How did Emily Dickinson, an introvert and recluse, know so much about human nature and the human condition?

Question

and come to be regarded, along with Walt Whitman, as one of the two poets most representative of 19th century America? And why was she neither recognized in her own century as the great poet she is nor published during her lifetime? Why was she so little appreciated in her own century and so greatly appreciated in the 20th and 21st centuries? She has not changed obviously, so what has? The same phenomenon, that is, of artists speaking more to generations that followed than to their own, has occurred frequently of course. In the history of music, the examples of Bruckner and Mahler come immediately to mind, both relatively unappreciated in their own times, both highly esteemed today. So were these great artists simply ahead of their times? Did they speak a language as yet incomprehensible to their contemporaries? I wonder too what great artists we are all overlooking today.

Answer 1

I wonder the same thing, although as they say: “future isn’t what it used to be”.

As for Emily Dickinson, who knows, perhaps for the same reason that the American Civil War was NOT as romanticized, celebrated, and reenacted in her time as it is today? … The wounds were too fresh back then, the moment too immediately close, and above all the poet painfully ahead of her time (in fact almost all her works were published posthumously, and in many cases decades later). … People’s tastes change, society gravitates towards a new reality – a reality of women’s rights, a call for feminism, a new acquired taste for the overlooked greatness of the past, a celebration of a magical slice of time that was and can never be quite cut the same way again. A yearning to come closer to the simpler universe of the past? An intellectual love affair with an eccentric woman of singular intellect? A rediscovery of a genius lingering in the dusty pages of a public library book? A more modern and evolved appreciation of poetry – and one more akin to Dickinson’s style – that no longer demanded strict adherence to the rules of grammar and punctuation? A long overdue academic apology for having critically mutilated her glorious obliquity and courageous formlessness? … The reasons are abound, the fact is that she lives on, while insipid characters such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich have long been buried and forgotten under the gravity of their self-righteous grammar.

She was NOT an introvert and a recluse, she was a loving friend to many, a lover to others and a true American Literary Hero – it is all in the original manuscripts (Not the highly edited/mutilated versions), if one pays close attention.

Answer 2

Emily Dickinson Recluse

Answer 3

My mystery women. Funny, you should ask this, she is one of my all time favorites.
As we walk through time we take with it what we need. She need to be loved. She hid herself well, Many miss understood her. She was unappreciated in her time.
It was her tales of life and loves that she got the phenomenon recognition that we know today..
Deep women devoted to her loves of life...

mmmmm I know an artists some may not know about....


You know what I cant stand is that why do so many cut and paste..Its like a book report why read the book read the footnotes and then report on that..Why not read and report what you can relate to......Ok I have spoke my peace...

Answer 4

Look at Anne Frank, she was deaf, dumb and blind, I believe, and she was on par with them as well...

Both Lao Tzu & Shakespeare said something to the effect, that you don't even need to leave your closet, but still you can know the whole world...and the further you go, the less you know!

Answer 5

I think you are actually asking two separate, and not necessarily related, questions. Because I feel a bit more confident in responding to the second, I shall begin with it: "And why was she neither recognized in her own century as the great poet she is nor published during her lifetime? Why was she so little appreciated in her own century and so greatly appreciated in the 20th and 21st centuries?"

The conventional poetry of an era attracts readers, gets critical attention, sorta defines poetry in the public mind. But, every so often, the exigencies of an age require voices that go beyond the conventional, that speak for new generations, that speak of and for a different and more complex world (or a newly, differently complex world). Usually these voices are not heard very well at first; our ears aren't trained to hear them; they do not fulfill our expectations. Often they are rejected by critics and the public, sometimes even denounced.

Witness, for example, the Metaphysicals after the Elizabethans, the Romantics after the Neo-classicists, and (in my own era) Allen Ginsburg and the Beats after T. S. Eliot and his imitators, the "darlings" of the New Critics. In the second half of the 19th century, the new voices were Walt Whitman, who clamored to have his "barbaric yawp" heard; Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had many of his poems destroyed and refused to have others published; and Emily Dickinson, who simply withdrew after her poems were not appreciated by the clergyman she chose as her critic/mentor.

In the US the conventional poets of the era, remember, were Whittier and Longfellow. As popular as they were (and intellectual in their own way), their poetry hardly spoke of a world that had been torn asunder (the Civil War, the railway, the onset of the industrial revolution and the redefinition of economic classes, immigration, migration, and "ethnic cleansing," higher criticism of the scriptures and Darwinism, and the like). The essays of Emerson and Thoreau had challenged and undermined conventional thinking just as Jefferson and Jackson had undermined conventional ideas of government. Sensitive ears could hardly be comfortable with old voices.

But let's be fair. Good ole Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in attempting to help Emily "improve" her poetry, was doing nothing more than the hundreds of poets-in-residence in American colleges and universities these days (they try to get their students to write more like Eliot or Ezra Pound or maybe Robert Lowell). Poets are "taught" to write like other poets.

But the public did not reject Dickinson's poetry in her own day; they just never saw it. And give ole Higginson credit: he did help collect her unpublished work and get it published posthumously, and the first volume went through eleven editions in just two years (1890-92); just think how long it took Walt to work up to his eleventh edition. So Emily spoke to her people, and they heard. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (who, curiously, had helped reinvent the boys' story in America--and Tom Sawyer) spoke for conventions, critics, and academicians (just exactly as most of today's critics and juries that review poetry, advise publishers and edit literary reviews, and give out awards speak for Eliot/New Critical conventions and academic standards).

I suspect that Emily's voice would have been heard sooner than Walt's or Gerard's--if it had not been silenced by her mentor. She did write in the conventional form of the hymn stanza (albeit eccentrically punctuated); she did write often in conventional religious images; she spoke of ordinary, everyday, human emotions and quandaries. But she let conventional imagery speak unconventionally (she hardly spoke for any of the Great Awakenings of Puritan/evangelical Christianity), and she gave voice to emotional questions more insistently than she provided answers. Even so, once her poems were published, her voice was heard. As very different as she and Whitman were, they did break through the 19th century conventions, and their voices opened the public's ears to unconventional poetry. Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay probably would not have found their voices if they had not heard hers--nor probably Ezra Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, even e e cummings). T. S. Eliot and his academic/new critical buddies had to rediscover John Donne and the Metaphysicals to reestablish their sense of the conventional.

Now to your main question: How did Emily Dickinson, an introvert and recluse, know so much about human nature and the human condition?

God knows. (I suspect I mean that quite literally.) How did the hostler's son, "cockney" John Keats in his early twenties know enough to remake British poetry for the next century? God knows. Explaining poetic reputations is one thing: critics and historians are pretty good at that. Explaining poetic genius is another altogether.

I am tempted to revert to that hymn stanza that Emily heard and reinvented:

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.

. . . . .

His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.

William Cowper

Introvert and recluse though she may have been, Emily Dickinson was not unread or illiterate, and the small circle of family and friends in which she lived probably provided her a microcosm of which human nature (if you will) is the macrocosm. After all, she had to learn to deal with people like Thomas Wentworth Higginson--that required some level of human understanding right there.

I have a huge volume on Emily's biography waiting on a shelf somewhere to be read. But every time I reach for it, my hand instead--and of its own free will--grasps the equally huge volume of her poetry. It's easier to revel in poetic genius than to understand it. Genius, too, "moves in a mysterious way / Her wonders to perform."

[And, Marko F, believe it or not, I was well along in my response to these questions before I realized they were YOUR questions. I don't mean to harangue you; you just keep asking questions that intrigue me. And this set had been around for four days and, in my opinion, had only one perceptive response. So I chimed in. Ding, dong!

And, no, indeed, I did not wait around in hopes that I would have the last word!]

Answer 6

You would be surpised how much observation does to ones knowledge of their surroundings.

Answer 7

She wasn't always that way, it came after she learned.