Dickinson, Emily, and Theodora Ward. The Letters of Emily Dickinson.

Harvard University

Press, 1986.

The author of this article “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”, Emily Dickson was a known

writer since 1800s. In his life spend writing poems and letters. He was a philosopher and

historian and wrote about the traditional culture and many other aspects of the life. The article

has been of greater use to the many people especially the college and university students in their

research. It is found in most of the libraries in the world and it helps in the research by the

students about the traditional culture and historical analysis. It manuscripts has been very crucial

and used over years. Emily as the author of many letters has been associate of the research and

this explains how was able to collect information from various backgrounds (Pg 31). These

letters of Emily are has given us important aspects to the researchers and have made it easy for

them. This letters presents the leadership skills Emily embraced during her time and how was

dedicated even the time of the civil war. Emily in her collections of letters teaches us various

aspects and qualities of a leader.

Emily in her letters wrote to many people to express who things need to be done to avoid

the conflict and war. Among many of her letters has a lot reflection in the current life about the

leaders. The materials about Emily were collected which contained poems and letters and were

rearranged in order. In 1956 before manuscripts were donated to Amherst were listed and

organized and numbered by Jay Leyda. The researchers have easy time to access the information

about Emily Dickson because they can use card catalogue to access the materials. These

manuscripts were only revised between 1999 and 2006 and are now arranged in the current

standard. This maintained easy handling and access of the documentaries because the access

was more detailed. Emily Dickinson Collection documents were creative work and personal life
of Emily Dickinson, spanning her lifetime, from 1830 to 1886; her family and friends; and the

early publication history of her work. The Collection also includes material from Dickinson

scholars. This collection includes original poems, manuscripts, and letters from Emily Dickinson

to family and friends; images of the poet including the daguerreotype and silhouette; physical

artifacts related to Emily Dickinson; manuscript transcriptions; printers’ copies and proofs;

Mabel Todd’s correspondence, research indices, and writings; and material from or about

Dickinson’s friends and family, including correspondence, photographs, objects, and scrapbooks

Manuscripts 80 to 1012 were arranged by Jay Leyda prior to their donation to Amherst

College by Millicent Todd Bingham. Manuscripts 1 to 79 came to Amherst at other times or

from other sources and were assigned numbers by Amherst cataloguers. Manuscript poems

generally are numbered between 80 and 540. Manuscript letters generally are numbered between

550 and 1012, with many of the later numbers being letters written by authors other than

Dickinson. At the end of Series can be found items without Amherst numbers, including blank

papers and non-manuscript material relating to individual manuscripts (Pg 29). Researchers use

photocopies of the manuscripts in the first instance. Requests to consult the original manuscripts

should be directed to the Head of Archives and Special Collections, and should provide a

specific explanation of the need. A few selected original manuscripts are on display in the exhibit

area of Archives and

Special Collections in the Robert Frost Library at all times. Transcript numbers were

assigned by Jay Leyda during his initial sorting of the material and do not correlate with Amherst

manuscript numbers. The poems and letter in this series were largely organized by Jay Leyda in

the 1950s when the collection was still in private hands. The order and numbering system that he
gave to the collection is maintained because it has been widely referenced. Manuscripts are

ordered by “Amherst number.” Amherst numbers are alternatively known as “Leyda numbers.”

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on 10 December, 1830

to Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. She attended Amherst

Academy from 1840 -1847 then enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary from 1847 -1848.

She stayed in Amherst for the rest of her life, and traveled only briefly to Boston, Philadelphia

and Washington, D.C. For virtually her entire adult life, Emily lived in the Dickinson with her

father, mother, and her younger sister, Lavinia, who Emily called “Vinnie.” Her brother William

lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert, one of Emily’s closest friends. Emily was very

close to their three children, Ned, Martha and Thomas Gilbert. After the death of her father in

1874 and her mother the following year, Emily remained in the family home, living alone with

Vinnie. Emily died there on May 15, 1886, at the age of 55.

Renowned for a severe reclusiveness that began when she was in her 20s, Dickinson

maintained warm and close relationships with family and friends through the medium of letters,

frequently containing poems. Some of her most frequent correspondents outside of her family

were childhood friends Abiah Root and Emily Fowler, her friend and later sister-in-law, Susan

Gilbert ; Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican; Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a

minister and poet; Thomas Higginson, writer and liberal activist; Josiah Gilbert and Elizabeth

Chapin Holland; and Adelaide Spencer Hills. A significant correspondent around 1858-1861 was

a mysterious love interest who Dickinson referred to as “Master.” It is not clear who this person

may have been or what form any relationship between them took - only three draft letters by
Dickinson to “Master” is known. Another important person Dickinson’s life was Judge Otis

Phillips Lord, with whom Dickinson had a romantic relationship starting in the late 1870s until

his death in 1884.

Emily and Lavinia were very close, and Lavinia was aware that Emily wrote poetry, she

was not aware of the extent of her sister’s writing. Upon Emily’s death, Lavinia discovered how

prolific and talented her sister had been when she found 1,775 poems in Emily’s bureau drawer.

Emily wrote some 1,789 poems, some contained in letters to friends and family, some sewn

together in little bundles called fascicles that Emily stored in her drawers, some written on scraps

of paper like shopping lists or envelope flaps. Lavinia preserved the poems she found,

distributing them between Mabel Loomis Todd and Susan Dickinson, but destroyed all of

Emily’s correspondence in accord with her sister’s previously expressed wishes. Within 10 years

of Emily’s death, three volumes of her poetry and two volumes of her letters were published by

Thomas Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, a woman with whom Austin had a long-term affair

during his marriage to Susan. Emily Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, also helped

to publish her aunt’s poetry. It was not until 1955, when Harvard published The Poems of Emily

Dickinson edited by

Thomas Johnson, that all of Dickinson’s poetry was available in a single source. In 1960,

Jay Leyda published The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, a chronological documentation of

the events in the lives of Emily Dickinson and her family and friends. In 1998, Ralph W.

Franklin, published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, which documents revisions and different

versions of the poet’s work. Unknown during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is known today as

one of the world’s most important and loved poets of all-time, in any language.
The majority of the materials in the Emily Dickinson Collection were given to the College in

1956, by Millicent Todd Bingham, the daughter of David Peck Todd and Mabel Loomis Todd,

and herself a Dickinson scholar and editor. The original collection consisted of 850 poems and

fragments of poems; 350 letters, notes, and drafts to and from family and friends; the

daguerreotype and silhouette of Emily Dickinson; and the extensive correspondence and

publication material of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham (Pg 51). The majority

of the Dickinson manuscripts were given to Mabel Loomis Todd by Lavinia Dickinson after her

sister’s death. Others were gathered by Todd from Dickinson’s correspondents through personal

request and a number of well publicized efforts to gather Dickinson material. Millicent Todd

Bingham inherited these from her mother. The remainder of the materials in the collection came

to Amherst College from various sources beginning in 1936 and continuing to the present.

“And Breaths were gathering firm / for that last Onset – when the King / be witnessed –

in the Room –““I heard a Fly buzz --," (Pg141). These quotations set up the expectations for a

death scene like the one in this poem, in Dickinson’s time. As a person lay dying, they were

usually surrounded by their family and close friends, and as they prepared to pass on they would

will away their material goods, and then there would usually be a moment of climax when they

would witness some kind of heavenly being coming to take them to the afterlife, and they would

describe it for the others in the room before dying. These quotes set up that expectation, or at

least make it clear that that is what all the onlookers to the speaker’s death expect to happen.

Thus when the fly interrupts the scene, and takes all of the speaker’s attention, this is a kind of

replacement for the heavenly vision one would usually have. This fly, that represents the most
physical aspects of death, is the antithesis to a heavenly agent. And yet its physicality is so

entrancing that the speaker notices nothing but it until she loses consciousness and dies. In this

way she works against the time’s expectations, and shows that death is a physical process and

not just a journeying from one life to the next.

“Himself has but to will / and easy as a Star / Abolish his Captivity -- / And laugh – No

more have I” “They shut me up in Prose.” (Pg 56-57) They describe both the bird and the

speaker’s ability to free them. For the speaker, no matter how she is physically restrained or

given rules and traditions that she is expected to follow, her mind cannot be contained or

constrained or restricted. The attempts to control her, in fact, only inflame her passions more,

and inspire her rebellion. That she enjoys this act of rebelling for its own sake is clear. Here the

“And laugh-“feels very closely tied to the escaping—it seems to almost be a necessary part of it.

Thus this attitude of disdain for her captors, this pleasure in eluding them, is part of the ability to

gain this freedom, as well as its pleasures—and she could not have this to enjoy had they not

tried to contain her in the first place.

“Much Madness is divinest Sense – / To a discerning Eye –“ "Much Madness is divinest

Sense --," Dickinson was often considered mad, and was an infamous figure in her community.

This was because, after her late twenties, she stopped leaving her house, and eventually would

see no one but her immediate family, letting other visitors talk to her only through a screen. She

also dressed only in white. This was not in fact madness, however, but sense—her time was

taxed greatly with taking care of the house and her mother, and her choice to retire from society

was the only reason that she was able to give so much time to her poetry. Her white dresses, too,

were the easiest to launder, and so wasted her time less. These quotes certainly apply to her
poetry, too. In their early publication, her poems were often criticized for their disregard for the

formal traditions and standards of the day. This apparent “Madness,” however, actually predicted

the path poetry would take many years after Dickinson’s lifetime and quickly after her death

came to be appreciated for the genius that it was. So here too, apparent “Madness” was actually

sense—she sacrificed the majority’s standards and traditions, and in doing so produced great art.