in literary magazines such as scribner's magazine and the independent now martha dickinson bianchi emily's neath niece published series of collections between 1914 and 1929 and then other volumes would follow from her family throughout the 1930s by the time we get to the 1960s the complete poems of emily dickinson is now a great seller again by thomas h johnson and it contains all 1775 of her poems and they are all unedited they look exactly the way that they look in emily's handwriting in all of her journals and bundles and of course after that the various books of her poems and letters have been published since throughout the world and a lot of times in the textbooks of students what is dickinson's poetry known for well she uses random capitalization sometimes you see capitalization at the beginning of her lines sometimes you see capitalization for words that don't need them in the middle of the line so if you can kind of tell from her handwriting on this right hand side she is capitalizing every first word on every line that makes a lot of sense what doesn't make a lot of sense to critics is when you start looking at other words as you get into the rest of the sentence like the word compass and chase in that second stanza there's no reason for them to have those proper nouns so there's random capital letters that will show up there'd be unconventional or broken rhymes or meters even though a lot of dickinson's poetry has rhyme in it she'll have what's called near or slant rhyme where it sounds like they're supposed to be rhyming but the words actually do not rhyme and a lot of times the meters will be broken up you can see in her first stanz on the right hand side we have some longer lines in lines one two and three and then our fourth line we just have three syllables the excessive use of dashes people will argue until the end of time what her dashes mean are we supposed to take a pause there and kind of take a look at what she has written before is she pausing because she's about to say something grand in the next part what are the pauses for we don't exactly know but we do know she uses them a lot she doesn't have any titles for any poems all 1775 poems do not have titles so if you see them being republished say in an anthology or a text in a classroom you're going to notice that the title is going to be the first line because she has no titles there is unconventional punctuation a lot of times not only with the dashes you're also going to see a lot of exclamation points which don't exactly make a lot of sense um sometimes you're going to see commas where there should not be and sometimes there are no commas where it probably feels like there should be a pause and she loves to use metaphor where we're comparing two unlike objects mostly we see these happening in her death poems they can occur rarely but they do occur in her nature poems emily dickinson is considered one of the most original poets of the 19th century certainly in the united states as an american poet but one of the most original writers of the 19th century overall she does not fit into a lot of what we considered 19th century poetry she's placed along such poets as walt whitman and robert frost in american canon simply because they all liked to write about nature they had a tendency to write specifically about the united states nature and they also had a tendency to write blank verse where we do have some rhythm and rhyme but it's not conventional taught in grade school high school and college classes for both content and context emily dickinson is looked over again and again for the poem's content what are we learning about nature and what are we learning about the author's tone at that time and a lot of times people like to look at context to teach near rhyme or slant rhyme try and figure out why she uses the dashes where they were a lot of people like looking at emily dickinson because her context the way she wrote is so different from others she is a powerful and persistent figure of american culture we've seen movies we've now seen a seasonal television show be made about emily dickinson uh the ideal of how she liked to stay by herself the idea that she was social but she never wanted to leave the house the idea that there was this woman creating such wonderful poetry and nobody knew about it the idea of love and no and not having any love returned to her because we have all these letters and we have her heart just being spilled out in so many poems people want to know more about emily dickinson she is argued as one of the greatest female poets in american history it is true that once you get before the 20th century we don't have many female poets um and the fact of the matter is that emily dickinson wasn't able to be a famous poet during her lifetime simply because she was a female and so arguing her as a greatest female poet certainly is a good idea she definitely has this sense of american culture and the idea of her context being so different she's going to be around for quite some time all right guys thanks for stopping by if you want to go check out some more of my videos i'd certainly appreciate it