On This Day in 1886

It was on this day in 1886 that poet Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. She had made her sister promise to burn all of her letters when she died, but didn't say what to do with her notebooks. There were 40 of them, and they contained nearly 1,800 poems that she'd written. Only a handful had been published while she was alive.

Relatives and friends fought over publishing her poems, and it wasn't until 1955 that a complete volume appeared that contained Dickinson's poems just as she herself had written them — with punctuation, capitalization, and obscure diction intact.

Up until 1866, Dickinson was a more or less normal, if painfully shy, member of society, interested in publishing her poems. But in that year, a long time domestic servant married and left the house, and she lost Carlo, her dog and constant companion for 16 years. At that point her behavior began to change.

She did not leave the house unless it was absolutely necessary and as early as 1867, she began to talk to visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking to them face to face. She acquired local notoriety; she was rarely seen, and when she was, she was usually clothed in white. Few of the locals who exchanged messages with Dickinson during her last fifteen years ever saw her in person. Despite her physical seclusion, however, Dickinson was socially active and expressive through what makes up two-thirds of her surviving notes and letters.

On June 16, 1874, while in Boston, her father Edward Dickinson suffered a stroke and died. When the simple funeral was held in the Homestead's entrance hall, Emily stayed in her room with the door cracked open. Neither did she attend the memorial service on June 28. A year later, on June 15, 1875, Dickinson's mother also suffered a stroke, which produced a partial lateral paralysis and impaired memory. Lamenting her mother's increasing physical as well as mental demands, Dickinson wrote that "Home is so far from Home".

As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In the fall of 1884, she wrote that "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come. That summer she had seen "a great darkness coming" and fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed. She was confined to her bed for a few months, but managed to send a final burst of letters in the spring. What is thought to be her last letter was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply read: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily". On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Dickinson's chief physician gave the cause of death as Bright's disease, an antiquated term for a group of kidney diseases that are now referred to a chronic nephritis, and its duration as two and a half years.

Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful figure in American culture. Although much of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely acknowledged as an innovative, proto-modernist poet. As early as 1891, William Dean Howells wrote that "If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry, we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it." Critic Harold Bloom has placed her alongside Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane as a major American poet, and in 1994 listed her among the 26 central writers of Western civilization.

Dickinson is taught in American literature and poetry classes in the United States from middle school to college. Her poetry is frequently anthologized and has been used as text for art songs by composers such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, John Adams and Michael Tilson Thomas. Paul Simon's song The Dangling Conversation refers to two lovers and their failed communication being due, somewhat in part to the different poets they read: Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost

A public garden is named in her honor in Paris: Square Emily-Dickinson.

As for me, I kind of lost it for Emily Dickinson the day I realized that almost everything she ever wrote could be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose Of Texas. Now I can't read her without giggling.

Here; try it yourself.

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –

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Square Emily Dickinson Paris XXé - Photographies de Françoise Larouge

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