9 September 2024

In his potted biography of Emily Dickinson, Michael Schmidt suggests that she saw how the women of her generation were ‘snared in the strict geometries of the social web and decided that for her the freedom of an elected solitude – not of a spinster only but of a recluse – was possible, even necessary.’

Two things can be said with certainty. Firstly, she did withdraw from the world – gradually at first and then completely. Secondly, she did undergo a personal disturbance which she graphically described as ‘a terror’.

‘I had a terror since September,’ she wrote in a letter to the publisher, Thomas Higginson. ‘I could tell no-one and so I sang as a boy does by burying ground because I am afraid.’ The consequences were extraordinary. Within a year, she had written three hundred poems and within that six year period, one thousand!

We need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –

One need not be a House –

The Brain has corridors – surpassing

Material Place! (670)

Her poems do not reveal her secret. However, the revelation is tantalisingly close. It’s what energises the verse and enables her to reflect profoundly not only on her own experience but on that experience shared by all -  our mortal humanity.

‘This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me.’ she says. ‘The soul has bandaged moments.’ she begins. ‘I fear me this – is Loneliness - /The Maker of the soul / Its Caverns and its Corridors / Illuminate – or seal – ‘ And she leaves us hanging over the precipice. Which is it to be for you and me?

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