In Our Time - Emily Dickinson

Episode Date: May 11, 2017

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Comedian Frank Skinner has picked the episode on the life and work of the poet Emily Dickinson and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the version broadcast on Radio 4). Emily Dickinson was arguably the most startling and original poet in America in the C19th. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity." That was in 1891 and, as more of Dickinson's poems were published, and more of her remaining letters, the more the interest in her and appreciation of her grew. With her distinctive voice, her abundance, and her exploration of her private world, she is now seen by many as one of the great lyric poets. With Fiona Green Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus CollegeLinda Freedman Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College LondonandParaic Finnerty Reader in English and American Literature at the University of PortsmouthProducer: Simon Tillotson.Reading list:Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (Penguin Books, 2009)Jed Deppman, Marianne Noble and Gary Lee Stonum (eds.), Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2013)Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2005)Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1992)Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006)Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (University Massachusetts Press, 1998)Ralph William Franklin (ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (Harvard University Press, 1998)Linda Freedman, The Myth of the Fall in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford University Press, 2025), especially chapter 3.Linda Freedman, Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011)Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle and Cristanne Miller (eds.), The Emily Dickinson Handbook (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)Alfred Habegger, My Wars are Laid Away in Books: The Early Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001)Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (eds.), Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998)Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton University Press, 2013)Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters (first published 1958; Harvard University Press, 1986)Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Poems of Emily Dickinson (first published 1951; Faber & Faber, 1976)Thomas Herbert Johnson and Theodora Ward (eds.), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1958)Benjamin Lease, Emily Dickinson’s Readings of Men and Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990)Mary Loeffelholz, The Value of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge University Press, 2016)James McIntosh, Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown (University of Michigan Press, 2000)Marietta Messmer, A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)Cristanne Miller (ed.), Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved (Harvard University Press, 2016)Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012)Elizabeth Phillips, Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988)Eliza Richards (ed.), Emily Dickinson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013)Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (first published 1974; Harvard University Press, 1998)Marta L. Werner, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1996)Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Anchor Books, 2009)Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale University Press, 1984)This episode was first broadcast in May 2017.Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our worldIn Our Time is a BBC Studios production

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, New England, is now celebrated as one of the greatest of American poets. There was little sign of that in her lifetime.

She refused to publish more than 11 of her poems, and people in Amherst knew her more for being reclusive and for dressing exclusively in white. She corresponded widely, though, bringing society and ideas into the room she scarcely left. With her death in 1886 came the discovery of her massive work, almost 1800 poems sewn together in neat bundles.

Her poems began to be published and quickly gained popularity and critical acclaim, entering the Western literary canon where they remain today. With me to discuss the life and works of Emily Dickinson are Fiona Green, Senior lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. Linda Friedman, lecturer in English literature at University College London,

and Porrick Finity, Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Fiona Green, what was the world into which Emily Dickinson was born in 1930? We tend to imagine Dickinson as a solitary figure, I think, and to emphasise perhaps the reclusive character of her life. But it's as well to know that she was born into and raised in a very sociable and outward-looking family. So she's born, as you say, in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. And this is a small but quite busy college town.

And the Dickinson family are very much involved, both in the church, the first Amherst church, the Congregational Church, and in the college itself. So in fact, Dickinson's grandfather had been among the founders of Amherst College. So this is a very prominent family. It's also a quite process. family. Her father is a lawyer and he's also involved in politics. So he's very, very much engaged with worldly affairs and he has a very strong sense of civic responsibility, particularly as far as education

is concerned. She's rather idyllic, doesn't he, in her early years, this small town, the dances they have with each other, the wealthy part of it anyway. And was it like that? She was active. She went to dances, so on a few? Can you just open that up a bit? Yes. The house that she lived in the Dickinson Homestead and the house next door, the Evergreens, which is where her brother and his wife eventually lived, were sort of the social centres in a way of Amherst. So the college, the highlight of the college calendar is the commencement ball, and that is held traditionally at the homestead. Various visiting lecturers and dignitaries would stay at the Evergreens.

So, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to lecture in Amherst and stayed. with Dickinson's brother Austin and his wife, Susan Gilbert. So I think in her teens and 20s at least, she did participate in this very sociable atmosphere. She had a good education. I mean, considering the education that was not given to most women at the time, or girls at the time, hers was good. She had a good education. She attended the district primary school, one-room schoolhouse,

but the really important part of her education came between the ages of 10 and 17, and she went to Amherst Academy. So Amherst Academy is affiliated to, closely related to Amherst College. And there's a very, very broad, liberal curriculum at Amherst Academy. So she studies... Is this for girls, only? It has a girls' section. It's not co-educational, but it does have a girls' section.

And so she studies Latin and history, but she also studies science. She studies biology and chemistry and geology and experimental science. And that kind of knowledge is vital to the poetry, I think. Is she going, is she moving around in a group, in her peer group all the time? Is she very affianced to those people? Do we see a group there? A group of academic little women? Well, she does have a group of women friends.

She's very close. I was using that ironically, folks, and also referring to another route in more than the same district. Right, can we continue? She has a group of women friends. One of her closest friends, Susan Gilbert, whom her brother marries is somebody that we might talk about in detail a bit later. But really I think Dickinson's family is so important to her in those early years. I think her brother is actually her closest ally, at least until his marriage. And there's also a younger sister, Lavinia.

So those young people and a number of friends from the academy, yes, they did socialise together very much. But to return to my intervention, are there any connections in the background, in the social life, with little women, with Louise M. Alcott's little women. I'm not sure about that You're not sure either No let's move on then Okay Linda

It seemed to me reading That there was something about the life That was portrayed by Louise Amalka Was in part of the life I have read From the notes you've given me That was lived by Emily Dickinson But we're going to move on Right

Linda, Linda Friedman Her life was in Puritan New England And so heavily conditioned by religion Can you tell us how heavily? Pretty fundamentally, I think is the answer. Amherst was an interesting place to grow up in many ways and one of those ways was that it was positioned, it was one of the last sort of real outposts of Puritanism I think at a time when a much more liberal Christianity was growing up in the intellectual centres of Boston and New York

and it was connected to those centres and as Fiona said Emerson who was one of the sort of key players, I think, in that world, you know, visited Amherst. So it wasn't entirely detached from it. But the church that she attended was a congregationalist church. It was a place where people would be encouraged to stand up and make very emotional conversions to God, to religion. Now, Dickinson herself, as a woman, she stopped. going to church rather famously. When she was in her 20s, she stopped. But as a child and a teenager, a young teenager,

she still went. And she went very regularly. And this was important in many ways. In one sense, I think her Puritan heritage gave her something to react against, to ironise, to satirise. She quite famously rejected the Puritans industry and morals and every righteous thing, she called it.

But it more importantly, I think, fed her imagination and her sense of poetic vocation. And one of the reasons for this, I think, is that actually her first, one of her first and most affecting experiences of fiction was in the context of a religious experience. When she went to church, when she heard these very, very powerful sermons being given by the ministers, she was absolutely. fascinated by what their words could do. When she was 14, she came back from church.

She wrote to her brother, Austin, with whom she was very friendly. She was very close. He was away at the time. You know, I've just come back from church, very hot and faded. It grows very interesting. Zion lifts her head. I overhear remarks signifying Jerusalem. And you can see, I mean, this is very characteristic of Dickinson,

this detachment, this observation of an emotion. of an emotional intensity around her. And her continuing fascination in a very small way because her life became, the outside life, was a very small way, with preachers. Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of sermonizing, the idea of preaching, and the congregational idea was part of the Unitarian thing

which came from this country and hammered away at the sermons. But can I move on to reclusiveness? The age of about 25, after her mother's death, she became reclusive, she had become. reclusive gradually or it was sudden, what happened and why do you think she became such a recluse? To live virtually in one room, not to see people, except to have family and even that seems very much now and then. Dressing, this business of dressing in white, let's get that out of the way. How did that start? Well, that, as they say, is the million-dollar question. We don't know is the answer. What we do know comes, I think, from one of her letters, which she wrote in 18-19.

she wrote at the age of 31 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was a new kind of friend and mentor of hers and she wrote I had a terror since September I could tell to none That's the bit I picked her Yeah so I see as

So she had a terror that she can't speak Unless terror and it's fascinating what she was terrified by whether it was out of body experience Some kind of breakdown But she doesn't name it. It was the terror That drove her into that room on her own I'm glad you said that because when I read all this stuff I thought I bet that's what started.

But that's the bit that jumps had for us and actually the end of that sentence I could tell to none and so I sing as the boy does by the burying ground because I am afraid. So there are clues there and these clues have I think it's fair to say preoccupied Dickinson scholars

was it a grief is that what she means? Was it the war? Is that what she means? Was it a lot of? lost love? Was it a heartbreak? Was it the onset of mental illness? Did she have something we would recognise as agoraphobia? I don't know. But certainly the way in which she presented it to Higginson was as a shock, as a fear. Yeah, as a terror. As a terror. It sounds like lots of terror, well, a few terrors people have known about. Good. Poor Affinity. What prompt

did her to start writing? Oh, well, I think Dickinson starts writing maybe sometime in the 1850s. He's in her early 30s then? 20s, early 20, sorry, 1838. Can't count, yeah. A couple of Valentine's are published early on in newspapers, in a student magazine.

And then sometime in 1858, she starts to collect her poems together into little booklets. So she takes a piece of stationery. She writes on all four sides and then she binds that piece together with another piece of stationery into booklets.

So why she starts, I guess she's inspired. She sees herself as a poet in her discussions with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. There's a sense in which they are poets. They're inspired by works that they've read by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Robert Browning, by the Brontays.

By Ruskin. By Ruskin. Yes, she says she really likes Ruskin. So I think she's inspired. She's driven to produce these booklets, these 40 booklets, between 1858 and 1865. And these make up about 11,000 of her poems. So, and later on, she doesn't bind them.

11,000, sorry. Sorry, I beg your part, 1100 poems. 1100 poems. In venture, there's nearly 1800, but these are nearly... Yes, sorry. Right, right. Yes. So 1,100 poems. And then the other side after 1865,

she continues to put these booklets together, but she doesn't bind them. And then we've got lots of drafts. We've got a position in the latter half of her life where she's actually sending more poems out to people. So in the first half of her life, before 1865, she seems to be keeping them. She seems to be, it's kind of a record of her work.

and she sends some out, but in the latter half of her life, she sends a lot out in letters, and she wants to communicate to the world. When you say sending them out, she's sending them out to somebody to say, look, I'm too far away from my own mind, I can't judge this, could you help me in this?

Yes. Or she's putting them in letters, she's not sending them out to be published. No, and my understanding of Dickinson, she's not interested in publishing. It's kind of one of the things, the mystery, I mean, one of the mysteries of Dickinson is how can somebody be such a great poet

and not seem to want to be published. She does want certain people to recognise her. She wants Thomas Wentworth Higginson to recognise her. Is it to recognise her or to tell her that her poems are alive? That's the word she uses. In what sense does she want to be recognised? I think she wants, yes, she wants them to say that they breed, that they're alive. She asks Thomas Wendor Higginson,

but I think she wants other people to know that she's doing this. Certain people, Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Helen Hunt Jackson and notable novelist and poets. She wants some of the important people in the day and I think she sets the groundwork for her posthumous publications by contacting

these people. So I think on one level, yes, she wants some sort of validation for what she's doing, but I think on some level she wants people to know, important people to know. When she's writing to these important people, are they writing back? Yes, they are. And what are they saying?

They're writing back and they're begging her to publish. Helen Hunt Jackson begs her to publish Thomas Wentworth Higgins is a bit wary about her publishing Samuel Bowles publishes some of her works in the Springfield Republican So we have to say that in the lifetime Only 11 of her poems were published Ten against her wishes

Yes yes and the one of what She didn't really want to be published She's sitting there on her own in this room Writing for the sake of writing Writing for the sake of writing but also for the sake of sharing In the latter half of her career She shares the poems with others she writes occasional verse

when somebody dies she sends a poem that's appropriate there's a sense in which she's engaging with those friends, those close friends and those important people within the world but she never leaves her father's house or never crosses her father's ground

or goes to another town Fiona Green is it possible to encapsulate the recurring themes in Ammelaidedington's work well there are 1800 poems, as we've said. Well, just a few of the recurring themes.

Well, some of the early editions of Dickinson do categorise the poems under headings like Life, Love, Nature, Time and Eternity. And of course, those are her themes, but they're also the recurring themes of lots of other lyric poets. So to get up, perhaps, the character of the writing, it's helpful to think of branches of knowledge that intrigued her. So, for example, she's really interested in geometry.

She writes about circumferences and angles. She's very excited by experimental science, so she thinks about proof and evidence. She's very, very intrigued by geology, and there are volcanoes and earthquakes and rocks in the poetry. And one thing I've noticed that she's very curious about is anatomy. So through those 1800 poems, you will find fingers and feet and bones and brains. So she has this very particular attachment to earthly existence and its corporeal forms, but also an interest in transitions between that physical world and a metaphysical sphere.

So she wants to know what's beyond. She does want to know what's beyond. But perhaps most importantly, she's interested in the medium that might translate between those spheres, and that is the medium of language. So above all, Dickinson is interested in words. How could it translate between those words?

I'll come to you one second. I promise, Lendon, just a second. We just finish this remark. Yeah. Why does she think it'll translate? What's her reason for thinking it'll translate? It becomes in the end for her a theological question. That's right. Because she's interested in transitions between the Word of God, the Logos, the word incarnate in Christ, and the faulty language that poets have to use, what she calls this loved philology. Linda, Linda Friedman.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. She has a poem, which I think is really helpful, actually, in trying to understand. her negotiation of this idea of the beyond and what it means to her poetry and it's a poem which begins this world is not conclusion. A species lies beyond. And I think, you know, if we just stop for a moment

to think about the word choices there to describe the beyond species is a scientific term. So she's immediately bringing these different vocabularies and interests and ways of understanding, ways of negotiating the limits of our understanding, the limits of what can be,

and different ways of fathoming the unknown to bear on this problem. You know, species is a category we can perhaps know and understand. It's a language of science, but it also has its limits. She's also trying to string thoughts together. The thought behind and the thought before, how are they connected? Yes, quite. And she's very, very interested, and especially in that poem,

in how we understand a paradox. She's always, and I think this is an important thing to remember when you're thinking about the way in which Dickinson negotiates these issues, she's actually often much more interested in satirizing attitudes than she is in satirizing objects, religious attitudes. So in that poem, she satirizes faith as a sort of naive girl. She said faith laughs and skips and rallies, blotches, if any, sea, plugs it a twig of evidence and asks a vein the way.

you know, and she's sort of playing on natural theology's desire to look towards evidence as being something you might do in vain. She ends by satirising the revivalist church. She says, you know, much gesture from the pulpit, strong hallelujah's role. But then her final lines are narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul. I think I've got that right. and I think you know you really have a sense there of this sort of questing, probing, drive as she's playing

and... She still returns to the soul. She does, she satirises it but she by no means rejects it. Absolutely. You're quite right. That ambivalence is at the heart. She satirises but she is driven. In that direction, yes.

Talk of the resurrection and I hope we come to that because it's wonderful. But come back to you, Parik. we have a relationship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and with other men I'm not foraging for anything other than talking about her poetry but can you describe was there the same pattern

parallel to all those relationships one or two of them that will do I guess Mandy Dickinson's scholars focus on two main relationships with men and that's Charles Wadsworth, who is a preacher, and Dickinson probably hears him when she goes to Philadelphia in 1855. She hears him.

And then there's Samuel Bolesville already mentioned, who's the editor of the Springfield Republican. Both were married men. And Dickinson seems to have had some sort of relationship with them, a friendship with them, a very powerful and important friendship with them. Was it a friendship on both sides or was it her friendship? On both sides. I mean, Wadsworth comes to visit her in Amherst.

He writes to her. she has some sort of spiritual crisis and he's there to help. Samuel Bowles is an editor who's very close to Dickinson's brother, Austin, so they're kind of part of a group in a way.

There are two, or sorry, there are three master letters which... They're called master letters. They're called master letter. They basically are Dickinson addressing a master figure and people wonder, is this

Charles Wordsworth that she's writing? Is it Samuel bowls or is it something she made it up What distinguishes them Before we go to who there too Why are they distinguishing Why are they called master letter Right so they're addressed dear master

All right okay And what distinguishes them Well in many ways They're drafts So there's no evidence That she actually sent them To somebody What distinguishes them

They're very hyperbolic They're very metaphoric She describes herself as Daisy And she plays As she often does in her poems She switches positions I still haven't got what they're talking about Well, they're basically letters in which Daisy, the address,

Daisy addresses a master and she sort of says, oh, you've abandoned me, oh, you've rejected me, have I offended you? Why don't you write to me? Why are you not engaging with me anymore? Self-tormenting. Self-tormenting. And in many ways, you see some of that in the letters as, or sorry, in the poetry as well. You see as speakers who feel abandoned or rejected by this man.

and this man who seems to be off-limits, a forbidden love. You get that in the poetry, you get that in the master letters. There's in some sense that this master is not available to her and that ultimately their relationship has to be postponed. So this is one of the reasons that the master letters are so discussed by Dickinson's scholars. Just to preserve the design. You said she went to Philadelphia. She went there once and Washington once.

Before she became a recluse. After the age of 25, she went nowhere out of her house. So just to come back from line. Yes. Good. So we know who we are. Fiona Green. Her neighbour is Susan Gilbert in the next house.

There's a homestead and there's a house that her brother built for him, his wife, him and his wife, of course, Susan Gilbert, and became very, very close, an intense friend for a while. Now, what was the next? I mean, they were very close friends and she sent her poems to Susan Gilbert. Who sent replies back as I read from the notes that you three have given me, which said, no, you must change this, that doesn't work, and that sort of thing.

she don't notice of it as well. Can you tell more? Yes. Dickinson's relationship with Susan Gilbert is perhaps one of the most important relationships of her life and perhaps one of the most fraught as well. I think it is right to say that Dickinson's early letters to Susan Gilbert are love letters. They're very impassioned,

they're very demanding, she's mournful when Susan is away. And of course, one of the things... A love or loving letters? I think they're love letters. So what's... Love letters generally are letters of declaration. These are letters of declaration. that. So is she the declaration that

the lover who sends the letter wants something to happen? In that case, what does she want you to happen in these letters? That's the question. Does she want something to happen? And of course, the intriguing aspect of all of Dickinson's letters is that we don't have the other side of the correspondence because apart from a handful of letters, the letters that Dickinson received

were destroyed at her death. So it sometimes feels when you're reading the letters to Susan that she's writing into the void, that there was no response. But of course, that's partly an accident of history. don't have the replies. They may have been equally impassioned. But it is possible to have loving friendships with your sister-in-law without them being called. I'm just trying to get a dart to the heart of the love idea in this, and then we move on.

You can't say because there's no response. Perhaps what we should talk about is the really teasing question, which is whether Susan had a part in drafting the poems, because Dickinson sent her 250 poems to the house next door. And many scholars have thought recently that there was a kind of workshop going on between the homestead and the Evergreens, that Susan was Dickinson's first editor in a way.

And we do have one example of a poem that Dickinson rewrote because Susan Gilbert wasn't satisfied with it. And we do have Susan's letters in that case. It's a poem called Safe. safe in their alabaster chambers. That's right. And inside the tomb and then outside of the natural world. So she's describing the dead awaiting the resurrection.

And then she describes what they're missing, the outside world. And she begins with a very pretty picture of babbling bees and birds. And Susan doesn't like it. And so Dickinson rewrites it. But what's really striking to me is that when Dickinson rewrites it, she has a very firm structure within which she's writing. So she goes from light laughs, breeze, then she rewrites it. Grand go the years, then she rewrites it. Spring shakes the

sills. What she's got there is a metrical structure and a grammatical structure that keeps the language in motion. And in a sense, her correspondence, whoever they are, also give her a structure within which to think. So to some degree, it seems to me, it doesn't matter if they reply, it doesn't matter what they think. It's that epistolary space that helps her to keep language moving. Sorry, hold on. You say it doesn't matter for the reply, but you've got this one wonderful example where Susan Gilbert did reply, and Emily Dickinson changed

it twice and dramatically changed it, so it did matter that she did reply. It matters that she asked Dickinson to change it, but this is not a workshop in which Susan Gilbert is rewriting the poems, and I think that's one of... I mean, you're the great expert, and I'm just here.

She's redirecting the poems very spermly and very... and very effectively. I'm asking you first, and then the others can dump in, because it's a fair point. She's saying, I am not suited with the second verse, Emily.

It seems to me that your universe doesn't hold a peer for that verse. So one of the things she's doing is praising the poem that Dickinson has sent her and wondering if she can herself match up to that achievement of her depiction of the dead awaiting the resurrection. Okay, Lyndon,

when they get in you first part. Just to say that's the only example we have. And there may be the case of Dickinson never sent any further examples to Sue. And shortly after that, she writes to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. And she sends that poem, like, and one of her, I don't know whether it was her first, maybe it was her second version, but it was the one that Dickinson was happiest with. I've seen no evidence from what I understand of Dickinson that she changes things in any other example except for that one. But that's because you don't have examples.

there are no examples so there's no evidence but you can speculate from that one example surely I'll get off this topic you want to say something Linda I was going to take it you mentioned something about her correspondence and how we see her kind of developing

her thought through her correspondence with these people and her poetic I was going to sort of take it to the correspondence with Higginson because he was somebody to whom she did send poems as well clearly asking his opinion on them. And I think that provides

in a way quite, that correspondence provides quite a nice juxtaposition with her correspondence with Sue to open up the discussion a little bit to what did these other people give her. Well, Higginson and Dickinson had a really interesting relationship

through letters, which Dickinson kind of set the terms for really. She first wrote to him in response to an editorial he printed in the Atlantic Monthly, which was letter to a contributor where he gave advice to novice poets. And the understanding I think was that he was giving advice to poets he thought were women poets

writing to him often under male pseudonyms. And he told them in this kind of how to get their stuff published. And one of the things he said was, you know, caught your editors with soft words and mild persuasions or something like that. You can kind of get the gist, you know, like, get on their good side. And Dickinson then wrote to him with this rather aggressive stance of intimacy.

And I think it does make a really nice juxtaposition with the Sue letters, because Higginson is somebody with whom she, I don't think she was remotely in love in any way we would recognise that. But somebody who she wrote to, sometimes quite literally verbally bearing herself. She, you know, she laid, she gave verbal descriptions of herself.

So, chose. Well, the first one, the rather famous one, was I am small like the wren. My hair is bold like the chestnut burr and my eyes dark like the sherry in the glass, the guest leaves. So, yeah, she's playing and it's funny and she was very witty. I think this is something that gets a bit lost in, in, the earnestness of Dickinson's scholarship actually is her incredibly good sense of humour. And she's describing herself as leftovers, you know, as something cast aside. She plays repeatedly on the idea that she was physically small, and she was physically small.

She was about five foot. She said she had herself a shelter associated themselves with the Bronte sisters. They have this romantic idea that they were living as the sisters did in Hayworth. Can we go to the American. Can we get to the American Civil War Porrick, which those years there, Amherst was very distant from the Civil War but like everywhere else

in America was involved in because people went there, took part in the ward, came back dead on sometimes and one particular instance where she was wrote about and she was particularly active as a poet at that time. Is there a connection? Yes, I think so. I mean, for many years

I guess Dickinson's scholars have focused on Dickinson's poems about suffering and death and have read them about Dickinson Whereas I think more recently, people have thought about the way in which Dickinson is writing so many poems between these years of the Civil War. And they've looked again at those poems of suffering and death and thought, well, actually maybe Dickinson is imagining what it would be like to be a soldier or what it would be like to have somebody in your family lost in the war. There are other poems, for example, the name of it is Autumn, where Dickinson turns Awesome into a bloodbath, you know, where there's veins and arteries being. slashed and basins of blood. So there's a clear sense in which Dickinson

reading about the war in newspapers and periodicals, she's bringing them into her poems, she's bringing the imagery into her poems. There's this poem, my portion of defeat today, where she talks about piles of solid moan. And there's a sense... You're straight-backed. The men with straight-backs are old.

That's right. They never stand up again. And there's piles of solid moan. And every time I think of that myself, I think of a battle. And I think of the most. moaning bodies that haven't been taken away to the hospital yet that are dying. Dickinson seems to capture that.

Way in Amherst. She seems to be able to imagine what it's like to be somebody else, what it's like to be a soldier. It's wonderful opening that, and they open a boys with broken and scra. You want to say something about the lovely piano? Yes, the curious thing about that wonderful poem, it's a very, very vivid picture,

an unflinching picture of dead bodies, scraps of prayer and death surprise stamped visible in stone. But it's a poem that begins, my portion is defeat today. So actually, curiously, she's using that very, very material description of a battlefield as a trope to talk about her own inward conflict. And sometimes during the civil war, it's not clear what is standing for what. There is a very moving letter, actually, about one of the greatest losses to Amherst during the civil war, and that was the death in battle of Fraser Stearns, who was the son of the president of Amherst.

And when she writes about the death of Fraser Stearns, Dickinson uses the resources of religious language and literary language to sort of wrap up and to convey this terrible loss in a comforting way. So she imagines his dying moments as though he's a Christ figure. He asks for water. He dies in his commanding officer's arms. she then, when she imagines his funeral, she draws in the charge of the light brigade.

Tennyson's poem actually features quite often in civil... I thought that was rather odd, right? Yes. How did she get that? She talks about the cortege passing through Amherst, and she says, classmates to the right of him, classmates to the left of him.

You can hear her with Tennyson's canon to the right of them, and so on. But then, she says, something really disturbing. After all this kind of more comfortable rhetoric, she says no one was allowed to look on Fraser. The doctors wouldn't allow it. So there you get to the heart of it. What is there in that

closed casket? What is there under the wrappings? That's right. The casket is closed so that nobody could see how damage this boy was. Yes. Yes, that's very powerful. Linda, you wanted to come in. I did. I think it's true that she's fascinated, by and very kind of emotionally connected to the idea that people on the battlefields and people around the battlefields and people who have men on the battlefields are being repeatedly bereaved with a kind of speed and that they can't keep abreast of. And one of the indications I think we get through this is, is again through her correspondence with Higginson, who was a military man.

He was, he led one of the first army regiments of black soldiers, actually, in the American Civil War. And he was away fighting for a good period of the time in which he knew Dickinson. And actually during this period, he, because he's presumably really quite busy, isn't writing to her so much. And she writes to him, you know, rather piqued, actually, that he isn't writing to her. And you can feel in those letters her frustration actually that she is quite removed from what's going on and that she feels a distance that she's trying to bridge possibly in her poetry between people who are actually living those day-to-day experiences on the battlefields and her own empathic and kind of intellectual engagement with the Civil War

when she is so far away from the reality of that fighting. And she does feel it as a distance, but what brings her into it is that she has, and she knows she has, a very, very profound understanding of grief and bereavement. Yes, that features again and again and again. And also, you see, this reclusive woman actually was writing to people all over the face,

was bringing the world outside, inside, the entire time, nothing more so, but never more so, than the Civil War, which is why we'd want to go. Porick, where do you find her at her most vivid? For me, it's the imagery of violence, actually. Some of the volcano poems, particularly one of our most famous poems, my life had stood a loaded gun. Okay, sorry, my life?

My life had stood a loaded gun. So it's a poem basically spoken by a gun. It's spoken by somebody who is engaging with a sort of a master figure, a master, an owner who identifies it. So the gun is of potential power. It's waiting to be identified by the master. And once it is identified, the gun serves the master and goes out, hunts the doe, does things to protect the master.

And we have then a very strange relationship, if we assume the speaker is a woman, a woman gun, who is protecting the male. figure rather than the other way around. And then the poem ends, though I didn't he may longer live, he longer must an eye, for I have but the power to kill

without the power to die. And then Dickinson is bringing up the ideas of being an artifact, of being an object, being of use to somebody else, and then by being that, not having the opportunity of immortality of a life that humanity would have.

And I think for me, that's the potential power, the secret power that is very, very important in Dickinson's volcano poems as well. We're coming back again, Fiona, to this, as it were, she goes around,

but in the end it comes back to a very strong religious core, doesn't it? And particularly the resurrection, particularly the beyond. And there's a poem about them in the alabaster. Can you talk about her preoccupation?

Is it a preoccupation? You tell me. The preoccupation with what happens after death. Yes, she imagined, one of the most curious poems of hers is the one that imagines itself being spoken by a dead woman. So a fly buzzed when I died. So that's the dying moments, the speaker is dying, and there interposes a fly between herself and the window. And there Dickinson is thinking about, partly about the material world and the density. of the material world, still being a kind of veil between her and what lies beyond.

But she's also thinking very physically about what happens when people die. So thinking of a fly buzzing in a death room has some quite unpleasant connotations. So again, I think she is very attached to physical life and mournful about what is lost when the physical body is left behind. and that comes through very much in her letters of condolence too. She's very good at imagining, almost too good at imagining, what a parent loses when a child dies. What do you mean always too good? I don't get it.

Well, she writes letters too of condolence, for example. There's a letter to her sister-in-law when Susan's son Gilbert dies at the age of eight. And it's a terribly moving letter. And I'm not sure it would be comforting because it is so wonderful at depicting. the child alive. She's wonderfully good at depicting a playful child, remembering the things he said. And what

she tries to do in that poem is make this curtailed life seem complete. I get it, yeah. Linda, we're near the end now, but so she dies and this massive letter, sorry, this massive poem nearly 18 in her, discovered

and people think her sister-in-law and friends think that they should be published Let's cut to the judge. They are published. First in a ward, then another one, then another one. And they become very popular and so on. Can you tell us, can you give some idea of the first readers, the early readers of these poems,

by someone who'd been known, if at all, as an eccentric? Yeah. Well, the first edition of her poems was published in 1891 and edited by Higginson and by Mabel Loomis Todd, who, it was slightly delayed. It was five years after her death because of a bit of a family quarrel because Mabel Loomis Todd

had been having an affair with Dickinson's brother. So that didn't go down totally well. But once they finally did come out, Higginson wrote the introduction and he presented, sorry, Higginson wrote the introduction and he presented Dickinson as something of a, he compared her to William Blake, actually,

and presented her as a painterly poet in order to excuse the unorthodoxies of her form because I think he realised that these poems would be rather startling to people. But they took to them. Yes, they did, they did. Full of dashes. No, he normalised that in the beginning. Originally and now back again full of dashes and such as.

But they normalised it. At the beginning they normalised. He gave them titles. He put in what we would recognise as conventional punctuation, full stops, commas. And quite soon they just took off. I'm sorry to be said. They did. I'm in power. And I've got to ask,

for you if I can move finitive or briefly. How has it built her reputation? You make huge claims for it in your notes. Okay, well, I think Dickinson is a global figure today. She said, this is my letter to the world that never wrote to me. Well, I think the world is engaging with Dickinson. Now we've got translations in French, in Japanese, in Chinese, in Polish, in German.

She's an international figure. She's a recent film from Terence Davis. We've novels about Dickinson and our life fictionalised versions. And we have to leave it. I'm very sorry. Thank you very much Fiona Green, Linda Friedman and Porick Finity. Next week we'll be discussing Louis Pasteur, the father of microbiology, who's vaccines have saved thousands of people.

Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we miss out that was important? I wanted to come back to something Porrex said, actually, which was that Dickinson hadn't wanted to publish. Because it seems very contradictory to me. You know, she sends 40 poems to Samuel Bowles,

who's the editor of a newspaper that publishes poetry. She doesn't say, will you print them? But she must have known that he might. And then again, she says things like, publication is as foreign to my nature, as firmament to Finn, she says, which is a very riddling little thought. I think that's a brilliant question.

I think for women in the day, obviously celebrity and fame is something that's problematic, but you can have it as long as it's got for you by somebody else. So if Samuel Bowles publishes her poems, or if Sue sends poems to somebody, then somebody else is creating your fame. Dickinson said, if fame belonged to me, I could not escape her. If she does not, the longest day will miss me on the chase.

So I think for Dickinson, I think she doesn't mind being published as long as it's somebody else that's doing it. It's not her actively seeking it out, because that would go against her sense of pride, or sense of reticence, and I think that would be my answer. I think there's also a distinction between posterity and fame, and I think posterity is something that I think she definitely wanted. I don't think you keep your poems that carefully.

You make them into little books like that. You think so much about publication. I mean, because she does write a lot of poems about how she doesn't, you know, you can read them quite easily about how she doesn't want publication. And it is a little bit me thinks the lady doth protest too much. You know, publication is the all. auction of the mind of man. It's very hyperbolic.

But it fits into being a woman in that class. Yeah, it fits an narrative. But she's good at styling herself. She's good at performing certain roles like that. Perhaps the question actually shouldn't be so much, why didn't she publish? Because we kind of get stuck on that, don't we? But what were the poems for?

And in a sense, I wonder if the value of the poems to Dickinson, in large part, is that they're her way of thinking. that she has this extraordinarily rhythmical language that is in her head in which she can turn over problems that perplex her especially when the soul is in pain she says

but also the soul at leisure begs you give it work so poetry is her occupation in this very strong sense it keeps this very agile mind occupied and in that way it may be a secondary question whether anybody else

is going to read it. And I think it's worth saying as well that we call them poems and we have been used to call them lyrics. She didn't use the word lyric ever. She sometimes called them poems. The word she used most often was thought. So I think it's absolutely right to think of her poems as thinking exercises and ways that we can, poems we can think with if you like. I don't really idea how she passed the time and she's sitting writing, but you've got even 1700 poems in quite a long writing lifetime isn't all that much time at a desk unless you write the

author. I mean, I'm being not facetious, but trying to get hold of, what did she do? I mean, she sit at a desk and read. Did she sit in an armchair? She did read a lot, and she read aloud, she read the newspaper to her sister, to her sister. You know, we shouldn't assume that Dickinson

is writing about herself, and I think, you know, Dickinson was a great fan of Robert Browning, of dramatic lyrics, and therefore, for many of those poems could be written from the perspective of somebody else. And, you know, we mentioned the soldier poem, but there's a poem twas just this time last year I died, where Dickinson seems to imagine being a soldier who has died

and then has the poem present the year that the soldier misses. So I think you have a sense of Dickinson, not as just somebody who is writing about herself, but who's thinking about others, who's imagining herself from somebody else's perspective. And that's something I think I would like to stress, you know, to listeners or to people. And I think you see it grammatically as well. One of her favorite hinges, if you like, in grammatical hinges, is the simile in her poems.

And this is because, I mean, she begins one poem we see comparatively. She begins another unto like story trouble has enticed me, which is exactly, I think, what Porrick is saying, which I agree with entirely, that she is looking to perspectives. What about the phrase the cleaving of the mind? I think that might take us

somewhere towards the terror. I felt a cleaving in my mind as if my brain had split. She will more often write about the brain than about the mind, actually. She has them together there. I felt a cleaving in my mind as if my brain had split.

That's a terrible headache, perhaps. She was physically fragile in many ways. There's been a suggestion that she suffered from epilepsy and that that might in some way diagnose the fitfulness of the poetry and that obviously we can't be sure about those kinds of claims. But what she has in that poem, when she's trying to join the thought behind unto the thought before, what she has in that poem is a perfect ballad stanza.

That's what holds it together when your mind is fore. falling apart. Her forms were sort of hymns, ballads. I can see why she should compare it with Blake because of the apparent simplicity of the style in both cases.

Yes, yes. Yeah. So she learns from Isaac Watts amongst others. She uses, I mean, she plays with common meter. That's, and common meter is the meter that you get in something like Amazing Grace.

That's the, so you've got eight syllables, then six syllables, stressed on stressed. But she plays with them. So she doesn't always have eight syllables. Sometimes she has seven. So she's a little, she's a little bit, unorthodox with the form she uses.

Compared to the sort of radical experiment that she makes with grammar and syntax and vocabulary and simile actually the stanza form is the conventional thing she bends it and twists it a little bit and does some fun things with Ryan but that's the structure I think our producer wants to make it enough for you are not allowed to refuse. I'm really sorry to interrupt that but would you like tea or coffee? Coffee?

Yes, coffee please. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC, follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Program.