The Complete Poems of Emily

Dickinson

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The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Critical Evaluation:
After Emily Dickinson’s death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found forty-nine fascicles, or packets, of poems
that Dickinson had sewn together during the late 1850’s and early 1860’s. Lavinia enlisted the help of Mabel
Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst professor, to transcribe them. With the assistance of the literary editor
Thomas Wentworth, they altered the rhyme scheme, regularized the meter, and revised unconventional
metaphors for the 115 poems they published in 1890. These were well received and led to the publication in
1891 of 161 additional poems and, in 1896, of 168 more.

In 1914, Dickinson’s niece and literary heir, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, compiled other poems. She kept
alterations to the verse to a minimum, as was also the case with additional volumes in 1929 and 1935.
Millicent Todd Bingham in 1945 published the remaining 688 poems and fragments. When Dickinson’s
literary estate was transferred to Harvard University in 1950, Thomas H. Johnson began to arrange the
unreconstructed and comprehensive body of Dickinson’s poetry chronologically. The Poems of Emily
Dickinson appeared in 1955; The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson appeared in 1960. Aside from
correcting misspellings and misplaced apostrophes, Johnson let Dickinson’s original punctuation and
capitalization stand. To the previously editorialized publications, Johnson restored the original dashes and
other nonconformist usage, listing for each poem both the approximate date of the earliest known manuscript
and the date of first publication. There is also a helpful “Index of First Lines” (Dickinson did not title her
poems) and a fairly comprehensive subject index based on key words or images in the poems, the three most
prominent being life, death, and love.

Of those poems which celebrate life, a substantial number are about nature, the inhabitants of which
Dickinson frequently praises. Dickinson describes her mission to reveal nature in #441: “This is my letter to
the World/ That never wrote to me—/ The simple News that Nature told—/ With tender majesty.” In #111,
“The Bee is not afraid of me,” butterflies, brooks, and breezes are among her dearest friends. She often pays
tribute to these friends, nature’s creatures, as in “A fuzzy fellow, without feet” (#173), which catalogs the
glorious transformation of caterpillar into a butterfly, or “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (#986), a
multisensory description of a sleek but frightening snake. In “An awful Tempest mashed the air” (#198),
nature is personified. In #214, nature is a “liquor never brewed” that inebriates the speaker with joy. The
sunset is a “Housewife” who has swept the west with color in “She sweeps with many-colored Brooms”
(#219). Nature assumes the role of “Gentlest Mother” in #790, bestowing “infinite Affection—/ And infiniter
Care” on all the world. Likewise the “Juggler of Day,” the sun, blazes in gold and quenches in purple (#228).
In “These are the days when Birds come back” (#130), Dickinson uses sacred—Sacrament, Last
Communion—diction to welcome the holy return of spring. In “An altered look about the hill” (#140), she
likens the return of spring to the resurrection with a biblical allusion to Nicodemus.

Nature is the focus of Dickinson’s spiritual life, as well. Her play with custom is seen in her subverting of
religious ceremonies. In “The Gentian weaves her fringes” (#18), Dickinson reveres nature, which pools her
resources to memorialize “departing blossoms.” She joins with Bobolink and Bee, Gentian and Maple in this

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson 1

commemoration service, which she closes with a sacrilegious play on the Trinity:

In the name of the Bee—

And of the Butterfly—

And of the Breeze—Amen!

Refreshingly, these are the entities with which Dickinson is most comfortable: In #19, the Bee and the Breeze
enable her transformation into a Rose; and in #111, the reader learns that her reverence of them is not based in
fear, nor is it founded upon not knowing the Other. Rather, they share a mutual knowledge and comfortable
relationship:

The Bee is not afraid of me.

I know the Butterfly.

The pretty people in the Woods

Receive me cordially—

The Brooks laugh louder when I come—

The Breezes madder play;

Wherefore mine eye thy silver mists,

Wherefore, Oh Summer’s Day?

Her communion with nature is a voluntary ritual, a genuine connection that makes her misty-eyed. Equally
significant, she implies that it is a reciprocally nurturing relationship.

Dickinson resents the dominance of nature by predominantly male scientists and is “mad” about its
co-optation, as she writes in #70:

“Arcturus” is his other name—

I’d rather call him “Star.”

It’s very mean of Science

To go and interfere!

. . . . . . . .

I pull a flower from the woods—

A monster with a glass

Computes the stamens in a breath—

And has her in a “class”!

Critical Evaluation: 2
Whereas I took the Butterfly

Aforetime in my hat—

He sits erect in “Cabinets”—

The Clover bells forgot.

She has contempt for the scientists, whom she mocks for thinking they can objectively know nature through
detached analysis. She fears that such objectification of an entity that she reverences will destroy or endanger
its spiritual aspect, “What once was ‘Heaven’.” Poems #97, #108, and #185 are among others that indict
science’s “advances” and its preoccupation with subduing nature, suppressing its playfulness, and interfering
with its course.

Dickinson likewise makes a farce of militarism and its threat to life and the world; in #73 she criticizes the
hypocrisy of militarism, first camouflaging her satire with the interrogative form, then affirming her disgusted
sarcasm with exclamation points.

Who never lost, are unprepared

A Coronet to find!

. . . . . . .

How many Legions overcome—

The Emperor will say?

How many Colors taken

On Revolution Day?

How many Bullets bearest?

Hast Thou the Royal scar?

Angels! Write “Promoted”

On this Soldier’s brow!

She concludes that what makes “sense” to society is “Madness” (#435), whereas what society, with its
undiscerning eye, would deem “mad” makes the most sense:

Much Madness is divinest Sense—

To a discerning Eye—

Much Sense—the starkest Madness—

’Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail—

Assent—and you are sane—

Critical Evaluation: 3
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—

And handled with a Chain—

Dickinson knows the cost of being labeled mad yet risks it, for she can discern the value of her genius and—in
a society of one—it matters not whether anyone else can discern that value. The poet understands the price
exacted for nonconformity or originality, but nature allows her to balance the risk with her sense of hope, “. . .
the thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—” (#254). The creator in “He fumbles at your Soul” (#315)
stuns “by degrees” until he “Deals-One-imperial-thunderbolt—/ That scalps your naked Soul—.” Dickinson
reveals her pantheism in “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” (#324), wherein the speaker stays at
home “With a Bobolink for a Chorister—/ And an Orchard, for a Dome—.” Here, a choir of sextons makes for
a heavenly service. Heaven is as accessible as our “Capacity” to imagine, according to poem #370, one of
366 poems written during Dickinson’s marathon poetry year of 1862. This seems quite understandable if one
agrees with #383 that “Exhilaration—is within—” and is among the divine feelings “the Soul
achieves—Herself—.”

Two other soul poems, #303 and #306, are thematically linked: “The Soul selects her own Society,” which
embodies willful solitude and seclusion, and “The Soul’s Superior instants.” One of her most well-known
“soul” poems is #512, which delineates the soul’s varied dimensions, such as “Bandaged moments” when
healing from a blow; “moments of Escape” when it “dances like a Bomb, abroad,” testing the limits of its
liberty, and “retaken moments” of caution. The soul is also “an imperial friend” to itself (#683), a theme
Dickinson resumes in “There is a solitude of space” (#1695), wherein the soul enjoys a “polar privacy” and,
with itself, experiences the paradox of “Finite infinity.” In “A Thought went up my mind today,” the soul
even facilitates so-called déjà-vu experiences. The integral connection between the soul and Dickinson’s
poetry is encapsulated in “There is no Frigate like a Book” (#1263), wherein “. . . a Page/ Of prancing
Poetry—” can bear the soul “Lands away.”

This transport may be necessary when grieving the loss of loved ones to death, another of Dickinson’s
subjects. One of the most prominent of these poems is “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (#280) wherein the
mourners pace and the service drones on to the point that “My Mind was going numb—.” Along similar lines,
in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (#341), grief reduces the narrator to disorientation and
mechanical, routine functioning. Also mournful in tone is #258, “There’s a certain Slant of light,” in which
“Winter Afternoons,” like “Cathedral tunes,” are oppressive. Even “the Landscape listens” to what is like “.
. . the Distance/ On the look of Death—.”

Similarly, in #389, the House wherein “There’s been a Death” has a “numb look” as it prepares for the
“Dark Parade” of mourners. It is in just such a house that the speaker of “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”
(#465) met her death. The tenuous “Stillness” that pervades the atmosphere of anticipated death is broken
only by the “Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—” of a carrion insect, oblivious to the exhausted tears of loving
relations. This deceased speaker, in turn, could inhabit “I died for Beauty” (#449) wherein she converses with
a kindred “One who died for Truth,” “until the Moss had reached our lips.” Or, she could become one of
those who are “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (#216), awaiting the Resurrection, unable to experience the
light of day before that moment. The undercurrent of finality also surfaces in “’Twas warm—at first—like Us”
(#519), a graphic and sobering delineation of the stages of rigor mortis and burial, and in “All but Death, can
be Adjusted” (#749), a brief poem about death’s irrevocability and incapacity for change.

Personification enables another view of death in one of Dickinson’s most famous poems: “Because I could
not stop for Death” (#712). In one of several lyrical poems that correspond to the rhythm and meter of the
hymn “Amazing Grace,” Death stops for the speaker in a carriage wherein they pass a figurative panorama of
her life and her gravesite on the way to “Eternity.” The redemptive quality of death also surfaces in “A Death
blow is a Life blow to Some” (#816), a one-stanza paradox wherein death is described as a wake-up call, as a

Critical Evaluation: 4
prerequisite to “Vitality.” In #501, life on earth is merely a way station to what scholars and the faithful can
only conjecture. Death, therefore, is to be welcomed rather than feared. Beyond riddle and bordering
conundrum are Dickinson’s poems about pain, in which Dickinson undercuts dualities by conflating
opposites. Perhaps most poignant among these is #125:

For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour

Sharp pittances of years—

Bitter contested farthings—

And Coffers heaped with Tears!

Even in her earliest poems, Dickinson demonstrates the fun she has with experimental language, particularly
with wordplay that reverses meaning, as in #33:

If recollecting were forgetting,

Then I remember not.

And if forgetting, recollecting,

How near I had forgot.

And if to miss, were merry,

And to mourn, were gay,

How very blithe the fingers

That gathered this, Today!

In #67, those who can define or know a thing such as success or victory are those most removed from it:
“Success is counted sweetest/ By those who ne’er succeed.” Here, Dickinson again explores notions of
identification through opposites and explodes the duality of language as found, for example, in the oxymoron
saved for the final line of #1695:

There is a solitude of space

A solitude of sea

A solitude of death, but these

Society shall be

Compared with that profounder site

Critical Evaluation: 5
That polar privacy

A soul admitted to itself—

Finite infinity.

In society, people experience the loneliness of death and of vastness; true solitude is that found by the soul
that admits only itself but, strangely, has limitless potential—infinity—within the finite bounds it sets itself.
Interestingly, in #303, the soul—significantly gendered as feminine—“selects her own Society—”

Then—shuts the Door—

To her divine Majority—

Present no more—

In her society of “One” (which she chooses, as we learn in the third stanza), the poet is free to exercise any
choice and free to play with the language of religion, custom, or ceremony. To demonstrate the former,
Dickinson in #172 realizes that concepts and words are just that: They have no power beyond themselves. As
she says in stanza 2:

Life is but Life! And Death, but Death!

Bliss is, but Bliss, and Breath but Breath!

And if indeed I fail,

At least to know the worst, is sweet!

Defeat means nothing but Defeat,

No drearier, can befall!

Even defeat and death lose their force. The only threat lies in what can be imagined, not in what simply is.
Demonstrative of her play with language’s dictates, too, is her use of the exclamation points in this poem and
others. Having discovered the limits of language, the poet cannot only (ex)claim revelatory/revolutionary
discoveries but sustain whatever degree of emphasis she wishes.

In #165 (“A Wounded Deer—leaps highest”), Dickinson combines these techniques to address the subject of
disguising pain by suggesting the unexpected or something seemingly disparate. In another poem referring
specifically to female deer (#754), Dickinson dissociates herself from those, especially women, who would
defer to powerful forces. Instead, she defines her life as a “Loaded Gun” in search of the doe. Every time she
speaks, “The Mountains straight reply—,” thus satisfying her desires both to be heard (for she incurs an echo)
and to have, like a bullet, an impact. Only then can she experience pleasure, as we learn in stanza 3:

And do I smile, such cordial light

Upon the Valley glow—

It is as a Vesuvian face

Had let its pleasure through—

Dickinson’s persona in this poem is both madly at play and enjoying the pleasures of play.

Critical Evaluation: 6
As these poems illustrate, Dickinson’s language is highly compressed and disjunctive. The compression
accounts for the multiplicity of meaning and the often anomalous, riddling quality of her poems, though it is
not clear whether her intention is to speak subversively, to disguise her power or pain, or to express through
form her personal ethic of renunciation. Disjunction in punctuation, syntax, action, and tone disrupts the
expected patterns of style and meaning. Disjunctive poetry disallows a single “correct” interpretation.
Dickinson’s surface features of often inexplicable punctuation, inverted and elliptical syntax, occasional
metrical irregularity, off-rhyme, and ungrammaticality rest on the acceptance of an underlying regularity of
meter, rhyme, and stanza forms. A similar interplay is found in the juxtaposition of singular nouns with plural
verbs and vice versa, as well as in singular versions of plural reflexive pronouns (as in “ourself”). While
Dickinson primarily uses the lyric present tense, the subjunctive mood often connotes conditionality or
universality. In similar fashion, her figurative language reinforces the nonconventional.

Dickinson believed that language’s potential for meaning exceeds the individual’s control of it. She
manipulates punctuation to reflect the resulting flux. Her use of the dash, for example, represents a resistance
to definiteness, definition, or closure, as does her irregular vocabulary. Her use of exclamation points and
question marks expresses emotional urgency and self-doubt. She also draws on an ironic tone, negation,
qualification, and challenges to authority.

Dickinson was reluctant to publicize her rich, nontraditional work, and she was adamant about not selling out.
“Publication—is the Auction/ Of the Mind of Man—” she contends in #709, wherein she reluctantly concedes
that only poverty could justify “so foul a thing.” She cautions readers not to reduce their souls “To Disgrace
of Price—.” Not surprisingly—as in “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (#288)—she prefers the privacy and dignity
that come from being unknown, to the dreariness of being “. . . Somebody!/ How public—like a Frog—” a
simile that captures her disdain for those who crave fame and recognition. This poem, like countless others
about the subject of poetry (#1212, #1261, #754, #657), demonstrates the integrity of her philosophy and the
quiet genius of her poetics, shaped as it is by her age.

As a female literary genius born into a male writing and publishing world in a region where late Calvinist and
Puritan theology manifests itself in ideal conventional feminine behavior, Dickinson had few options. Her art
expresses an attempt to transcend the patriarchally imposed limits on prose (#613), heaven (#947), and her
own sexual identity (#908), limits that she felt deprived her of purpose or place. As she wrote early in her
career, in the poem #613 of approximately 1862:

They shut me up in Prose—

As when a little Girl

They put me in a 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—

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Critical Evaluation: 7
Abolish his Captivity—

And laugh—No more have I—

The negative images of the first line suggest that Dickinson did not regard prose highly. In a letter, Dickinson
wrote, “We please ourselves with the fancy that we’re the only poets, everyone else is prose.” Stating that
she had the madness of a poet who would not stay shut up in convention, Dickinson will break out of this
outer-imposed prison and reveal the true singer. The very fact that this inhibition is outer-imposed rather than
chosen leaves the persona speechless (that is, “shut up”). Only by creating her own self-initiated and
self-chosen style can she abolish her captivity, similar to the “Patriarch’s bird” as female explorer in poem
#48. The captive’s dream of freedom found in #613 and #48 also surfaces in #661, when the bee escapes the
authoritative chase of police and exclaims: “What Liberty! So Captives deem/ Who tight in Dungeons are.”
In another poem, #657, poetry and possibility provide more freedom than prose: “I dwell in Possibility—/ A
fairer house than Prose—.”

Prose, specifically as it was conventionally practiced at the time, was not a form of expression conducive to
Dickinson’s art, for most of its forms would have required a plot—typically a romance plot whose end
restricts female characters either to marriage or death, and in any case a linear progression of events.
Dickinson is aware that her mind does not follow such a path and that it is, instead, cyclic, circular, and
concentric. In pursuing the nonlinear nature of her thinking and writing, Dickinson created her new aesthetic.
She may also have found the prose with which she was familiar to be static, final, and lacking in affect. Its
syntax and grammar represent the rational structures she wished to undercut.

The imagination can enact simultaneously both needed sequestration and escape. Dickinson hoped through
words to assert autonomy and independence. She mocked social efforts to control and negate her adult
liberating self-expression. Through laughter, Dickinson overcame confinement and transformed into success
the futility she felt in poems such as #77:

I never hear the word “escape”

Without a quicker blood,

A sudden expectation,

A flying attitude!

I never hear of prisons broad

By soldiers battered down,

But I tug childish at my bars

Only to fail again!

This poem, written in 1859, during a year of self-initiated and symbolic changes that Dickinson made in her
life—she began, for example, to wear white—indicates her conscious affirmation of her own emancipatory
poetry and her decision to ignore external pressures and follow on her own artistic independence and
convictions, as she writes in so many subsequent poems.

Dickinson became a stylistic innovator and modern experimentalist so as to voice her sense of autonomy. At
the same time, she recognized the tension this innovation would necessarily entail. She discovers, for
example, the inevitable discontinuity of her thought in #937:

Critical Evaluation: 8
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—

As if my Brain had split—

I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—

But could not make them fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before—

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound

Like Balls—upon a Floor.

Perhaps the split is a result of the agonistic relation between her poetic aesthetic and conventional writing.
Even though sequential thought decomposes and ruptures cognition, incoherence attests Dickinson’s use of
paradoxes to explode binarism and enable multiplicity and disunity.

If, therefore, Dickinson is to tell the truth, she must tell it “slant,” “in circuit” (#1129):

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

Dickinson reveals truth gradually, so as not to blind its recipients with its dazzling light. Dazzled by her own
discoveries, she experiences a splitting that leads to loneliness and possibly even insanity, as indicated by the
final two stanzas of #410:

My Brain—begun to laugh—

I mumbled—like a fool—

And tho’ ’tis Years ago—that Day—

My Brain keeps giggling—still.

And Something’s odd—within—

That person that I was—

Critical Evaluation: 9
And this One—do not feel the same—

Could it be Madness—this?

Again laughter accompanies this splitting and multiplicity, as it liberates the speaker to the space of madness
in which to create and to exercise poetic license. In her attempts to dissociate self, mind, and world, Dickinson
in her multiplicitous project tries to speak for those who do not have the language, to see for those who are
less conscious, and to create a poetry of extreme states that allows others to go further into their awareness
and consciousness.

Dickinson’s poetry focuses meaning even as it scatters, disperses, undoes, and disrupts it. Dancing, spinning,
and weaving, even of webs, serve as metaphors for her poesis: She is the performing artist and craftswoman in
a sharply defined world. The poet artistically adopts several roles but settles for none. Dickinson believed that
the female, like the male, poet would be able to dance freely and fiercely, like the lillies and daisies liberated
from toil into ecstasy. Her poetry offers readers the same opportunities.

Bibliography
Bennett, Paula. Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. A probing,
instructive discussion of feminine creativity, sexual imagery, and themes of desire.

Duchac, Joseph. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary in English, 1978-1989.
New York: Macmillan, 1993. This bibliography is organized by poem and is an easy and helpful reference
tool for those wanting information on specific poems.

Ferlazzo, Paul. Emily Dickinson. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Written specifically for those new to Dickinson, this
easy-to-understand text is a good introduction to Dickinson’s poetry and life.

Juhasz, Suzanne, ed. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
This collection of essays by some of the most respected Dickinson scholars is prefaced with a piece by Juhasz
giving a brief history of feminist interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry. Thus it is a good source for students
interested in recent criticism.

Pollak, Vivian R. Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. A
psychobiographical, feminist study of the poetry’s intensity and resonance in Dickinson’s relations with
family, friends, and literary acquaintances.

Rosenbaum, S. P., ed. Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1964. This one-volume text indexes each word in Dickinson’s poetry and is therefore especially helpful when
one is studying particular images or subjects.

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980. Winner of the
National Book Award for biography, this interpretive biography brilliantly discusses Dickinson’s poetry in
the context of her life, family, region, and historical setting.

Stonum, Gary Lee. The Dickinson Sublime. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Analyzes
Dickinson’s idiosyncratic style. Uses literary theory to assess topics such as reading, writing, language,
intention, fame, power, knowledge, imagination, the resistance to closure, and the suspension between trauma
and sublimation.

Bibliography 10
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. This critical biography makes
use of past biographies and is much more manageable and accessible than they are. Also, the bibliography is
extensive and the index helpful.

Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984.
Examines Dickinson’s poetic forms and syntax, as well as martial imagery and historical and metaphysical
issues.

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