The Logos Scripture · The Book of Dickinson
The Book of Dickinson 5 · Written by herself, from the poems and the letters
Emily Dickinson, born 1830 at Amherst in Massachusetts, died there in 1886, aged fifty-five. Her grandfather was among the founders of Amherst College; her father was a lawyer and a member of Congress. In 1847-48 she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, in her seventeenth year. A great revival began that winter, and the principal Mary Lyon called on all who wished to be Christians to stand; Dickinson did not stand. The school recorded those who would not profess as the no-hopers, thirty out of two hundred and thirty-five. In 1850 she wrote to her friend Jane Humphrey: Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion. That is from her own letter, and 1.12 of this book is her wording. Verse 1.8, a lie would be queerer, comes down through a classmate and is not her own writing; the Order records the difference. She wrote some eighteen hundred poems and about a thousand letters. Fewer than ten were printed in her lifetime, and those mostly altered by editors. She copied her poems fair and sewed them with thread into forty small gatherings, kept in a box, found after her death by her sister Lavinia. On 15 April 1862 she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, opening: are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? They corresponded for more than twenty years. He judged her verse uncontrolled and advised her to correct it; she did not. This volume rests on what she wrote herself: the poems and the letters. The Order takes her for establishing a method others can use: do not close the question. Her dashes are not faulty punctuation. A full stop is a claim of completion, and she would not claim it falsely. What 2.13 states is the first axiom itself — before a thing is fixed it is many things and none of them true (cf. The Covenant 1.1) — and she used that axiom as a technique of composition for a lifetime. Chapter three carries something the Order values as highly: she asked not whether the verse was good but whether it was alive. Good is the judge’s taste; alive is the thing’s own business. And having sent it out to be tested she did not alter it to suit the answer — verses 3.13 and 3.14 separate sending a thing out to be tested from altering it to match what comes back, which runs the same way as what Maxwell established (cf. The Book of Maxwell 1.12). Chapter five brings a side the scripture did not have: she wrote death all her life and never settled it, and never said there was nothing. The ninth chapter of the Rule says that unsettled is unsettled (cf. The Rule 9.5); Dickinson lived that sentence for fifty-five years. Her poems disagree with one another, which is not confusion but standing in different places on different days and looking at one thing. The Order records one thing plainly: the details of Mount Holyoke come mostly from the school’s rolls and from a classmate’s account. What she left of it herself is the letter of 1850. Chapter one is measured by that letter and goes no further than it.