The Life of Emily Dickinson

This study will examine the life of Emily Dickinson, providing a brief overview of her life and then focusing on her relationship with Thomas Higginson and the impact of that relationship on her creativity and poetry.

Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her life is remarkable mainly for its lack of remarkability, at least in external terms:

Here she lived a life, outwardly uneventful, inwardly dedicated to a secret and self-imposed assignment--the mission of writing a "letter to the world" that would express, in poems of absolute truth and of the utmost economy, her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of . . . "the landscape of the soul" (Linscott iii).

Dickinson was unpublished during her life, had no fame at her death in 1886. Her poems were not known at all to the world she addressed until four years after her death, when her first book of poems was published. It was not until the early twentieth century that her poems were fully recognized.

Dickinson received from her family "love without understanding." She lived in a well-off household dominated by her lawyer-Congressman father, whose heart Emily would describe as "pure and terrible." Her mother was "gentle" and "colorless," her brother resembled her father in disposition, and her sister was "crotchety and outspoken" and "watchdog and protector of her shy, sensitive, and sometimes rebellious sister" (Linscott iv).

Dickinson, who never married, attended Amherst

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r poetry or her life to fit Higginson's views. Higginson was obviously pleased to be involved professionally and personally (but in no way romantically) with a poet and woman of Dickinson's worth, but it is fair to say that she is the one who benefitted most from the relationship. Higginson gave her the knowing encouragement she needed and was in part responsible for the ultimate publication and fame which came to her after her death. The reader perhaps will never know Dickinson as a person in the same way that many if not most famous and cherished writers are known through biographical and autobiographical disclosures. However, through her relationship with Higginson and the letters she wrote him (only one of his letters to her survives), we can know much of the way she wanted to be seen and known. If one considers and compares Whicher's view of the Higginson-Dickinson relationship with Mossberg's view, one finds very different perceptions of that relationship. Whicher seems to take at face value the cutting, behind-the-back attitude of Higginson toward Dickinson. Higginson, for example, concurs with his wife who asked, "Oh, why do the insane so cling to you?" Higginson himself refers to Dickinson as "my partially cracked p

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