Emily Dickinson (Archive Episode)

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0:37To celebrate Melvin Bragg's 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Here's the comedian Frank Skinner. I'm actually quite a late adopter of In Our Time. I've only been listening to it regularly for about three or four years. I have been digging deep now into the fabulous compilations that are available and wallowing in collected episodes like 25 Perspectives on the Visual Arts. Oh, joy. I'm a big fan of soaking up knowledge and I love enthusiasts, especially when it ranges, as it does on these shows, from people who are mad about Julian the Apostate to people who are mad about slime moulds.

1:22And I have to confess I love the sitcom element of In Our Time, Three academics being kept in order by Melvin Bragg, the listener's great champion, who makes sure we get clarity, context, and that every statement is backed up by evidence. I'm fascinated by Emily Dickinson, so I chose this episode, and I was so glad that she is a bit of a victim of life over work for a lot of people. So people are fascinated by the fact that she was a recluse and that she always wore white. but Melvin gets through that and moves it on. Let's get that out of the way, he says. And there are some great Melvin quotes in this.

2:02I don't get that. It's something to stop any academic in their tracks. And then the much feared. Well, it's in the notes you gave me and there's one in here which is a classic Melvin moment when he says to one of the academics, well, you're the great expert. I'm just here. if you want to get a real flavour of this I think you should listen to the section where they discuss whether Emily Dickinson changed poetry according to things that she received from the various people she sent it to whether she took their advice and you really hear the intellectual sheepdog in Melvin tearing into them listen, learn and maybe wince a little Hello, Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, New England and is now celebrated as one of the greatest of American poets.

2:57There 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 1 ,800 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 Porik Finity, Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth.

3:46Fiona Green, what was the world into which Emily Dickinson was born in 1830? 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. In fact Dickinson's grandfather had been among the founders of Amherst College.

4:28So this is a very prominent family. It's also a quite prosperous 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? She was. 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.

5:15So the college, the highlight of the college calendar is the commencement ball and that is held traditionally at the homestead and various visiting lecturers and dignitaries would stay at the Evergreen. 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. And 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, the one-room schoolhouse.

5:55But 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 moving around in a group, in her peer group all the time?

6:34Is 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. I was using that ironically, folks, and also referring to another writer in more or less 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?

7:29I'm not sure about that. You're not sure either. Let's move on then. OK, Linda, it seemed to me reading that there was something about the life that was portrayed by Louise M Alcott was in part of the life I've 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.

8:21and it was connected to those centres and as Fiona said, Emerson who was one of the key players I think in that world 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, young teenager, she still went, and she went very regularly. And this was important in many ways.

9:11In 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 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.

10:00When 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 this is very characteristic of Dickinson this detachment this observation 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 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.

10:49But can I move on to her 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 in 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 at the age of 31 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was a new kind of friend and mentor of hers.

11:36And she wrote, I had a terror since September. but I could tell to none. That's the bit I picked out. Yeah. So I sing as the... So she had a terror that she can't speak, at least 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. Well, but that's the bit that John's 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.

12:11So 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 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 as a terror and it sounds like a few terrors people have known about good Paul Rickfinity what prompted her to start writing? well I think Higginson starts writing maybe sometime in the 1850s.

13:04She's in her early 30s, though. 20s, early 20s. Sorry, 1830s. Can't count, yeah. A couple of Valentines 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 Brontes.

13:51By 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 1100 poems 1100 poems yes

14:24so 1100 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?

15:07Yes. 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 them to say that they breathe, that they're alive.

15:40She asks Thomas Wentworth 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 Helen Hunt Jackson a notable novelist and poet 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?

16:13yes they are 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. We have to say that in a lifetime only 11 of her poems were published. That's correct, yes. 10 against her wishes. Yes, yes. So she didn't really want to be a publisher 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.

16:46She writes occasional verse. you know, when somebody dies, she sends a poem that's appropriate. You know, there's a sense in which she's engaging with those friends, those close friends and those important people within. I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's Upset Web, every week for my show Merrin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists and experts about how markets really work.

17:21And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Within the world. Fiona Green. Is it possible to encapsulate the recurring themes in Amelie Dickinson'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.

18:00So to get at 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.

18:50So... She wants to know what's beyond. She does want to know what's beyond. She keeps bringing that word out, doesn't she? 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 spheres? I'll come to you in one second, I promise. I promise Linda, just a second, we'll just finish this remark yeah, how does she 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 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.

19:34Linda, 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 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 known and different ways of fathoming the unknown to bear on this problem.

20:18You 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, is she's actually often much more interested in satirising attitudes than she is in satirising objects, religious attitudes.

20:52So in that poem, she satirises faith as a sort of naive girl. She said, faith laughs and skips and rallies, blushes if any sea, plucks 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 hallelujahs roll. But then her final lines are Our narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul. I think I've got that right. And I think you really have a sense there of this sort of questing, probing drive as she's playing.

21:42She still returns to the soul. 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. Yeah, in that direction. The talk of the resurrection, and I hope we come to that because it's wonderful. But to come back to you, Porik, we have a relationship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Yes. And with other men. Yes. I'm not foraging for anything other than talking about her poetry, but can you describe, was there the same pattern, parabola to all those relationships? One or two of them, that'll do.

22:25OK, well, I guess Manny 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 Bowles, who I 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.

23:02He writes to her. And 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 three master letters. which... They're called Master Letter. 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 Bowles? Or is it something she made it up? So what distinguishes them? Before we go to who they're to, why are they distinguished and why are they called Master Letter?

23:40Right, so they're addressed Dear Master. 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, 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?

24:19Self-tormented. self-tormenting and in many ways you see some of that in the letters or sorry in the poetry as well you see 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 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 scholars Just to preserve the design, you said she went to Philadelphia. She went there once and Washington once.

24:54That was before she became a recluse. Yes. After the age of 25, she went nowhere out of her house. So just to come back from the line. Yes, yes, 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 and 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.

25:30She took notice of it as well. Can you say 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... Are love or loving letters? I think they're love letters. So love letters generally are letters of declaration. These are letters of declaration. So what's she declaring? The declaration that the lover who sends the letter wants something to happen.

26:06In that case, what is she wanting 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. We 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.

26:39I'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.

27:22That's... It's a poem called Safe... It begins safe in their alabaster chambers. That's right. Inside the tomb and then outside 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 the breeze, then she rewrites it, grand go the years, then she rewrites it, spring shakes the sills.