Category: Emily Dickinson

Me, Myself, and I -- Part 2

5/17/2025

When Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain,” was she referring to herself? Was she hoping to “stop one heart from breaking” so that her life would not be in vain?

In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson wrote, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.”

Obviously, that statement is true in poems like “I heard fly buzz – when I died” and “I felt a funeral in my brain” – but is it also true for the poem mentioned at the start of this post? Or what about “I think I was enchanted,” “I never lost as much as twice,” “I taste a liquor never brewed,” and “Afraid of whom am I afraid?”

In “My life had stood a loaded gun” does the “my life” refer to HER life?

In his Foreword to Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work,” poet Gregory Orr noted that “More of Emily Dickinson’s poems begin with ‘I’ than any other word” – which turns out to be 143 poems. As a matter of fact, about 10% of all of her poems begin with a first-person pronoun:

I: 143
My: 26
Me: 4
Myself: 2

In addition, the word “I” appears in about 550 other poems. Therefore, the word “I” turns up in about 38% of her 1750+ poems – and I wrote that yesterday, HERE.

What about the pronoun “you”?

“You” appears in 520 entries on the online archive – so according to my hypothesis from yesterday, that would equate to about 209 poems.

But does she mean YOU when she uses “you” in a poem? Was she talking about YOU when she wrote “If you were coming in the fall,” “Fly – fly – but as you fly,” and “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

Hmm…that last poem I mentioned made me realize that in my post about first person pronouns, I did not check for contractions like “I’m,” so I did that this morning, and here are the results:

“I’m” appears in 50 poems, “I’ll” is in 25 poems, “I’ve” is in 24, and “I’d” is in 22. Of these poems, 7 of them begin with the word “I’ll,” 5 start with “I’m,” 3 begin with “I’ll,” and one of the poems starts with “I’d” – so that nudges the statistic for poems which begin with a first person pronoun up to about 11%.

Back to “you.” When Dickinson used “you,” did she mean YOU or some supposed person? Od did she mean a specific person in her life – and therefore any first-person pronoun in the poem would refer to her?

That brings us back to where we started with Dickinson’s remark, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.”

Was she just pulling the wool over her I’s?

Me, Myself and I -- Part 1

5/16/2025

In his Foreword to Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work,” poet Gregory Orr noted that “More of Emily Dickinson’s poems begin with ‘I’ than any other word” (143 poems.)

I wrote about that the other day, HERE.

That bit of trivia made me think of that old saying, “Me, myself and I” – and yes, that led me to wonder about how many different poems did Dickinson use the words “me,” “myself,” and “I.” I also checked into “my” and “mine.”

Well, this venture (as I expected) turned out to be a bit overwhelming.

When I ran a search for the pronoun “I” on the online Dickinson archive, 1,657 entries popped up. However, this number does not mean “I” appears in 1,657 different poems because multiple entries can represent a single poem (for example, one entry might represent the version of the poem as it appears in the Johnson edition of Dickinson’s poetry; another entry might represent the version of the poem in Franklin’s edition; another entry might represent the poem as it appeared in the 1890 publication of Dickinson’s “Poems,” while still another entry might represent a variation of the poem she included in a letter to a family member or cherished friend, etc.).

Sooo…in how many different poems did Dickinson use the pronoun “I”?

Yikes! The number of entries was far too high for me to dive into – but here’s what I did.
First I checked the number of archive entries for the various pronouns:

I : 1,657
My: 1020
Me: 993
Mine: 238
Myself: 163

Since the number was relatively low for “myself” (163), I analyzed those entries and found that the number represented 68 different poems, or 41.7% of the total number of entries.

IF that ratio holds true for the other pronouns, then “I” shows up in 691 poems, “my” in 426 poems, “me” in 414 poems, and “mine” in 99 poems.

I then put my hypothesis to the test: I analyzed the entries for “mine” (238) to see if I’d come up with 99 poems – or 41.7% of the entries. The results were close: the 238 entries for “mine” represented 93 different poems, or 39.1% of the entries.
Next, I combined the two categories I’d analyzed: 401 entries (238 for “mine” and 163 for “myself”) represented 161 poems, or 40.1% of the entries.

Based on this new percentage – if it were to hold true – then “I” would be in approximately 665 different poems, “my” in 409 poems, and “me” in 398 poems.

Soooo…do you find this information vital – and telling – or a bit more nugatory? LOL. Either way, I’ll have a bit more to say about this tomorrow.

This Was A Poet

5/15/2025

Today marks the 139th anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death. She died on May 15, 1886 at the age of 55. The last letter she wrote to her cousins consisted of just two words, “Called Back” – and those two words are etched into her tombstone.

I wrote about that yesterday, HERE.

Interestingly, Mabel Loomis Todd gave Dickinson’s poem “Just lost when I was saved!” the title “Called Back” when she published it in the “Second Series” of the poet’s “Poems” in 1891.

For information about Dickinson’s death and funeral, check out this page from the Dickinson Museum’s site, HERE.
From that page, “Emily Dickinson was interred in a grave Sue had lined with evergreen boughs, within the family plot enclosed by an iron fence.” Pictures of the family plot are below.

I also found this travelogue (HERE) written by someone who had visited Amherst – including Dickinson’s gravesite – in 2002, and it makes mention of the plaque on the iron fence dedicated to the “poetess”: “‘The Dickinson Kinsfolk’ (members of the extended family, as no direct descendants of Squire Dickinson survived beyond 1943) enclosed the plot with an iron fence and affixed the plaque seen at right in 1954.”

Seriously? Was the term “poetess” being bandied about in the 1950s? I s’pose so!

I looked up the usage of the word and – to be honest – I’m not so sure I’m picking up what Google’s putting down here! LOL. Here’s what I found – and it suggests that the usage of “poetess” from the 1950s to 2019 declined only slightly? I mean seriously, who uses the word “poetess" these days?

And just FYI: Dickinson was writing poetry at that time of peak usage for “poetess” in the chart above. However, she wrote eight poems that included the word “poet,” and not a single one with the word “poetess” – and in the eight poems, she used both feminine and masculine pronouns in regards to the “poet." Just an observation.

In closing, here are the opening stanzas to Dickinson’s “This was a Poet” – and surely, the lines describe Dickinson’s gift:

This was a Poet –
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From Ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door –
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it – before –

INFO FROM THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM:

Today, we'll be remembering Emily Dickinson on the 139th anniversary of her death.
Here are a few ways you can honor the poet:

Share your favorite poem and tag the Museum on socials.
Plan your visit to the place she called home.
Make a supporting gift in honor of her poetic legacy.

In a remarkable obituary for The Springfield Republican, Susan Dickinson described her sister-in-law’s unique creative gift in these words: “A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see.”

Special thanks to all who supported the Museum by making a donation at our Poetry Walk. A daisy has been placed at Dickinson's grave for each of you and your loved ones.

Called Back

5/14/2025

Tomorrow, May 15, 2025, marks the 139th anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death. She died on May 15, 1886 at the age of 55.

She wrote her final letter to her cousins Frances and Louise Norcross a few days before her death, and it consisted of just two words, “Called back.”

Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson wrote this about her 1886 letter (and mentions an earlier letter from 1885):

“It was in a letter written to the Norcrosses in January 1885 (no. 962) that ED spoke of having read Hugh Conway's Called Back. During the second week in May (1886) she probably came to know that she had but a short time to live. This letter was evidently her last. On the thirteenth she went into a coma. Vinnie sent for Austin and for Dr. Bigelow, who remained with her much of the day. She never regained consciousness, and died about six in the evening, Saturday, 15 May 1886.”

Concerning the novel she mentioned in her 1885 letter, Wikipedia provides this information: "Called Back is an 1883 mystery/romance novel written by Englishman Frederick John Fargus under the pseudonym Hugh Conway."

In the letter to her cousins in 1885, Dickinson said, “Loo asked ‘what books’ we were wooing now - watching like a vulture for Walter Cross's life of his wife. A friend sent me Called Back,. It is a haunting story, and as loved Mr. Bowles used to say, ‘greatly impressive to me.’”

LOL – when I read that letter in full (as well as many others), I wondered if Dickinson had (undiagnosed) ADD. The letter opens with this, “Had we less to say to those we love, perhaps we should say it oftener, but the attempt comes, then the inundation, then it is all over, as is said of the dead.”

Then she moves to the discussion of the books, to information about an acquaintance who has died, to some information about someone’s move to Cambridge (with a religious reference), and then on to a call…to work? (i.e. housework?) to end the day?

She then closes the letter with another Dickinsonian pearl of wisdom: “That we are permanent temporarily, it is warm to know, though we know no more."

The complete letter from 1885 is HERE. Johnson’s notes on the 1885 letter are HERE.

Of course, her 1886 letter to her cousins consisted of just the two words, Called Back, taken from the title of Conway’s novel, and the two words also appear on the poet’s grave stone.

The Circle of Life

5/13/2025

Yesterday I posted a link to Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work” to discuss the Foreword of the book by Gregory Orr, and when I explored “who is/was Gregory Orr,” I was surprised to find that he lives where I live, in Charlottesville, Virginia. See yesterday’s post for details, HERE.

I also looked into “who is/was Stanley Kunitz,” the person Orr quoted at the start of his Foreword:

The voice of the solitary
Who makes others less alone
~ Stanley Kunitz

It was at that time I uncovered a second surprise: Kunitz was an American poet who was twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (first in 1974 and then again in 2000), and when information popped up on my screen, I discovered that his first wife shared my last name, Asher.

So who was Elise Asher? (And are we related? LOL.)

Elise Asher was an American painter and poet. She is known for paintings on canvas and plexiglass, illustrating poems written by herself and others.

Of course, you know I ran a search to discover if Asher ever painted anything based on a Dickinson poem, and I got this: “Whether Elise Asher ever painted anything based on Emily Dickinson's poetry cannot be definitively stated.”

Some of Asher’s paintings are shown below.

Since I ran a search to explore any connection between Elise Asher and Emily Dickinson, I decided to run a search, too, on Stanley Kunitz and Emily Dickinson. I ended up getting an AI generated discussion on the two poets and their styles, but no “connection” between the two – EXCEPT – there was a link to a page at the Poetry Foundation with an essay entitled “Remembering Stanley Kunitz” (HERE), a memorial tribute written by a former student of his.

The writer said this:

“He modeled for many of us, for me at least, a poetry rooted in autobiography, but transfigured by imagination. The ‘I’ that inhabits his poems is not trapped in the personal self, but is instead Emerson’s ‘representative man.’ Or what Emily Dickinson said (she who began more poems with ‘I’ than any other word)—’when I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.’ The protagonist of his poems both him and not-him, and always searching, always questing.”

And who was this writer/former student? None other than Gregory Orr, the gentleman who penned the Foreword to Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson,” the very book I wrote about yesterday and at the start of this post.

(Suddenly I’m singing, “It’s the circle / The circle of life.”)

First Person Singular

5/12/2025

I can’t remember when I found the online copy (linked later in this post) of Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work.” I’m sure it was related to some past Dickinson post of mine, but which one? Who knows! However, I saved the link with a note to myself to check out the opening to the Foreword of the book by Gregory Orr – who, coincidentally, is from Charlottesville, Virginia, the city where I live.

Sooo…before proceeding with today’s post, I had to search “Gregory Orr,” and I found this, HERE, and this, HERE.

From a page at the Poetry Foundation, I discovered that “After 44 years in the University of Virginia’s English department, Orr retired in 2019.”

Okay, so on with today’s post: What captured my attention in Orr’s Foreword to Leiter’s “Critical Companion” was his opening statement: “More of Emily Dickinson’s poems begin with ‘I’ than any other word.”

TBH, I’m surprised – with the various and random posts I’ve done in the past about how often Dickinson used various and random words – that I never looked into that. I’m not at home now to check exactly how many poems Dickinson wrote beginning with “I,” so I accessed the Wikipedia list of Dickinson’s poems (HERE), and the number is 143.

Of course, Orr’s Foreword is not just about the objective count of Dickinson’s poems that begin with “I,” but it really focuses on how a reader identifies with a poem’s speaker when the pronoun “I” is used.

Orr said, “Paradoxically, in the lyric this pronoun of self functions inclusively, rather than exclusively. The reader is invited to identify with the poem’s speaker for the brief, intensified moment of the poem’s unfolding,” and later he mentioned Dickinson’s letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson where she stipulated, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.”

Just FYI: I discussed that very missive in a recent post dealing with internal rhyme, HERE.

With the use of the first person singular pronoun, Orr notes that “The reader is invited to identify with the poem’s speaker for the brief, intensified moment of the poem’s unfolding,” and he continues with examples from other poets, most notably Walt Whitman:

“Although in most poems this lyric invitation is implicit, Walt Whitman states it outright and with typical confidence in the opening lines of ‘Song of Myself,’ recognizing that all the deeper emotional and spiritual transactions of his sequence derive from it:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume, you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

This invocation called to mine a site I discovered several years ago, “Whitman Alabama,” “an experiment in using documentary and poetry to reveal the threads that tie us together—as people, as states, and as a nation”:

“For two years, filmmaker Jennifer Crandall has crisscrossed this deep Southern state, inviting people to look into a camera and share a part of themselves through the words of Walt Whitman. The 19th century poet’s ‘Song of Myself’ is a quintessential reflection of our American identities.”

Check it out here (IT IS WONDERFUL), HERE.

Leiter’s “Critical Companion” is HERE – and Orr’s Foreword begins on page 6 of the 465 pages.

More on all of this tomorrow – including another odd little coincidence involving the quote from Stanley Kunitz with which Orr opens his Foreword.

What Didst That Reckless Zephyr Fling?

5/11/2025

In her article “Defining Poetry in the Twilight Interval: Frost, Dickinson, and the Critics,” Karen Kilcup contends that the passionate moments of Robert Frost’s first published poem, “My Butterfly,” “resonate with Dickinson’s ‘Wild Nights,” which had appeared only two years before.”

“But,” states Kilcup, “instead of Dickinson’s ecstatic (if imagined) consummation, Frost’s poem represents loss: The opening line cites the eponymous protagonist’s ‘emulous fond flowers’ who have ‘none left to mourn thee in the fields.’”

Here’s some of Kilcup’s take on the two poems:

“(In Frost’s poem) the floral imagery rehearses contemporaneous standards for feminine poetry, as does the speaker’s emotional transparency. The tender narrator feels keenly the insect’s absence, so ‘long ago – It seems forever,’ when the butterfly expressed its ardor ‘With all thy dazzling other ones’”

     In airy dalliance,
     Precipitate in love,
     Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
     Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.

Unlike Dickinson’s speaker, who announces ‘Futile the winds / To a heart in port,’ Frost’s girlish narrator mourns how 'fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind, / With those great careless wings.’ While Dickinson’s speaker has metaphorically furled her sail, Frost’s butterfly is doomed by its ‘careless’ abandonment, its wings’ openness to ‘that reckless zephyr’ that flings against his cheek ‘the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing.’ Even as it dies (or is already dead?) the insect seduces the narrator, who speaks as ecstatically as Dickinson’s sharing her multiple exclamation points: Tempestuous and delicate love, buffeted by external forces, is easily ‘broken.’”

Of course, Kilcup’s full essay considers two related questions; 1) How did the late-nineteenth-century cultural and critical climate impact how Frost encountered Dickinson’s work? 2) How did his reactions – both to the critics and to the poems – help shape his own verse, and ultimately, American poetry? And in the discussion of these two poems, she did mention that Frost’s floral imagery “rehearses contemporaneous standards” – although the language and conventionality of the poem did surprise me.

Frost wrote the poem in 1894, during a time that Edward Blair Stedman later referred to as the “Twilight Interval” (1890 to 1912) to describe the end of the Victorian era and the rise of modernism in poetry; however, the language and form of Frost’s “My Butterfly” are definitely more Victorian than modern.

The various thys, thines, and thous – along with the didsts, wists and more – certainly do not reflect a kindred rascally spirit in language or form with Emily Dickinson – who penned her “lawless” poems at the height of the Victorian era.

Though Frost was reading – and admired – Dickinson at the time he wrote “My Butterfly,” he still stuck with convention.

Twilight Zone

5/10/2025

Slowly but surely I’m making my way through an article entitled “Defining Poetry in the Twilight Interval”by Karen Kilcup. Though not obvious by its title, the article includes a heavy focus on the development of Robert Frost as a poet at a time when many of Dickinson’s poems were just being published and discovered (Frost was sixteen years old when the first series of Dickinson’s “Poems” was published) – and evidently this period in the world of poetry is known as the Twilight Interval.

Imma be honest – I’ve not heard that designation before. In college I majored in English Education, so my courses included a good number of classes in literature and poetry, but I don’t recall hearing of this designation, the Twilight Interval.
Evidently the Twilight Interval refers to the period in poetry between 1890 and 1912, and the term was coined by American critic Edward Blair Stedman “to describe the end of the Victorian era and the rise of modernism in poetry.” Stedman characterized this era as an "interregnum" or "twilight," suggesting a time of transition and decline after “the golden age of Victorian poetry.”

Have any of you heard of this before?

In exploring the Twilight Interval, I found this timeline of poetry (HERE), but it does not include the term. On the left side of the page, you can see that it identifies the Victorians as from 1833 - 1903 followed by the Georgians and then the Moderns.
Then lo and behold, as I was exploring all of this, I came across a website of Karen Kilcup’s (HERE), and it includes a now defunct link to the article I’m reading; however, the page does include a subtitle to the article which brings it into better focus: “Defining Poetry in the Twilight Interval: Frost, Dickinson, and the Critics.”

Here’s the gist of the article in Kilcup’s words:

“This essay considers two related questions: How did the late-nineteenth-century cultural and critical climate impact how Frost encountered Dickinson’s work? How did his reactions – both to the critics and to the poems – help shape his own verse, and ultimately, American poetry?”

Yesterday I posted some of the essay’s introduction, which included a (harsh) review of Dickinson’s poetry that was representative of what Frost would have encountered as critics of the time began responding to Dickinson’s work. Still, Frost recognized Dickinson’s genius in her “lawless” approach to language and style. As I read on, I’ll see how this all unfolds.

One of the first poems Kilcup explores is the first poem Frost sold and had published, “My Butterfly, An Elegy.” Can you guess which of Dickinson’s poems she compares it to? I’ll share that tomorrow.

Defying Gravity

5/9/2025

Yesterday I discussed a few poets’ uses of internal rhyme, and one poem I’d mentioned was Robert Frost’s “Birches.” I also mentioned that at an earlier date I’d come across an article comparing various Frost poems to some by Dickinson, so I revisited that article and printed it so that I could take a closer look – and the opening lines took me by surprise.

Here’s how the article, “Defining Poetry in the Twilight Interval,” opens:

“‘She is the best of all the women poets who ever wrote, from Sappho on down. As for all the other women poets…they can’t touch Emily …Emily wrote fine lines – right from the soul.’ Robert Frost’s remark to Louis Mertins indicates not only intense admiration for his Amherst predecessor but also how astutely he assessed her merit and how presciently he anticipated her future reputation.”

The author of the article, Karen Kilcup, noted in the next paragraph that “Frost was only sixteen when the ‘lawless’ Emily Dickinson’s first volume appeared,” and she also included a scathing review from that time – written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of the Atlantic Monthly – to represent the types of reviews Frost would have encountered when Dickinson was first published. Aldrich wrote the following:

"An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar….Miss Dickinson’s versicles have a queerness and a quaintness that have stirred a momentary curiosity in emotional bosoms. Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.”

Ouch! Could he have been more wrong? LOL.

Kilcup noted, “Frost knew better, quickly recognizing that his predecessor was not simply a star, but a supernova.”

More on Frost and Dickinson tomorrow.

BTW: The complete Aldrich review appears below as it appeared in the January 1892 issue of the Atlantic Magazine (the review begins at the bottom of the right column on page 143; click the images to enlarge).

Internal Investigation

5/8/2025

Yesterday I posted info related to Dickinson’s use of internal rhyme. While exploring that topic, I stumbled across this Reddit page; a Redditor (is that what you call an individual on Reddit?) posed the question, “Favourite internal rhyme poems?” (HERE)

I ran a word search for “Dickinson” on the page, and nothing popped up; however, having recently read a paper comparing a poem by Robert Frost to one by Emily Dickinson, I noticed with interest this statement from one responder: “Check out ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost, it's filled with internal rhymes!”

Soooo...I checked out “Birches” and…"filled with internal rhymes”? Not that I could tell.

I re-read the poem a couple of times – was I missing something?

I then ran a Google-search on “internal rhyme in Robert Frost’s Birches,” and I found this (HERE):

“‘Birches’ does not have a set rhyme scheme. And while there are several moments in which the speaker uses internal slant rhymes, even these instances are few and far between. In fact, there aren't any rhymes at all until line 12, when the speaker creates an internal slant rhyme between the word ‘heaps’ and the word ‘sweep.’ Although this is a subtle rhyme, there are so few rhymes in the surrounding lines that it actually has a very noticeable effect, ultimately making line 12 sound particularly musical.”

"Birches" was a bust when it came to internal rhyme.

I knew that when I discussed internal rhymes I would recommend Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” as a great example, and then I discovered this, “10 Best Internal Rhymes Examples” (HERE) – and “The Raven” is there in the top spot!

Scroll down to #9 on the page, and there’s Dickinson – with a poem I wrote about just a few days ago, HERE.