WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.820 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are taking 00:00:01.820 --> 00:00:06.740 a close look at the life and really the secret 00:00:06.740 --> 00:00:09.660 work of Emily Dickinson. And if you think you 00:00:09.660 --> 00:00:12.599 know the story, the simple reclusive maid of 00:00:12.599 --> 00:00:15.580 Amherst who wore white and loved flowers, well, 00:00:15.679 --> 00:00:18.000 you probably only know half the truth. It's... 00:00:18.539 --> 00:00:21.199 Quite possibly the greatest literary paradox 00:00:21.199 --> 00:00:23.660 in American history. I mean, you have Emily Elizabeth 00:00:23.660 --> 00:00:27.579 Dickinson, who lived from 1830 to 1886, and she 00:00:27.579 --> 00:00:29.500 is without a doubt one of the most important 00:00:29.500 --> 00:00:32.140 figures in our entire poetic canon. Absolutely. 00:00:32.259 --> 00:00:35.079 A giant. A giant. And yet, out of the nearly 00:00:35.079 --> 00:00:37.759 1 ,800 poems she meticulously wrote down and 00:00:37.759 --> 00:00:41.520 composed, a mere 10 and one single letter were 00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:43.119 actually published while she was alive. Jeff, 00:00:43.140 --> 00:00:45.280 10. That number is just staggering. And even 00:00:45.280 --> 00:00:47.149 those weren't really hers, were they? not really 00:00:47.149 --> 00:00:50.450 they were heavily edited um often mangled beyond 00:00:50.450 --> 00:00:53.189 recognition to fit the style of the day and this 00:00:53.189 --> 00:00:55.390 is what's so fascinating she was this incredibly 00:00:55.390 --> 00:00:58.329 prolific intensely dedicated writer but she was 00:00:58.329 --> 00:01:00.890 living in a very visible very prominent family 00:01:00.890 --> 00:01:03.189 in amherst massachusetts she was known around 00:01:03.189 --> 00:01:06.349 town but as eccentric You know, the woman famous 00:01:06.349 --> 00:01:08.489 for wearing only white clothing, for almost never 00:01:08.489 --> 00:01:10.709 leaving her house and for choosing to have her 00:01:10.709 --> 00:01:13.170 most important, most intimate relationships entirely 00:01:13.170 --> 00:01:15.849 through letters. She literally built a physical 00:01:15.849 --> 00:01:18.129 wall around herself. And what our sources are 00:01:18.129 --> 00:01:20.170 showing us now, we're really going to unpack 00:01:20.170 --> 00:01:22.730 for you today, is that this seclusion wasn't 00:01:22.730 --> 00:01:25.549 some kind of sad, pathological failure to connect 00:01:25.549 --> 00:01:28.670 with the world. No. It seems to have been a deliberate, 00:01:28.790 --> 00:01:32.090 even a strategic choice. It was the very the 00:01:32.090 --> 00:01:35.310 engine of her radical creativity. drama of her 00:01:35.310 --> 00:01:37.890 life was locked away literally in a wooden chest 00:01:37.890 --> 00:01:40.510 until after she died. And that is the mission 00:01:40.510 --> 00:01:42.790 of this deep dive for you today. We're going 00:01:42.790 --> 00:01:45.489 way past the simple myth of the fragile recluse. 00:01:45.810 --> 00:01:48.730 We're going to explore the factual context of 00:01:48.730 --> 00:01:51.250 her family's ambition, the surprising intimacy 00:01:51.250 --> 00:01:53.530 of her personal life relationships that many 00:01:53.530 --> 00:01:56.810 scholars now interpret as romantic, and the fierce 00:01:56.810 --> 00:02:00.090 decades -long battles that raged over her manuscripts. 00:02:00.390 --> 00:02:02.530 Battles that, you know, prevented us from hearing 00:02:02.989 --> 00:02:05.329 Her authentic revolutionary voice until the middle 00:02:05.329 --> 00:02:08.310 of the 20th century. Exactly. We're examining 00:02:08.310 --> 00:02:10.949 the intentional radical choices she made in her 00:02:10.949 --> 00:02:14.789 life and her verse that turned this little -known 00:02:14.789 --> 00:02:18.770 19th century figure into an enduring proto -modernist 00:02:18.770 --> 00:02:22.009 giant. Okay, let's get into it and start with 00:02:22.009 --> 00:02:24.210 the foundation of the world she very deliberately 00:02:24.210 --> 00:02:26.909 decided to leave behind. To really understand 00:02:26.909 --> 00:02:28.969 the intensity of her withdrawal from society, 00:02:29.210 --> 00:02:31.129 you have to first recognize the intensity of 00:02:31.129 --> 00:02:34.069 the world she was born into. Dickinson was born 00:02:34.069 --> 00:02:36.770 in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a family that 00:02:36.770 --> 00:02:39.409 was, I mean, the absolute definition of the New 00:02:39.409 --> 00:02:42.110 England establishment. Her paternal grandfather, 00:02:42.610 --> 00:02:45.250 Samuel Dickinson, wasn't just wealthy. He was 00:02:45.250 --> 00:02:47.490 one of the founders of Amherst College. He founded 00:02:47.490 --> 00:02:50.090 the college. Wow. He did. And he built the family 00:02:50.090 --> 00:02:53.229 home, the massive homestead, which was this mansion 00:02:53.229 --> 00:02:54.849 on the main street that would be the epicenter 00:02:54.849 --> 00:02:56.879 of their family. life for nearly a century. And 00:02:56.879 --> 00:02:59.580 her father, Edward Dickinson, he was a force 00:02:59.580 --> 00:03:01.780 of nature in that community, wasn't he? Oh, a 00:03:01.780 --> 00:03:04.300 titan. He was a successful lawyer. He was the 00:03:04.300 --> 00:03:06.840 treasurer of Amherst College for decades. He 00:03:06.840 --> 00:03:08.780 served multiple terms in the Massachusetts House 00:03:08.780 --> 00:03:11.000 and Senate and even represented the state in 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:13.159 the U .S. Congress for a while in the 1850s. 00:03:13.199 --> 00:03:15.840 So she was born into this lineage of serious 00:03:15.840 --> 00:03:19.139 civic power, of social responsibility, and I 00:03:19.139 --> 00:03:22.400 assume deep intellectual rigor. She had every 00:03:22.400 --> 00:03:25.449 opportunity to live a very traditional Very prestigious 00:03:25.449 --> 00:03:28.150 life. Every opportunity. And that rigor extended 00:03:28.150 --> 00:03:30.069 directly to her schooling, which really goes 00:03:30.069 --> 00:03:32.469 against the whole image of the untutored genius. 00:03:32.849 --> 00:03:35.310 She wasn't. She attended the Amherst Academy 00:03:35.310 --> 00:03:38.189 for seven years, starting in 1840 with her sister 00:03:38.189 --> 00:03:41.210 Lavinia. Our sources describe her education as 00:03:41.210 --> 00:03:44.409 ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl. Who 00:03:44.409 --> 00:03:46.830 does that mean, ambitiously classical? It means 00:03:46.830 --> 00:03:49.389 she was studying English and classical literature, 00:03:49.729 --> 00:03:52.930 Latin, botany, geology, history, and something 00:03:52.930 --> 00:03:55.229 they called mental philosophy. The principal 00:03:55.229 --> 00:03:57.669 at the time described her as very bright and 00:03:57.669 --> 00:03:59.990 an excellent scholar. This is a woman who was 00:03:59.990 --> 00:04:02.030 trained from a young age to think, to debate 00:04:02.030 --> 00:04:04.949 and to analyze. And that training continued for 00:04:04.949 --> 00:04:07.870 a little while anyway at Mary Lyons Mount Holyoke 00:04:07.870 --> 00:04:10.409 Female Seminary. She only went for about 10 months 00:04:10.409 --> 00:04:12.949 and then she just abruptly came home. Yes. And 00:04:12.949 --> 00:04:15.069 the reasons why she left are so important because 00:04:15.069 --> 00:04:18.170 they give us the first real evidence of her nonconformity. 00:04:18.269 --> 00:04:20.860 So what are the theories? Well, the sources suggest 00:04:20.860 --> 00:04:23.220 a few possibilities. It could have been poor 00:04:23.220 --> 00:04:26.079 health or just crippling homesickness. But the 00:04:26.079 --> 00:04:28.540 most interesting theory is that it was outright 00:04:28.540 --> 00:04:31.519 rebellion. Rebellion against what? Against the 00:04:31.519 --> 00:04:34.720 school's very strict, very intense evangelical 00:04:34.720 --> 00:04:38.259 fervor. Mount Holyoke at the time was deeply 00:04:38.259 --> 00:04:41.220 focused on securing public declarations of faith 00:04:41.220 --> 00:04:44.420 on saving its students. And in a sort of spiritual 00:04:44.420 --> 00:04:47.279 roll call, Dickinson was famously categorized 00:04:47.279 --> 00:04:49.139 as having no hope in the eyes of the. faculty. 00:04:49.220 --> 00:04:51.519 No hope. That says everything, doesn't it? She 00:04:51.519 --> 00:04:53.199 was already choosing a different path. She was. 00:04:53.300 --> 00:04:55.560 And whatever the exact reason, her brother Austin 00:04:55.560 --> 00:04:58.399 was sent to bring her home at all events in March 00:04:58.399 --> 00:05:01.839 of 1848. So she returns to the homestead and 00:05:01.839 --> 00:05:05.680 she occupies herself with these high -level domestic 00:05:05.680 --> 00:05:08.420 duties. She was a great baker. Apparently famous 00:05:08.420 --> 00:05:11.279 for her Indian rye bread. Yes. And she attended 00:05:11.279 --> 00:05:13.980 local college town events for a while. But the 00:05:13.980 --> 00:05:16.199 foundation for her later rejection of public 00:05:16.199 --> 00:05:19.019 life was already being laid. OK, so let's dig 00:05:19.019 --> 00:05:21.480 into the emotional context a little bit. The 00:05:21.480 --> 00:05:24.660 world inside the homestead that was driving her 00:05:24.660 --> 00:05:27.560 interior life. It was a world of powerful contrast, 00:05:27.839 --> 00:05:30.579 especially with her parents. She wrote warmly 00:05:30.579 --> 00:05:33.360 of her father, Edward. She noted he would buy 00:05:33.360 --> 00:05:35.439 her books, which was great, but then... There's 00:05:35.439 --> 00:05:38.459 a but. A big but. He would then beg her not to 00:05:38.459 --> 00:05:40.819 read them because he fears they joggle the mind. 00:05:41.040 --> 00:05:44.420 Joggle the mind. That phrase is so incredibly 00:05:44.420 --> 00:05:47.019 revealing about the tension she must have lived 00:05:47.019 --> 00:05:49.360 with every day. It is. You have this man who 00:05:49.360 --> 00:05:51.600 is an intellectual powerhouse in the public sphere, 00:05:51.819 --> 00:05:54.579 a congressman, but he's afraid of what that same 00:05:54.579 --> 00:05:57.100 intellectual freedom might do to his daughter. 00:05:57.259 --> 00:06:00.019 Right. And was it a genuine fear for her mental 00:06:00.019 --> 00:06:02.939 stability? Or was this a common Victorian constraint 00:06:02.939 --> 00:06:05.420 placed specifically on women's intellectual freedom? 00:06:05.480 --> 00:06:08.079 The fear that thinking too much would lead them 00:06:08.079 --> 00:06:11.079 away from domesticity. Almost certainly the latter. 00:06:11.279 --> 00:06:13.740 It just highlights this massive conflict between 00:06:13.740 --> 00:06:16.920 the expectation for a high status daughter, you 00:06:16.920 --> 00:06:20.420 know, marriage, social graces, and her own innate 00:06:20.420 --> 00:06:22.879 powerful curiosity. And did you contrast that 00:06:22.879 --> 00:06:25.500 with her mother? Her mother. Emily Norcross Dickinson, 00:06:25.759 --> 00:06:28.300 whom she described as regularly cold and aloof. 00:06:28.399 --> 00:06:30.779 She wrote very candidly to a confidant that her 00:06:30.779 --> 00:06:33.319 mother was an awful mother, but I liked her better 00:06:33.319 --> 00:06:36.120 than none. Wow. I mean, that statement just speaks 00:06:36.120 --> 00:06:39.060 volumes about emotional distance. It does. And 00:06:39.060 --> 00:06:41.699 you can see how it would create the necessity 00:06:41.699 --> 00:06:45.000 for Dickinson to cultivate her own intense private 00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:47.720 emotional landscape to, you know, compensate 00:06:47.720 --> 00:06:49.720 for what she wasn't getting at home. And we can 00:06:49.720 --> 00:06:52.000 trace that need for an intense internal life 00:06:52.000 --> 00:06:54.740 back to some early trauma camp. We can. She was 00:06:54.740 --> 00:06:57.079 deeply traumatized by the death of her close 00:06:57.079 --> 00:06:59.920 cousin, Sophia Holland, from typhus in 1844. 00:07:00.660 --> 00:07:03.259 She suffered from such a severe melancholia that 00:07:03.259 --> 00:07:05.319 she had to be moved to Boston for a while just 00:07:05.319 --> 00:07:08.379 to recover. So these early shocks, the emotional 00:07:08.379 --> 00:07:10.860 distance from her mother losing her cousin, the 00:07:10.860 --> 00:07:13.199 intellectual constraints from her father, they 00:07:13.199 --> 00:07:15.819 all created this incredibly sensitive internal 00:07:15.819 --> 00:07:19.079 environment where her art would eventually just 00:07:19.079 --> 00:07:21.600 flourish. And as we touched on, her spiritual 00:07:21.600 --> 00:07:24.750 choices were also... deeply personal and nonconformist. 00:07:25.009 --> 00:07:27.470 After that brief period of religious revival 00:07:27.470 --> 00:07:31.069 in the mid -1840s, she never made a formal public 00:07:31.069 --> 00:07:34.370 declaration of faith. And by 1852, she'd stopped 00:07:34.370 --> 00:07:36.670 going to church altogether. Completely. And her 00:07:36.670 --> 00:07:39.009 famous couplet just captures that deliberate 00:07:39.009 --> 00:07:41.649 choice so perfectly. Some keep the Sabbaths going 00:07:41.649 --> 00:07:44.160 to church. I keep it. staying at home exactly 00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:47.000 she was actively choosing an intimate personal 00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:49.500 self -defined relationship with the divine with 00:07:49.500 --> 00:07:52.819 thought with nature over the institutional piety 00:07:52.819 --> 00:07:55.480 everyone else was practicing she simply replaced 00:07:55.480 --> 00:07:57.819 the church with her own room and her own garden 00:07:57.819 --> 00:08:00.439 and this private intellectual life wasn't happening 00:08:00.439 --> 00:08:03.699 in a vacuum it was guided by a few Very select 00:08:03.699 --> 00:08:06.399 mentors. The first major formative influence 00:08:06.399 --> 00:08:08.860 was a young man named Benjamin Franklin Newton. 00:08:09.120 --> 00:08:11.540 He was an attorney studying law with her father 00:08:11.540 --> 00:08:14.540 for a couple of years in the late 1840s. And 00:08:14.540 --> 00:08:17.800 she called him her tutor or master. She did. 00:08:18.079 --> 00:08:21.459 And what he did essentially was act as a conduit 00:08:21.459 --> 00:08:23.920 to the most radical intellectual thought of the 00:08:23.920 --> 00:08:26.819 time. He's the one who introduced her to Ralph 00:08:26.819 --> 00:08:30.420 Waldo Emerson and William Wordsworth. Ah, Emerson. 00:08:30.519 --> 00:08:33.279 That makes so much sense. It does. Dickinson 00:08:33.279 --> 00:08:35.860 credits Newton's gift of Emerson's poems as having 00:08:35.860 --> 00:08:38.539 a liberating effect. She said Newton has touched 00:08:38.539 --> 00:08:41.820 the secret spring. And you can see why. Emerson's 00:08:41.820 --> 00:08:44.779 focus on self -reliance, on rejecting society's 00:08:44.779 --> 00:08:47.970 demands, on the divinity of the individual. It 00:08:47.970 --> 00:08:50.309 resonated so deeply with her. It's like it provides 00:08:50.309 --> 00:08:52.889 the entire intellectual framework for her eventual 00:08:52.889 --> 00:08:55.490 seclusion. She's not just retreating from the 00:08:55.490 --> 00:08:57.870 world. She's engaging in an Emersonian act of 00:08:57.870 --> 00:09:00.250 self -reliance. Precisely. And the relationship 00:09:00.250 --> 00:09:02.690 was emotionally intense, too. Newton saw her 00:09:02.690 --> 00:09:04.710 greatness. When he was dying of tuberculosis, 00:09:04.809 --> 00:09:06.830 he wrote to her, saying he wanted to live long 00:09:06.830 --> 00:09:08.690 enough to see her achieve the greatness he knew 00:09:08.690 --> 00:09:11.049 she was capable of. That's incredible validation 00:09:11.049 --> 00:09:14.409 for a young writer. It is. And she later canonized 00:09:14.409 --> 00:09:17.789 him. In 1862, she wrote that she had a friend 00:09:17.789 --> 00:09:20.450 who taught me immortality but venturing too near. 00:09:20.610 --> 00:09:23.990 Himself, he never returned. So Newton gave her 00:09:23.990 --> 00:09:26.769 both the intellectual keys and the template for 00:09:26.769 --> 00:09:29.409 these intense, singular emotional connections 00:09:29.409 --> 00:09:32.850 that operated completely outside the realm of, 00:09:32.870 --> 00:09:35.049 you know, conventional relationships. And beyond 00:09:35.049 --> 00:09:38.429 Newton, her literary influences were just vast 00:09:38.429 --> 00:09:42.539 and often contraband, right? They were. She adored 00:09:42.539 --> 00:09:45.320 contemporary popular literature like Lydia Maria 00:09:45.320 --> 00:09:47.620 Child's Letters from New York. When she read 00:09:47.620 --> 00:09:50.080 it, she gushed, this then is a book and there 00:09:50.080 --> 00:09:51.759 are more of them. Like she was just discovering 00:09:51.759 --> 00:09:53.919 this whole world. But she also consumed classic 00:09:53.919 --> 00:09:56.539 British writers ferociously. Her brother Austin 00:09:56.539 --> 00:09:59.100 had to literally smuggle books into the house 00:09:59.100 --> 00:10:02.019 for her. Smuggle them? Yes, books like Longfellow's 00:10:02.019 --> 00:10:04.120 Cabanaw because their father often disapproved 00:10:04.120 --> 00:10:06.500 of any fiction or poetry that wasn't directly 00:10:06.500 --> 00:10:08.679 related to the Bible or the law. And her love 00:10:08.679 --> 00:10:11.960 for Shakespeare was total. completely she once 00:10:11.960 --> 00:10:15.120 asked a friend referring to his plays why clasp 00:10:15.120 --> 00:10:18.639 any hand but this and to another why is any other 00:10:18.639 --> 00:10:21.899 book needed for dickinson her library was her 00:10:21.899 --> 00:10:24.740 world it provided the warmer language she just 00:10:24.740 --> 00:10:27.019 couldn't find in the rigid social interactions 00:10:27.019 --> 00:10:29.700 of amherst and i love this one little detail 00:10:29.700 --> 00:10:31.779 that just sticks with you she named her only 00:10:31.779 --> 00:10:35.820 dog A big Newfoundland. Carlo. Carlo. And she 00:10:35.820 --> 00:10:38.139 named him after the dog in Charlotte Bronte's 00:10:38.139 --> 00:10:41.539 Jane Eyre, a book that was lent to her in 1849. 00:10:41.720 --> 00:10:44.210 Yeah. It shows that the influence wasn't just 00:10:44.210 --> 00:10:46.909 intellectual. It was woven right into the fabric 00:10:46.909 --> 00:10:49.889 of her daily domestic life. These deep literary 00:10:49.889 --> 00:10:52.570 and intellectual attachments, they came first 00:10:52.570 --> 00:10:55.110 and they fueled her retreat from society. They 00:10:55.110 --> 00:10:56.850 made that retreat an intellectual necessity, 00:10:57.210 --> 00:10:59.629 not some kind of social failure. So the early 00:10:59.629 --> 00:11:01.789 1850s, that seems to be a real turning point, 00:11:01.809 --> 00:11:03.769 the moment that propels her toward her final 00:11:03.769 --> 00:11:06.529 form of self -confinement. It really was. She 00:11:06.529 --> 00:11:09.009 started the decade in high spirits, writing that. 00:11:09.289 --> 00:11:11.789 Amherst is alive with fun this winter, but then 00:11:11.789 --> 00:11:14.029 a series of emotional blows just hit her one 00:11:14.029 --> 00:11:16.549 after another. And the death, right? Yes, specifically 00:11:16.549 --> 00:11:19.070 Leonard Humphrey. He was the former principal 00:11:19.070 --> 00:11:21.850 of Amherst Academy, and he died suddenly of what 00:11:21.850 --> 00:11:24.129 they called brain congestion when he was only 00:11:24.129 --> 00:11:27.429 25. Dickinson wrote two years later about the 00:11:27.429 --> 00:11:29.629 depth of her sadness, feeling like the scholar 00:11:29.629 --> 00:11:33.009 at school alone. So the fun fades, and the walls 00:11:33.009 --> 00:11:35.149 start to go up. They go up quickly. And the most 00:11:35.149 --> 00:11:37.210 practical catalyst for her physical confinement 00:11:37.210 --> 00:11:39.529 was the chronic illness of her mother, Emily 00:11:39.529 --> 00:11:43.049 Norcross Dickinson. She became effectively bedridden 00:11:43.049 --> 00:11:46.029 from the mid -1850s all the way until her death 00:11:46.029 --> 00:11:49.549 in 1882. And her sister, Lavinia, later said 00:11:49.549 --> 00:11:51.409 that because their mother needed constant care, 00:11:51.669 --> 00:11:53.590 one of the daughters had to stay home all the 00:11:53.590 --> 00:11:55.649 time. And Emily willingly took on that role. 00:11:55.870 --> 00:11:58.049 So she had this pragmatic reason to stay home, 00:11:58.210 --> 00:12:00.659 but it seems like she turned that necessity into 00:12:00.659 --> 00:12:03.179 a choice. She found that the life with her books 00:12:03.179 --> 00:12:05.580 and nature so congenial continued to live it. 00:12:05.679 --> 00:12:07.659 And this is when her seclusion really begins 00:12:07.659 --> 00:12:10.600 to escalate. By the mid -1850s, she was already 00:12:10.600 --> 00:12:12.820 compiling her poems into those secret manuscript 00:12:12.820 --> 00:12:16.580 books, the fascicles. By 1867, her withdrawal 00:12:16.580 --> 00:12:18.320 was so complete that she started speaking to 00:12:18.320 --> 00:12:20.179 visitors only from the other side of the door. 00:12:20.440 --> 00:12:23.120 She just wouldn't come out. Rarely leaving my 00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:26.019 father's ground to any house or town, she was 00:12:26.019 --> 00:12:28.620 actively cultivating this public image of the 00:12:28.620 --> 00:12:32.059 eccentric. the myth of Amherst, who was rarely 00:12:32.059 --> 00:12:34.200 seen and was almost always dressed completely 00:12:34.200 --> 00:12:36.259 in white. Let's talk about the white dress for 00:12:36.259 --> 00:12:38.519 a second. The one surviving piece of clothing 00:12:38.519 --> 00:12:41.320 we have of hers is this white cotton dress. What's 00:12:41.320 --> 00:12:44.179 the symbolism there? Well, scholars see it as 00:12:44.179 --> 00:12:46.080 a very deliberate statement. It's definitely 00:12:46.080 --> 00:12:48.399 a rejection of the Victorian norms where women 00:12:48.399 --> 00:12:50.919 were expected to wear these dark, restrictive 00:12:50.919 --> 00:12:53.759 clothes. So wearing white could symbolize what? 00:12:53.980 --> 00:12:57.230 A kind of spiritual purity? It could be that 00:12:57.230 --> 00:12:59.669 or perhaps a rejection of traditional fashion 00:12:59.669 --> 00:13:02.429 and the expectation of marriage. Some see it 00:13:02.429 --> 00:13:04.610 as her symbolizing a different kind of marriage, 00:13:04.809 --> 00:13:07.990 a spiritual or artistic devotion, an emblem of 00:13:07.990 --> 00:13:10.409 her total commitment to her inner life and her 00:13:10.409 --> 00:13:13.070 art. It reinforces this idea that she saw her 00:13:13.070 --> 00:13:15.690 life as exceptional, as separate and as chosen. 00:13:15.889 --> 00:13:19.090 And yet behind those symbolic white doors, her 00:13:19.090 --> 00:13:21.769 emotional life was incredibly vibrant and complex 00:13:21.769 --> 00:13:24.850 and intimate, all thanks to her mastery of writing 00:13:24.850 --> 00:13:27.090 letters. Which brings us to the most central 00:13:27.090 --> 00:13:29.710 and, I think, the most passionately debated relationship 00:13:29.710 --> 00:13:32.710 of her life. The one with her sister -in -law, 00:13:32.830 --> 00:13:36.570 Susan Huntington, Gilbert Dickinson. Susan, yes. 00:13:36.929 --> 00:13:40.330 Susan married Emily's brother, Austin, in 1856 00:13:40.330 --> 00:13:43.110 and moved into the Evergreens, the house right 00:13:43.110 --> 00:13:45.309 next door. So they were neighbors. Neighbors. 00:13:45.309 --> 00:13:47.529 And the marriage between Austin and Susan was 00:13:47.529 --> 00:13:49.750 reportedly very unhappy, but the bond between 00:13:49.750 --> 00:13:52.330 Emily and Susan was something else entirely. 00:13:53.149 --> 00:13:57.350 Dickinson sent Susan over 300 letters. 300 letters 00:13:57.350 --> 00:13:59.090 to the house next door. That's not just communication. 00:13:59.429 --> 00:14:02.710 That's an ongoing daily negotiation of her inner 00:14:02.710 --> 00:14:05.370 self. It is. Susan was her most beloved friend, 00:14:05.629 --> 00:14:08.690 influence, muse, and advisor. Dickinson wrote 00:14:08.690 --> 00:14:10.590 in one letter, With the exception of Shakespeare, 00:14:10.870 --> 00:14:12.789 you have told me of more knowledge than anyone 00:14:12.789 --> 00:14:15.789 living. She put her sister along the same pedestal 00:14:15.789 --> 00:14:18.149 as Shakespeare. The very same. And this brings 00:14:18.149 --> 00:14:20.190 us right to the heart of the scholarly debate. 00:14:20.600 --> 00:14:22.580 Many scholars, when they look at the textual 00:14:22.580 --> 00:14:24.679 evidence, they interpret their relationship as 00:14:24.679 --> 00:14:27.559 deeply romantic and homoerotic. Okay, but hold 00:14:27.559 --> 00:14:30.360 on a minute. Isn't there a risk here of, you 00:14:30.360 --> 00:14:32.879 know, putting a modern lens on this? If we only 00:14:32.879 --> 00:14:36.159 had these intense, flowery letters between Dickinson 00:14:36.159 --> 00:14:38.799 and her brother, would we be calling that relationship 00:14:38.799 --> 00:14:41.500 romantic? What's the actual textual evidence 00:14:41.500 --> 00:14:44.460 that pushes this beyond just typical Victorian 00:14:44.460 --> 00:14:47.330 female hyperbole? That is the crucial question. 00:14:47.509 --> 00:14:50.029 And scholars, like Lenokoski, argue that the 00:14:50.029 --> 00:14:52.769 language contains these unique elements of possession 00:14:52.769 --> 00:14:55.669 and physical desperation. Okay. The most cited 00:14:55.669 --> 00:14:58.610 example is from a letter in 1852, long before 00:14:58.610 --> 00:15:01.330 Susan was even her sister -in -law. Emily asks, 00:15:01.610 --> 00:15:03.450 Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday 00:15:03.450 --> 00:15:05.769 and be my own again and kiss me as you used to? 00:15:05.909 --> 00:15:09.009 Be my own again. Yes. And it continues. I hope 00:15:09.009 --> 00:15:11.149 for you so much and feel so eager for you, feel 00:15:11.149 --> 00:15:13.049 that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have 00:15:13.049 --> 00:15:16.200 you, that the expectation once more to... And 00:15:16.200 --> 00:15:21.960 the ending of that quote is the real clincher, 00:15:22.019 --> 00:15:25.000 isn't it? My darling, so near I seem to you that 00:15:25.000 --> 00:15:27.700 I disdain this pen and wait for a warmer language. 00:15:28.279 --> 00:15:31.299 Exactly. That warmer language, the idea that 00:15:31.299 --> 00:15:33.500 written words are just not enough for her desire, 00:15:33.740 --> 00:15:36.120 combined with the physical symptoms she describes, 00:15:36.399 --> 00:15:39.539 hot and feverish, heart beating fast, and the 00:15:39.539 --> 00:15:43.159 insistence on ownership, be my own again. For 00:15:43.159 --> 00:15:45.580 most contemporary scholars, that pushes the evidence 00:15:45.580 --> 00:15:47.860 way beyond the realm of platonic friendship. 00:15:48.120 --> 00:15:50.639 It points toward an erotic element she felt compelled 00:15:50.639 --> 00:15:53.899 to express. It does. And this intimacy is what 00:15:53.899 --> 00:15:56.659 led directly to that shocking historical cover 00:15:56.659 --> 00:15:58.879 -up we mentioned at the start. The posthumous 00:15:58.879 --> 00:16:01.659 cover -up. This is a true literary scandal. Yeah. 00:16:01.740 --> 00:16:04.179 And it's all driven by this toxic love triangle. 00:16:04.460 --> 00:16:06.720 At the center of it is a woman named Mabel Loomis 00:16:06.720 --> 00:16:09.720 Todd. Codd was Austin Dickinson's longtime mistress. 00:16:09.879 --> 00:16:12.559 It was a very public affair and it deeply damaged 00:16:12.559 --> 00:16:14.980 the relationship between Austin and Susan. So 00:16:14.980 --> 00:16:17.809 when Emily died. Her sister Lavinia, who's obsessed 00:16:17.809 --> 00:16:20.110 with getting the poems published, turns to Mabel 00:16:20.110 --> 00:16:22.669 Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress, and Thomas 00:16:22.669 --> 00:16:25.210 Wentworth Igginson to edit the manuscripts. Yes, 00:16:25.309 --> 00:16:27.669 can you imagine? The layers of conflict are just 00:16:27.669 --> 00:16:30.210 staggering. Austin's mistress becomes the gatekeeper 00:16:30.210 --> 00:16:32.690 and the first editor of his dead sister's love 00:16:32.690 --> 00:16:34.809 poems to his wife. The rivalry must have been 00:16:34.809 --> 00:16:37.509 intense. Oh, it was. And because of the bad blood 00:16:37.509 --> 00:16:39.929 between Mabel Loomis Todd and Susan Dickinson, 00:16:40.090 --> 00:16:42.250 who were essentially rivals fighting over Austin 00:16:42.250 --> 00:16:45.460 Todd, actively tried to diminish Susan's role 00:16:45.460 --> 00:16:48.559 in Emily's life and her poetry. And modern science 00:16:48.559 --> 00:16:51.580 has actually proved it. Tell us about the infrared 00:16:51.580 --> 00:16:54.360 evidence. This is amazing. So modern infrared 00:16:54.360 --> 00:16:57.259 technology has revealed that in at least 11 of 00:16:57.259 --> 00:16:59.340 Dickinson's poems that were dedicated to Susan, 00:16:59.500 --> 00:17:02.899 the name Susan was deliberately obliterated. 00:17:03.019 --> 00:17:06.130 Crutched out. Erased, yes. Presumably by Todd 00:17:06.130 --> 00:17:08.450 or her daughter. This wasn't some accidental 00:17:08.450 --> 00:17:10.750 smudge. This was conscious censorship designed 00:17:10.750 --> 00:17:13.089 to obscure the most central, intimate relationship 00:17:13.089 --> 00:17:16.250 of Emily's life. Todd replaced the dedications 00:17:16.250 --> 00:17:18.450 and altered the context to create this narrative 00:17:18.450 --> 00:17:21.269 of a cruel or dismissive Susan instead of acknowledging 00:17:21.269 --> 00:17:24.470 her as Emily's muse. This one act just warped 00:17:24.470 --> 00:17:26.589 the public perception of Dickinson's entire emotional 00:17:26.589 --> 00:17:29.250 life for decades. Which explains why the publication 00:17:29.250 --> 00:17:32.779 process was so... toxic and fragmented. So beyond 00:17:32.779 --> 00:17:35.680 Susan, who else was in this tiny key circle of 00:17:35.680 --> 00:17:38.160 intimate correspondence? The other major figure 00:17:38.160 --> 00:17:40.819 in her literary life was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 00:17:41.160 --> 00:17:44.779 He was a literary critic, an essayist, a former 00:17:44.779 --> 00:17:47.420 minister, and he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly. 00:17:47.900 --> 00:17:50.799 And their correspondence started in 1862, right 00:17:50.799 --> 00:17:53.099 at the peak of her productivity. She wrote him 00:17:53.099 --> 00:17:55.539 a letter. A now famous letter, a highly nuanced, 00:17:55.799 --> 00:17:58.660 slightly dramatic letter asking, Are you too 00:17:58.660 --> 00:18:01.259 deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? 00:18:01.980 --> 00:18:04.660 What an opening line. She was asking for critique, 00:18:04.799 --> 00:18:06.940 but doing it anonymously, right? She put her 00:18:06.940 --> 00:18:09.240 name on a separate card to maintain her mystery. 00:18:09.460 --> 00:18:12.660 She did. And Higginson was completely intrigued, 00:18:12.779 --> 00:18:15.059 but also just baffled by her. I mean, he was 00:18:15.059 --> 00:18:17.660 a champion of very conventional literature, and 00:18:17.660 --> 00:18:20.119 her style just shocked him. And she gave him 00:18:20.119 --> 00:18:22.160 those amazing descriptions of herself. She did. 00:18:22.799 --> 00:18:25.220 I am small like the wren and my hair is bold 00:18:25.220 --> 00:18:27.559 like the chestnut burr and my eyes like the sherry 00:18:27.559 --> 00:18:30.319 in the glass that the guest leaves. She's painting 00:18:30.319 --> 00:18:32.660 this literary self -portrait for him while keeping 00:18:32.660 --> 00:18:35.500 him at arm's length. She clearly valued his advice, 00:18:35.579 --> 00:18:37.900 though. She called him dear friend and signed 00:18:37.900 --> 00:18:40.359 her letters, your scholar. And she even told 00:18:40.359 --> 00:18:42.660 him later that he had saved her life in 1862. 00:18:42.900 --> 00:18:45.220 That was the year of her greatest poetic output. 00:18:45.460 --> 00:18:48.420 So what did he do that saved her? He provided 00:18:48.420 --> 00:18:50.750 validation. At a time when she was consciously 00:18:50.750 --> 00:18:53.309 choosing to leave the world behind, he took her 00:18:53.309 --> 00:18:55.930 seriously as a poet. Even though he didn't quite 00:18:55.930 --> 00:18:58.970 get her revolutionary style, he tried to correct 00:18:58.970 --> 00:19:02.069 her punctuation. He confirmed for her that she 00:19:02.069 --> 00:19:04.809 had a singular genius, even if he couldn't publish 00:19:04.809 --> 00:19:06.710 it as it was. But when he urged her to come to 00:19:06.710 --> 00:19:09.130 Boston to meet him, she refused. Absolutely refused. 00:19:09.269 --> 00:19:12.769 She stuck to her rule. I do not cross my father's 00:19:12.769 --> 00:19:15.789 ground to any house or town. They did finally 00:19:15.789 --> 00:19:19.619 meet, though, in 1870 in Amherst. And the encounter 00:19:19.619 --> 00:19:23.240 sounded pretty exhausting for him. It was. He 00:19:23.240 --> 00:19:25.819 wrote that she drained my nerve power so much. 00:19:25.900 --> 00:19:28.039 Without touching her, she drew from me. I am 00:19:28.039 --> 00:19:30.920 glad not to live near her. Her personality, fueled 00:19:30.920 --> 00:19:33.119 by all those years of seclusion and her intense 00:19:33.119 --> 00:19:35.839 internal life, was just as demanding and unforgettable 00:19:35.839 --> 00:19:38.359 as her poetry. And we should quickly mention 00:19:38.359 --> 00:19:40.900 two other figures, Charles Wadsworth. The famous 00:19:40.900 --> 00:19:43.740 minister from Philadelphia. She met him in 1855, 00:19:43.960 --> 00:19:45.940 saw him only once more after he moved to San 00:19:45.940 --> 00:19:48.799 Francisco in 1862, but she referred to him in 00:19:48.799 --> 00:19:51.900 these incredibly elevated terms. My Philadelphia, 00:19:52.339 --> 00:19:55.849 my clergyman. and my dearest earthly friend. 00:19:56.029 --> 00:19:57.930 He's often seen as a candidate for the mysterious 00:19:57.930 --> 00:20:00.730 master figure in her poems. He is. He was a married 00:20:00.730 --> 00:20:03.569 older man, and their connection was mostly intellectual 00:20:03.569 --> 00:20:06.390 and spiritual, but she clearly elevated him to 00:20:06.390 --> 00:20:09.970 this nearly divine status, a shepherd from little 00:20:09.970 --> 00:20:12.789 girlhood. And finally, there was the late -life 00:20:12.789 --> 00:20:15.970 romance with Judge Otis Phillips Lord. Yes, this 00:20:15.970 --> 00:20:19.069 relationship likely became romantic after 1877, 00:20:19.210 --> 00:20:21.990 after his wife died. Lord was an elderly judge, 00:20:22.269 --> 00:20:24.190 a friend of her father's, and their correspondence 00:20:24.190 --> 00:20:27.210 just escalated dramatically. She called him My 00:20:27.210 --> 00:20:29.930 Lovely Salem, and they wrote to each other religiously 00:20:29.930 --> 00:20:31.890 every single Sunday. It's like she integrated 00:20:31.890 --> 00:20:34.289 him into her highly personalized spiritual world. 00:20:34.490 --> 00:20:37.049 She did. She saw him as a kind of private church, 00:20:37.269 --> 00:20:40.049 writing, While others go to church, I go to mine. 00:20:40.509 --> 00:20:42.750 For are you not my church, and have we not a 00:20:42.750 --> 00:20:45.930 hymn that no one knows but us? When he died in 00:20:45.930 --> 00:20:48.869 1884, it was just another profound loss for her 00:20:48.869 --> 00:20:51.809 tightly controlled emotional world. Her seclusion 00:20:51.809 --> 00:20:53.990 did not mean emotional isolation, it just meant 00:20:53.990 --> 00:20:56.890 she chose her anchors with extreme care and intensity, 00:20:57.190 --> 00:20:59.410 mostly through the power of the written word. 00:20:59.720 --> 00:21:02.539 Okay, so let's get to the work itself. What's 00:21:02.539 --> 00:21:04.400 truly remarkable is that the period when she 00:21:04.400 --> 00:21:06.359 was most actively withdrawing from the world, 00:21:06.460 --> 00:21:09.920 the first half of the 1860s, was her most astonishingly 00:21:09.920 --> 00:21:11.880 productive. This wasn't just, you know, writing 00:21:11.880 --> 00:21:14.859 a few poems. This was a poetic explosion. It 00:21:14.859 --> 00:21:17.339 was an... unbelievable burst of concentrated 00:21:17.339 --> 00:21:20.480 genius right after she chose that life of domestic 00:21:20.480 --> 00:21:23.500 confinement. The scholar Thomas H. Johnson estimated 00:21:23.500 --> 00:21:27.299 she wrote 86 poems in 1861, and then in 1862 00:21:27.299 --> 00:21:32.299 alone, she composed a monumental 366 poems. 366. 00:21:32.400 --> 00:21:34.599 That is literally a poem a day, every single 00:21:34.599 --> 00:21:36.339 day, and often focused on these massive themes 00:21:36.339 --> 00:21:38.619 of nature, life, and mortality. A poem a day. 00:21:38.740 --> 00:21:40.859 It's an astonishing feat of creative output. 00:21:41.390 --> 00:21:43.490 What was happening in 1862 that would trigger 00:21:43.490 --> 00:21:46.009 something so intense? Well, you have a confluence 00:21:46.009 --> 00:21:49.630 of things. Internally, the move of Charles Wadsworth 00:21:49.630 --> 00:21:52.470 to San Francisco would have created a massive 00:21:52.470 --> 00:21:55.769 emotional vacuum for her. Externally, the Civil 00:21:55.769 --> 00:21:58.329 War had begun, throwing the entire nation into 00:21:58.329 --> 00:22:01.329 chaos, which Dickinson felt very keenly, even 00:22:01.329 --> 00:22:02.930 from behind her door. And that's the same year 00:22:02.930 --> 00:22:05.359 she started writing to Higginson. Exactly. She 00:22:05.359 --> 00:22:07.539 was actively seeking a gauge for her work. So 00:22:07.539 --> 00:22:09.940 you have all these pressures, emotional turmoil, 00:22:10.099 --> 00:22:12.700 national crisis, and the need for artistic validation. 00:22:13.019 --> 00:22:15.799 And they all funnel into her solitude and get 00:22:15.799 --> 00:22:18.660 transmuted into verse. The seclusion wasn't just 00:22:18.660 --> 00:22:21.240 permitting the work. It was intensifying it. 00:22:21.380 --> 00:22:23.319 And she wasn't just churning out rough drafts 00:22:23.319 --> 00:22:26.319 on scraps of paper. She was organizing them into 00:22:26.319 --> 00:22:28.839 this highly formalized personal archive. We have 00:22:28.839 --> 00:22:31.099 to talk about the fascicles. The fascicles are 00:22:31.099 --> 00:22:33.299 the central physical evidence of her genius. 00:22:33.930 --> 00:22:38.089 Between 1858 and 1865, she meticulously compiled 00:22:38.089 --> 00:22:42.150 nearly 800 of her poems into 40 carefully pieced 00:22:42.150 --> 00:22:45.529 together hand -sewn manuscript books. Yes, she 00:22:45.529 --> 00:22:48.130 would fold sheets of paper, stack them, and then 00:22:48.130 --> 00:22:50.930 stitch them together with thread. They were intended 00:22:50.930 --> 00:22:53.650 to be private controlled collections of her work. 00:22:54.029 --> 00:22:56.849 What did they look like? Were they elegant, professional 00:22:56.849 --> 00:22:59.309 -looking volumes? Not at all. They often looked 00:22:59.309 --> 00:23:01.789 more like laundry lists or an intensely personal 00:23:01.789 --> 00:23:05.009 journal. The paper she used was sometimes whatever 00:23:05.009 --> 00:23:07.450 she had on hand, the back of an envelope, a scrap 00:23:07.450 --> 00:23:10.150 of butcher paper, leftover stationery. But the 00:23:10.150 --> 00:23:12.390 act of sewing them together shows how much she 00:23:12.390 --> 00:23:14.869 valued the organization and preservation of the 00:23:14.869 --> 00:23:17.130 work, even if the only audience she intended 00:23:17.130 --> 00:23:20.190 was herself or maybe posterity. And the most 00:23:20.190 --> 00:23:22.670 shocking part is that no one in her inner circle. 00:23:23.099 --> 00:23:25.940 Not her sister Lavinia, not Susan, not even Higginson 00:23:25.940 --> 00:23:29.400 knew they existed until Lavinia found them after 00:23:29.400 --> 00:23:32.619 Emily died in 1886. No one, which just emphasizes 00:23:32.619 --> 00:23:34.460 that her motivation for writing was profoundly 00:23:34.460 --> 00:23:36.660 intrinsic. It was completely divorced from the 00:23:36.660 --> 00:23:39.099 contemporary literary marketplace. And when she 00:23:39.099 --> 00:23:41.660 did try that publication route, it just reinforced 00:23:41.660 --> 00:23:44.660 her decision to keep the fascicles private. Absolutely. 00:23:44.880 --> 00:23:47.599 As we said, only 10 poems and one letter were 00:23:47.599 --> 00:23:49.819 published while she lived, mostly through the 00:23:49.819 --> 00:23:51.759 Springfield Republican, where her friend Samuel 00:23:51.759 --> 00:23:54.900 Bowles was the editor. And they were almost universally 00:23:54.900 --> 00:23:57.099 mangled in the process. How exactly were they 00:23:57.099 --> 00:23:58.980 mangled? What were the editors doing? They were 00:23:58.980 --> 00:24:01.839 heavily edited to conform to 19th century poetic 00:24:01.839 --> 00:24:04.220 rules. They were given conventional punctuation, 00:24:04.440 --> 00:24:07.240 standardized capitalization, titles were added, 00:24:07.380 --> 00:24:10.819 and sometimes entire phrases or words were altered 00:24:10.819 --> 00:24:13.480 just to flatten her eccentric style into something. 00:24:13.519 --> 00:24:16.099 palatable for Victorian readers. And the classic 00:24:16.099 --> 00:24:19.480 example of this editorial vandalism is her poem 00:24:19.480 --> 00:24:23.460 I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed. Yes. Her original 00:24:23.460 --> 00:24:26.059 lines are so powerful, so ecstatic they were. 00:24:26.200 --> 00:24:28.839 Not all the Frankfurt Berries yield such now 00:24:28.839 --> 00:24:31.900 at all. Specific earthy. Exactly. And the Republican 00:24:31.900 --> 00:24:34.779 version rewrote those lines to be. Not Frankfurt 00:24:34.779 --> 00:24:37.940 Berries yield the sense such a delirious whirl. 00:24:38.440 --> 00:24:40.900 Delirious whirl. So generic and sentimental. 00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:43.819 It just washes out her idiosyncratic genius completely. 00:24:44.329 --> 00:24:47.009 It does, and she recognized this violation immediately. 00:24:47.470 --> 00:24:49.730 When her poem, A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, 00:24:49.930 --> 00:24:52.589 was published as This Snake, she specifically 00:24:52.589 --> 00:24:55.289 complained that the editors altered the punctuation. 00:24:55.470 --> 00:24:57.930 They replaced one of her original dashes with 00:24:57.930 --> 00:25:00.210 a comma and a full stop. And this is where the 00:25:00.210 --> 00:25:03.180 dash becomes so important. It's not a grammatical 00:25:03.180 --> 00:25:06.019 error. No, it's a technical tool. Scholars like 00:25:06.019 --> 00:25:08.140 Judith Farr point out that Dickinson's original 00:25:08.140 --> 00:25:11.740 use of the dash captured the breathless immediacy 00:25:11.740 --> 00:25:14.740 of encountering the snake. That sudden fear, 00:25:14.960 --> 00:25:17.299 the interruption of thought, the edited version 00:25:17.299 --> 00:25:20.200 with its conventional punctuation made her lines 00:25:20.200 --> 00:25:23.480 more commonplace. It just erased the poem's unique 00:25:23.480 --> 00:25:25.660 rhythm and tension. It's no wonder she found 00:25:25.660 --> 00:25:27.819 publication so foreign to her. She said it was 00:25:27.819 --> 00:25:30.660 as firmament to Finn. Right. And this failed 00:25:30.660 --> 00:25:32.900 contemporary exposure is what made the discovery 00:25:32.900 --> 00:25:36.039 of the manuscripts in 1886 so explosive. It set 00:25:36.039 --> 00:25:39.299 the stage for this chaotic 50 -year battle over 00:25:39.299 --> 00:25:41.960 her true voice. Lavinia finds the locked chest. 00:25:42.200 --> 00:25:44.579 She becomes obsessed with publication. She kept 00:25:44.579 --> 00:25:46.700 her promise to burn the correspondence but found 00:25:46.700 --> 00:25:48.740 no instructions for the 40 notebooks of poetry. 00:25:49.210 --> 00:25:51.529 So she first turns to Susan, who was grieving 00:25:51.529 --> 00:25:56.190 and was initially unwilling or maybe unable to 00:25:56.190 --> 00:25:58.710 dedicate the time needed to decipher these nearly 00:25:58.710 --> 00:26:01.430 illegible manuscripts. So then Lavinia turns 00:26:01.430 --> 00:26:04.170 to Mabel Loomis Todd. And so the family feud 00:26:04.170 --> 00:26:07.369 over Austin leads directly to a feud over literary 00:26:07.369 --> 00:26:10.690 property. Precisely. That first volume, published 00:26:10.690 --> 00:26:13.529 in 1890, edited by Todd and Higginson, was a 00:26:13.529 --> 00:26:16.710 sensation. It had 11 printings in just two years. 00:26:16.869 --> 00:26:19.390 But the content was... heavily altered. They 00:26:19.390 --> 00:26:21.309 were trying to introduce her to the world, but 00:26:21.309 --> 00:26:23.049 they couldn't conceive of her style as being 00:26:23.049 --> 00:26:25.109 intentional. They couldn't. So the normalization 00:26:25.109 --> 00:26:27.970 of punctuation, the regularization of capitalization, 00:26:28.150 --> 00:26:30.910 the occasional rewording to lessen her obliquity, 00:26:31.049 --> 00:26:33.569 it was rampant. They turned her into a Victorian 00:26:33.569 --> 00:26:36.009 eccentric, not a modern radical. And because 00:26:36.009 --> 00:26:38.230 of the complex personal history, the manuscripts 00:26:38.230 --> 00:26:41.450 were literally divided. Yes. The fallout between 00:26:41.450 --> 00:26:43.869 the Dickinson and Todd families fueled by the 00:26:43.869 --> 00:26:46.029 affair and a subsequent legal battle over land 00:26:46.029 --> 00:26:48.920 meant the manuscripts were for over half a century. 00:26:49.180 --> 00:26:51.779 The poems stayed divided between two warring 00:26:51.779 --> 00:26:54.480 camps. One set with Susan and Austin's daughter. 00:26:54.660 --> 00:26:57.019 Martha Dickinson Bianchi, yes. She inherited 00:26:57.019 --> 00:26:59.660 one set. And Millicent Todd Bingham inherited 00:26:59.660 --> 00:27:02.400 the other set from her mother, Mabel Loomis Todd. 00:27:02.579 --> 00:27:04.960 So this created a completely fractured, incomplete, 00:27:05.180 --> 00:27:08.240 and highly edited view of Dickinson for the first 00:27:08.240 --> 00:27:10.539 half of the 20th century. You have these competing 00:27:10.539 --> 00:27:13.119 editions constantly being published, each one 00:27:13.119 --> 00:27:16.099 claiming to hold the true version. Until 1955. 00:27:17.039 --> 00:27:19.460 That's the watershed moment. That's when the 00:27:19.460 --> 00:27:21.660 scholar Thomas H. Johnson published his complete 00:27:21.660 --> 00:27:24.660 three -volume collection, The Poems of Emily 00:27:24.660 --> 00:27:27.960 Dickinson. And Johnson's goal was simple. but 00:27:27.960 --> 00:27:30.859 completely revolutionary, to present the poems 00:27:30.859 --> 00:27:33.339 very nearly as Dickinson had left them. Which 00:27:33.339 --> 00:27:35.380 meant they were untitled, they were numbered, 00:27:35.559 --> 00:27:38.460 they were strewn with her iconic dashes, and 00:27:38.460 --> 00:27:40.720 they had all of her irregular capitalization. 00:27:41.059 --> 00:27:44.440 This 1955 edition is the definitive version that 00:27:44.440 --> 00:27:46.539 broke the tyranny of the editors and forms the 00:27:46.539 --> 00:27:49.420 basis of all modern Dickinson scholarship. And 00:27:49.420 --> 00:27:51.640 the scholarship didn't stop there. It got even 00:27:51.640 --> 00:27:54.240 more granular, highlighting the critical importance 00:27:54.240 --> 00:27:57.079 of the physical artifact. Yes, later scholars 00:27:57.079 --> 00:27:59.900 like R .W. Franklin insisted on analyzing the 00:27:59.900 --> 00:28:01.660 physical evidence of the manuscripts themselves. 00:28:02.180 --> 00:28:04.640 This goes way beyond just reading the words on 00:28:04.640 --> 00:28:07.480 a page. So what does analyzing the physical evidence 00:28:07.480 --> 00:28:09.930 actually entail? It means looking at the varying 00:28:09.930 --> 00:28:12.569 lengths and the angles of the dashes, the physical 00:28:12.569 --> 00:28:14.789 layout of the text on the page, the way she broke 00:28:14.789 --> 00:28:17.329 up certain stanzas, and the patterns she used 00:28:17.329 --> 00:28:20.009 when she compiled the fascicles. These scholars 00:28:20.009 --> 00:28:22.369 argued that her choices in line breaks and punctuation 00:28:22.369 --> 00:28:24.950 were not random errors. They were aesthetically 00:28:24.950 --> 00:28:27.450 based. Almost like musical notation. Exactly. 00:28:28.150 --> 00:28:30.210 Integral to the poem's intended rhythm and meaning. 00:28:30.589 --> 00:28:33.109 As one scholar noted, the consequences of her 00:28:33.109 --> 00:28:35.210 failure to disseminate her work in an orderly 00:28:35.210 --> 00:28:37.829 way are still with us. But thanks to these efforts, 00:28:38.089 --> 00:28:40.130 we can finally read her as she intended to be 00:28:40.130 --> 00:28:42.329 read. Okay, so now that we can read the authentic 00:28:42.329 --> 00:28:46.150 Emily Dickinson, what do we find? We find this 00:28:46.150 --> 00:28:49.289 truly radical style, one that completely defied 00:28:49.289 --> 00:28:52.089 the rigid conventions of her time, one that baffled 00:28:52.089 --> 00:28:54.890 Higginson, and one that required a 50 -year scholarly 00:28:54.890 --> 00:28:58.150 investigation just to restore. Let's start with 00:28:58.150 --> 00:29:00.910 her unique structural choices. Her most notable 00:29:00.910 --> 00:29:03.869 structural choice was avoiding the traditional 00:29:03.869 --> 00:29:07.369 iambic pentameter that just dominated 19th century 00:29:07.369 --> 00:29:11.250 poetry. That standard tadum, tadum, tadum, tadum, 00:29:11.250 --> 00:29:14.190 tadum rhythm of poets like Longfellow or Tennyson. 00:29:14.529 --> 00:29:16.289 She just wasn't interested in that. Not at all. 00:29:16.589 --> 00:29:19.589 Instead, she primarily used shorter line strometer, 00:29:19.809 --> 00:29:22.390 which is three feet, and tetrameter, four feet, 00:29:22.470 --> 00:29:24.470 and she frequently used the traditional ballad 00:29:24.470 --> 00:29:27.069 stanza. Can you give us an auditory example so 00:29:27.069 --> 00:29:29.130 you can really hear the difference? Certainly. 00:29:29.420 --> 00:29:31.440 Just think of the common hymn meter, which she 00:29:31.440 --> 00:29:33.880 used all the time. It follows alternating lines 00:29:33.880 --> 00:29:36.539 of tetrameter and trimeter, usually in a quatrain 00:29:36.539 --> 00:29:38.640 where only the second and fourth lines rhyme, 00:29:38.799 --> 00:29:42.099 that ABCB scheme. For example, the first stanza 00:29:42.099 --> 00:29:45.519 of, because I could not stop for death, is a 00:29:45.519 --> 00:29:48.519 perfect example of this common meter. Because 00:29:48.519 --> 00:29:50.519 I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped 00:29:50.519 --> 00:29:53.319 for me. The care it held but just ourselves and 00:29:53.319 --> 00:29:55.759 immortality. It's a rhythm that feels familiar, 00:29:55.819 --> 00:29:58.079 like a nursery rhyme or a song. Which is why 00:29:58.079 --> 00:30:00.380 so many of her poems can literally be sung to 00:30:00.380 --> 00:30:03.740 common meter melodies. Precisely. And often, 00:30:03.839 --> 00:30:05.980 she didn't even use a perfect rhyme in those 00:30:05.980 --> 00:30:09.059 common meters. She favored what we call slant 00:30:09.059 --> 00:30:11.900 rhyme. How do we define slant rhyme and why did 00:30:11.900 --> 00:30:14.599 she use it so often? Slant rhyme, or near rhyme, 00:30:14.799 --> 00:30:17.680 uses words with similar but not identical sounds. 00:30:18.160 --> 00:30:20.279 So words that look like they should rhyme but 00:30:20.279 --> 00:30:24.059 don't quite, like... gate and mat or her famous 00:30:24.059 --> 00:30:26.700 pairing of day and eternity. And the effect of 00:30:26.700 --> 00:30:29.640 that is what? She used it to create dissonance, 00:30:29.720 --> 00:30:32.819 to signal tension, or to pull the poem just slightly 00:30:32.819 --> 00:30:35.680 off kilter. Instead of that satisfying resolution 00:30:35.680 --> 00:30:38.339 you get with a perfect rhyme, the slant rhyme 00:30:38.339 --> 00:30:40.759 leaves you with the slightly unsettled lingering 00:30:40.759 --> 00:30:43.380 thought, a feeling that perfectly matched her 00:30:43.380 --> 00:30:46.339 subject matter. Of course, the infamous dashes. 00:30:46.359 --> 00:30:48.579 Modern scholars now see the DAC as having multiple 00:30:48.579 --> 00:30:50.420 functions. It's not just a run -on sentence. 00:30:50.660 --> 00:30:53.140 Oh, it's an incredibly dynamic punctuation mark. 00:30:53.259 --> 00:30:56.099 It can signal a pause, a breath, an interruption, 00:30:56.160 --> 00:30:58.819 or a huge intellectual leap. It allows her to 00:30:58.819 --> 00:31:01.839 compress massive ideas into a tiny space and 00:31:01.839 --> 00:31:04.000 create ambiguity. Because she was only writing 00:31:04.000 --> 00:31:06.460 for herself? She was free to invent her own grammar, 00:31:06.579 --> 00:31:09.099 one that mirrored the way thought actually moves, 00:31:09.279 --> 00:31:10.900 you know, interrupting itself, accelerating, 00:31:11.319 --> 00:31:14.599 pausing for emphasis. The dashes, combined with 00:31:14.599 --> 00:31:17.220 her unconventional capitalization, create this 00:31:17.220 --> 00:31:20.440 visual syntax that forces you, the reader, to 00:31:20.440 --> 00:31:22.680 slow down and consider multiple meanings at the 00:31:22.680 --> 00:31:25.519 same time. Okay, let's turn to her major thematic 00:31:25.519 --> 00:31:28.200 areas. We can group her work into about five 00:31:28.200 --> 00:31:30.539 crucial categories, and we have to start with 00:31:30.539 --> 00:31:33.859 the most sensational one. Her lifelong fascination. 00:31:34.240 --> 00:31:36.920 with morbidity and death. Yes, she was often 00:31:36.920 --> 00:31:39.880 typecast as the morbid poet. And her poetry does 00:31:39.880 --> 00:31:42.220 explore mortality and the mechanics of dying 00:31:42.220 --> 00:31:44.519 in these surprisingly violent and clinical ways. 00:31:44.779 --> 00:31:47.779 The source's catalog references to death by crucifixion, 00:31:47.779 --> 00:31:50.420 drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature 00:31:50.420 --> 00:31:52.579 burial, shooting, stabbing, and guillotinage. 00:31:52.700 --> 00:31:55.940 That is an immense and incredibly intense preoccupation 00:31:55.940 --> 00:31:57.980 with physical violence for a woman who rarely 00:31:57.980 --> 00:32:00.390 left her own yard. It is. And this obsession 00:32:00.390 --> 00:32:03.109 is often tied to what one critic calls her thirsting, 00:32:03.109 --> 00:32:06.009 starving persona. A thirsting, starving persona. 00:32:06.269 --> 00:32:09.349 Yes. The critic Vivian Pollack sees this as an 00:32:09.349 --> 00:32:12.069 autobiographical reflection, a way for her to 00:32:12.069 --> 00:32:15.269 explore psychological complexity. What happens 00:32:15.269 --> 00:32:17.690 when the loss of hunger for life causes the death 00:32:17.690 --> 00:32:20.279 of the self? And this theme is often connected 00:32:20.279 --> 00:32:22.980 to the natural world, particularly winter, which 00:32:22.980 --> 00:32:25.880 she saw as the season that strips all hope of 00:32:25.880 --> 00:32:28.940 transcendence, a metaphor for the finality of 00:32:28.940 --> 00:32:31.079 death. But on the lighter side, you have her 00:32:31.079 --> 00:32:33.539 famous connection to nature and gardens. She 00:32:33.539 --> 00:32:36.500 was famous for sending friends, posies and poesies. 00:32:36.599 --> 00:32:39.019 And she was a serious botanist. She studied the 00:32:39.019 --> 00:32:41.819 subject from the age of nine. During her lifetime, 00:32:41.920 --> 00:32:45.339 she compiled this 66 -page leather -bound herbarium 00:32:45.339 --> 00:32:48.920 that had 424 pressed, classified, and labeled 00:32:48.920 --> 00:32:50.900 plant specimens in it. So she was a scientist, 00:32:50.980 --> 00:32:53.819 in a way. She was. The scholar Judith Farr notes 00:32:53.819 --> 00:32:56.460 that she was known more widely as a gardener, 00:32:56.460 --> 00:32:58.880 perhaps, than as a poet during her lifetime, 00:32:59.119 --> 00:33:01.539 especially in the years when her poetry was unpublished. 00:33:01.700 --> 00:33:03.579 But she definitely noted the imbalance of appreciation. 00:33:04.319 --> 00:33:06.940 She wrote that her friends valued the posy more 00:33:06.940 --> 00:33:10.589 than the poetry. The garden was her primary imaginative 00:33:10.589 --> 00:33:13.329 realm, this controlled, intimate landscape of 00:33:13.329 --> 00:33:16.890 the spirit. She used flowers as emblems for actions 00:33:16.890 --> 00:33:19.950 and emotions. So gentians might symbolize youth 00:33:19.950 --> 00:33:22.809 and humility, or the fear and beauty of a rose 00:33:22.809 --> 00:33:25.630 could represent transient perfection. The garden 00:33:25.630 --> 00:33:28.190 was simultaneously her physical workplace and 00:33:28.190 --> 00:33:31.309 her intellectual metaphor. Third, let's discuss 00:33:31.309 --> 00:33:33.529 her spiritual side through what are called the 00:33:33.529 --> 00:33:36.569 gospel poems. These poems really show her continued 00:33:36.569 --> 00:33:38.630 engagement with the teachings of Jesus Christ, 00:33:38.849 --> 00:33:41.589 even long after she rejected institutional religion. 00:33:43.500 --> 00:33:46.519 narratives by recreating them with wit and American 00:33:46.519 --> 00:33:49.339 colloquial language, stressing how pertinent 00:33:49.339 --> 00:33:51.160 they still were. So she's not just rejecting 00:33:51.160 --> 00:33:52.940 fate, she's reinterpreting it on her own terms. 00:33:53.299 --> 00:33:55.900 Precisely. The scholar Dorothy Oberhaus argues 00:33:55.900 --> 00:33:57.940 that the deep structures of these poems place 00:33:57.940 --> 00:34:00.220 her firmly in the tradition of Christian devotional 00:34:00.220 --> 00:34:03.319 poetry alongside major figures like Hopkins and 00:34:03.319 --> 00:34:05.380 Eliot. And she could inject a real wry humor 00:34:05.380 --> 00:34:07.509 into these sacred texts too. Oh, absolutely. 00:34:07.849 --> 00:34:10.230 Think of her nativity poem where she wrote of 00:34:10.230 --> 00:34:13.429 Jesus. The Savior must have been a docile gentleman 00:34:13.429 --> 00:34:16.210 to come so far, so cold a day, for little fellow 00:34:16.210 --> 00:34:18.369 men the road to Bethlehem since he and I were 00:34:18.369 --> 00:34:21.400 boys was leveled, but for that would be A rugged 00:34:21.400 --> 00:34:24.860 billion miles. Amazing. She takes this divine 00:34:24.860 --> 00:34:28.079 event and frames it with the kind of dry wit 00:34:28.079 --> 00:34:30.340 you'd hear in a small New England parlor. Yeah. 00:34:30.420 --> 00:34:32.659 She makes the monumental human and relatable. 00:34:32.739 --> 00:34:36.079 Yes. Now, the fourth major category is maybe 00:34:36.079 --> 00:34:39.019 the most emotionally potent. The master poems. 00:34:39.340 --> 00:34:42.039 Right. These are confessional and searing in 00:34:42.039 --> 00:34:44.039 their self -inquiry. They're addressed to this 00:34:44.039 --> 00:34:46.840 unattainable, unknown male figure she just refers 00:34:46.840 --> 00:34:49.380 to as master, senor, or sir, her lover for all 00:34:49.380 --> 00:34:51.679 eternity. This figure represents a crisis of 00:34:51.679 --> 00:34:54.059 identity, of faith, and of desire. And scholars 00:34:54.059 --> 00:34:56.400 mostly reject the idea that the master was one 00:34:56.400 --> 00:34:59.260 single specific person, like Charles Wadsworth. 00:34:59.659 --> 00:35:02.099 What are the other interpretations? The general 00:35:02.099 --> 00:35:04.760 consensus is that he was likely a composite figure, 00:35:04.940 --> 00:35:07.880 human yet godlike. He might have been a kind 00:35:07.880 --> 00:35:10.519 of Christian muse or perhaps even an idealized 00:35:10.519 --> 00:35:13.320 reflection of her own internal ambition, representing 00:35:13.320 --> 00:35:15.820 the ultimate unattainable standard of literary 00:35:15.820 --> 00:35:18.760 and emotional acceptance. They are incredibly 00:35:18.760 --> 00:35:21.760 intense poems. They reveal this deep, painful 00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:24.519 struggle for intellectual and spiritual surrender. 00:35:24.880 --> 00:35:26.980 And finally, we come to the overarching theme 00:35:26.980 --> 00:35:29.599 that really ties all of her isolation together. 00:35:29.980 --> 00:35:33.460 The mind itself, what the academic Suzanne Chuhais 00:35:33.460 --> 00:35:36.000 calls the undiscovered continent. This is key. 00:35:36.260 --> 00:35:38.940 Dickinson conceptualized the mind and the spirit 00:35:38.940 --> 00:35:42.519 as tangible, visitable places, a landscape of 00:35:42.519 --> 00:35:45.659 the spirit. At times, this inner world was pastoral 00:35:45.659 --> 00:35:47.739 and beautiful, embellished with all her nature 00:35:47.739 --> 00:35:50.719 imagery. But not always. Often it was described 00:35:50.719 --> 00:35:54.460 in darker, more forbidding terms. as castles 00:35:54.460 --> 00:35:56.599 or prisons complete with corridors and rooms 00:35:56.599 --> 00:35:59.039 where she lived with her other selves and battled 00:35:59.039 --> 00:36:01.840 herself. This is the true drama for seclusion, 00:36:01.840 --> 00:36:04.460 that battle for internal control. And there's 00:36:04.460 --> 00:36:06.440 that famous line that just encapsulates this 00:36:06.440 --> 00:36:09.480 battle for self -control perfectly. Me from myself 00:36:09.480 --> 00:36:13.119 to banish. Had I art impregnable my fortress 00:36:13.119 --> 00:36:16.059 unto all heart, but since myself assault me, 00:36:16.179 --> 00:36:20.219 how have I peace except by subjugating consciousness? 00:36:21.579 --> 00:36:23.920 She realized that her greatest struggle, and 00:36:23.920 --> 00:36:26.119 therefore her greatest subject, was the management 00:36:26.119 --> 00:36:29.079 of her own interiority. The seclusion was just 00:36:29.079 --> 00:36:31.559 the stage on which this lifelong battle was fought. 00:36:31.699 --> 00:36:34.239 Exactly. So let's talk about how the public has 00:36:34.239 --> 00:36:37.159 received this extraordinary body of work once 00:36:37.159 --> 00:36:39.639 it finally came out in its true form. When her 00:36:39.639 --> 00:36:41.440 work first appeared posthumously, even though 00:36:41.440 --> 00:36:43.000 it was championed by people like William Dean 00:36:43.000 --> 00:36:46.179 Howells and Higginson, it was met with extreme 00:36:46.179 --> 00:36:49.309 confusion. The initial dismissal focused almost 00:36:49.309 --> 00:36:52.250 entirely on her unique radical style, which Victorian 00:36:52.250 --> 00:36:54.349 readers just lacked the framework to understand. 00:36:54.710 --> 00:36:56.969 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who was a very prominent 00:36:56.969 --> 00:36:59.409 poet and editor at the time, wrote this devastating 00:36:59.409 --> 00:37:02.630 critique in 1892. What did he say? He said the 00:37:02.630 --> 00:37:04.630 incoherence and formlessness of her versicles 00:37:04.630 --> 00:37:07.869 are fatal. He argued that an eccentric, dreamy, 00:37:07.869 --> 00:37:10.969 half -educated recluse cannot with impunity set 00:37:10.969 --> 00:37:13.170 at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. 00:37:13.429 --> 00:37:15.889 That critique tells you more about 19th century 00:37:15.889 --> 00:37:18.440 expectations. for women's writing, that it had 00:37:18.440 --> 00:37:21.199 to be orderly and sentimental, than it does about 00:37:21.199 --> 00:37:23.380 Dickinson's revolutionary genius. It really does. 00:37:23.539 --> 00:37:26.440 But by the 1920s, that view started to change 00:37:26.440 --> 00:37:29.179 dramatically. Why then? Well, as modernist poetry 00:37:29.179 --> 00:37:32.340 gained popularity, led by writers who also rejected 00:37:32.340 --> 00:37:35.139 traditional meter and sentimentality, Dickinson's 00:37:35.139 --> 00:37:37.199 irregularities were no longer seen as a lack 00:37:37.199 --> 00:37:40.050 of skill. They were seen as consciously artistic 00:37:40.050 --> 00:37:42.829 ahead of their time choices. Critics started 00:37:42.829 --> 00:37:45.690 to recognize her as essentially modern. Her use 00:37:45.690 --> 00:37:48.409 of fragmentation, ambiguity, and complex internal 00:37:48.409 --> 00:37:50.949 narratives fit perfectly with the new literary 00:37:50.949 --> 00:37:53.550 trends. And this recognition really solidified 00:37:53.550 --> 00:37:56.210 in the 1930s with the new critics. Why were they 00:37:56.210 --> 00:37:58.969 so receptive to her? Figures like Alan Tate and 00:37:58.969 --> 00:38:01.449 R .P. Blackmer valued complexity, ambiguity, 00:38:01.690 --> 00:38:04.789 and close reading above everything else. Dickinson's 00:38:04.789 --> 00:38:07.389 highly compressed, dash -laden, image -intensive 00:38:07.440 --> 00:38:09.599 poems were perfect for their analytical approach. 00:38:10.239 --> 00:38:12.679 Blackmer called her a private poet who wrote 00:38:12.679 --> 00:38:15.420 as indefatigably as some women cook or knit, 00:38:15.579 --> 00:38:17.980 who arrived at the right time for one kind of 00:38:17.980 --> 00:38:20.539 poetry, the poetry of sophisticated eccentric 00:38:20.539 --> 00:38:22.920 vision. They were able to look past the biography 00:38:22.920 --> 00:38:25.760 and just treat the poems as these fully realized 00:38:25.760 --> 00:38:29.219 complex artifacts. Yes. And then the second wave 00:38:29.219 --> 00:38:32.659 of feminism, post -1970s, provided another massive 00:38:32.659 --> 00:38:35.300 shift in understanding her life, completely transforming 00:38:35.300 --> 00:38:38.510 the way we see her. This is a huge reframing. 00:38:38.510 --> 00:38:41.110 It is. Instead of viewing her seclusion as a 00:38:41.110 --> 00:38:44.650 sad eccentricity or a pathology, that old, made 00:38:44.650 --> 00:38:47.550 -of -Amherst stereotype feminist critics saw 00:38:47.550 --> 00:38:50.309 it as a powerful strategic choice for a female 00:38:50.309 --> 00:38:52.909 artist living in a deeply patriarchal society. 00:38:53.429 --> 00:38:55.909 Adrienne Rich, in her landmark essay Vesuvius 00:38:55.909 --> 00:38:58.750 at Home, famously theorized this. How did she 00:38:58.750 --> 00:39:00.869 frame it? Rich argued that Dickinson chose her 00:39:00.869 --> 00:39:03.130 seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing 00:39:03.130 --> 00:39:05.849 what she needed. She saw the seclusion as a deliberate 00:39:05.849 --> 00:39:08.889 act of necessary economics. She retreated to 00:39:08.889 --> 00:39:11.150 protect her creative energy and use her powers, 00:39:11.230 --> 00:39:13.409 rejecting the traditional roles of womanhood 00:39:13.409 --> 00:39:16.230 like hostess or wife or public figure, which 00:39:16.230 --> 00:39:18.190 would have just consumed her time and her genius. 00:39:18.409 --> 00:39:20.769 So her withdrawal was an act of artistic autonomy. 00:39:21.050 --> 00:39:23.889 That's the perspective. And it cemented her legacy, 00:39:23.989 --> 00:39:27.349 not just as a poet, but... as this groundbreaking 00:39:27.349 --> 00:39:30.630 figure who actively carved out the necessary 00:39:30.630 --> 00:39:33.849 space for profound female artistic creation. 00:39:34.150 --> 00:39:37.349 And her legacy today is just immense. Harold 00:39:37.349 --> 00:39:39.630 Bloom lists her alongside Walt Whitman and T 00:39:39.630 --> 00:39:42.590 .S. Eliot as a major American poet and a central 00:39:42.590 --> 00:39:45.139 writer of Western civilization. her influence 00:39:45.139 --> 00:39:47.780 is everywhere she's taught globally her poetry 00:39:47.780 --> 00:39:50.559 has been set to music by composers from aaron 00:39:50.559 --> 00:39:53.500 copeland to john adams and she was inducted into 00:39:53.500 --> 00:39:56.239 the national women's hall of fame in 1973 and 00:39:56.239 --> 00:39:58.739 we see her presence constantly in popular culture 00:39:58.739 --> 00:40:00.960 from the one woman played the belle of amherst 00:40:00.960 --> 00:40:03.739 to recent films like a quiet passion and wild 00:40:03.739 --> 00:40:05.960 nights with emily and the tv series dickinson 00:40:05.960 --> 00:40:08.159 all of which explore that tension between the 00:40:08.159 --> 00:40:10.619 outer confinement and the explosive inner world 00:40:10.619 --> 00:40:13.780 exactly it's an ongoing fascination which proves 00:40:13.900 --> 00:40:16.039 that the woman who actively avoided the public 00:40:16.039 --> 00:40:18.679 eye is now one of the most powerful, persistent 00:40:18.679 --> 00:40:21.780 and continually reinterpreted figures in American 00:40:21.780 --> 00:40:24.039 culture. So what does this all mean? Well, this 00:40:24.039 --> 00:40:26.940 deep dive has really revealed the profound transformation 00:40:26.940 --> 00:40:30.239 of Emily Dickinson. She went from being this 00:40:30.239 --> 00:40:33.300 private myth of Amherst, a figure almost entirely 00:40:33.300 --> 00:40:36.139 unknown outside of a small family circle, to 00:40:36.139 --> 00:40:39.000 becoming a highly influential proto -modernist 00:40:39.000 --> 00:40:42.059 giant. Her radical techniques, which were once 00:40:42.059 --> 00:40:44.619 dismissed as just accidental errors, or the scribbles 00:40:44.619 --> 00:40:47.039 of an unbalanced mind, they fundamentally change 00:40:47.039 --> 00:40:49.840 how poetry could be written and punctuated. Her 00:40:49.840 --> 00:40:52.079 life illustrates, maybe more powerfully than 00:40:52.079 --> 00:40:54.679 any other American writer, how personal control 00:40:54.679 --> 00:40:58.179 over your own solitude can lead to this unparalleled 00:40:58.179 --> 00:41:00.639 inner world of creative production. Her mastery 00:41:00.639 --> 00:41:03.139 lay in synthesizing a highly ambitious classical 00:41:03.139 --> 00:41:06.019 education with this fierce nonconformity and 00:41:06.019 --> 00:41:08.460 the self -reliance philosophy of Emerson. She 00:41:08.460 --> 00:41:10.340 took her confined domesticity and she transformed 00:41:10.340 --> 00:41:12.440 it into an undiscovered continent for the mind, 00:41:12.579 --> 00:41:14.960 creating her own rules for language as she went. 00:41:15.199 --> 00:41:18.619 And the battles over her manuscripts, the feuds, 00:41:18.619 --> 00:41:21.940 the censorship, the careful restoration of every 00:41:21.940 --> 00:41:25.219 single dash and capitalization, they only underscore 00:41:25.219 --> 00:41:28.340 the explosive revolutionary nature of the work 00:41:28.340 --> 00:41:30.079 that had been locked away for half a century. 00:41:30.480 --> 00:41:33.360 It's the ultimate victory of private genius finally 00:41:33.360 --> 00:41:35.980 finding its public voice. And leads to a final 00:41:35.980 --> 00:41:38.130 question we want to leave with you. We know she 00:41:38.130 --> 00:41:39.929 occasionally sought encouragement. She asked 00:41:39.929 --> 00:41:42.570 Higginson, is my verse alive? We know her work 00:41:42.570 --> 00:41:44.969 was edited to death when it was published conventionally, 00:41:44.969 --> 00:41:47.289 fundamentally altering the entire meaning of 00:41:47.289 --> 00:41:50.130 her poems with just a single misplaced comma 00:41:50.130 --> 00:41:52.389 or dash. So here's where it gets really interesting 00:41:52.389 --> 00:41:54.309 for you to think about. If her unique genius, 00:41:54.530 --> 00:41:57.690 her unconventional capitalization, her use of 00:41:57.690 --> 00:42:01.530 the dash, her deeply personal themes, if all 00:42:01.530 --> 00:42:03.630 of that was intrinsically tied to her extreme 00:42:03.630 --> 00:42:06.250 seclusion, to her intentional removal from the 00:42:06.250 --> 00:42:08.530 world of publication and criticism and the pressure 00:42:08.530 --> 00:42:11.349 to conform, could the 1800 poems we love today 00:42:11.349 --> 00:42:14.050 have ever existed, had she received the conventional 00:42:14.050 --> 00:42:16.250 encouragement and audience she occasionally sought. 00:42:16.510 --> 00:42:18.789 Would the 19th century marketplace designed for 00:42:18.789 --> 00:42:20.969 poets like Longfellow have just normalized her 00:42:20.969 --> 00:42:23.369 poetry right out of existence, leaving us with 00:42:23.369 --> 00:42:25.630 a collection of delirious whirls instead of her 00:42:25.630 --> 00:42:28.630 raw, ecstatic genius? That's the profound contradiction 00:42:28.630 --> 00:42:30.130 at the heart of the myth of Amherst.