No one, not even her sister Lavinia, had foreseen such a large and powerful body of work. Despite oddities of punctuation, diction, rhyme, and rhythm, her cumulative achievement surprised Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her first editors.
One might expect a poet concerned with the most major of human issues to offer her poems to a larger audience than a handful of relatives and friends, but only ten poems appeared in print while Dickinson lived, some more than once-but none with her approval. Nor does it resolve the apparent contradiction between her unwillingness to publish and her care in preserving the bulk of her poetry. This essentially religious concern does not explain Dickinson’s reluctance to present her work to the world at large. Her characteristic hymn-like rhythms and structures enable a range of aesthetic tactics, and her wide array of topics impresses, but her primary focus on the stress and strain of the immortal pushing upon the mortal runs like a live wire through all of her work.
Keeping this binary opposition in mind clarifies our reading of her work, which is sometimes oblique and idiosyncratic. Wallace Stevens notes that the pressure of reality on the imagination varies with circumstance (wartime, for example), but for Dickinson, the pressure of the infinite on mortality is constant and compelling:ĭeath and life, in her world, overlap and compete, although death always has some advantage: since it leads to eternity, it is permanent. The Auction of the Mind: Editing Emily DickinsonĮmily Dickinson’s poetry explores the relationship between the temporal world and the infinite, teasing out the ways in which the ineffable presses upon the mortal and ephemeral.
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