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In Our Time
Emily Dickinson (Archive Episode)
00:50:14
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), celebrated American poet.
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- [00:00]
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- [02:18]
Melvyn Bragg
To celebrate Melvyn Bragg's 27 years presenting.
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Grainger Advertiser
In our time, some well known fans.
- [02:23]
Melvyn Bragg
Of the program have chosen their favourite episodes. Here's the comedian Frank Skinner.
- [02:27]
Frank Skinner
I'm actually quite a late adopter of In Our Time. I've only been listening to it regularly for about three or four years. I have been digging deep, though, into the fabulous compilations that are available and wallowing in collected episodes like 25 Perspectives on the Visual Arts. Oh, joy. I'm a big fan of soaking up knowledge, and I love enthusiasts, especially when it ranges, as it does on these shows, from people who are mad about Julie and the Apostate to people who are mad about slime molds. And I have to confess, I love the sitcom element of In Our Time. Three academics being kept in order by Melvin Bragg, the listener's great champion who makes sure we get clarity, context and that every statement is backed up by evidence. I'm fascinated by Emily Dickinson, so I chose this episode and I was so glad that she is a bit of a victim of life over work. Work for a lot of people. So people are fascinated by the fact that she was a recluse and that she always wore white. But Melvin gets through that and moves it on. Let's get that out of the way, he says. And there are some great Melvin quotes in this. I don't get that. It's something to stop any academic in their tracks. And then the much feared. Well, it's in the notes you gave me, and there's one in here which is a classic Melvin moment when he says to one of the academics, well, you're the great expert. I'm just here. Oh, if you want to get a real flavor of this, I think you should listen to the section where they discuss whether Emily Dickinson changed poetry according to things that she received from the various people she sent it to, whether she took their advice. And you really heard the intellectual sheepdog in Melvin tearing into them. Listen, learn, and maybe wince a little.
- [04:30]
Melvyn Bragg
Hello. Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, New England, is now celebrated as one of the greatest of American poets. There was little sign of that in her lifetime. She refused to publish more than 11 of her poems, and people in Amherst knew her more for being reclusive and for dressing exclusively in white. She corresponded widely, though, bringing society and ideas into the room. She scarcely left. With her death in 1886 came the discovery of her massive work, almost 1800 poems sewn together in neat bundles. Her poems began to be published and quickly gained popularity and critical acclaim. Entering the Western literary canon, where they remain today with me to discuss the life and works of Emily Dickinson are Fiona Green, senior lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. Linda Friedman, Lecturer in English Literature at University College London and Porich Finnerty, Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Fiona Green. What was the world into which Emily Dickinson was born in 1830?
- [05:32]
We tend to imagine Dickinson as a solitary figure, I think, and to emphasise perhaps the reclusive character of her life. But it's as well to know that she was born into and raised in a very sociable and outward looking family. So she's born, as you say, in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. And this is a small but quite busy college town and the Dickinson family are very much involved both in the church, the First Amherst Church, the Congregational Church and in the college itself. So in fact Dickinson's grandfather had been among the founders of Amherst College. So this is a very prominent family. It's also a quite prosperous family. Her father is a lawyer and he's also involved in politics so he's very, very much engaged with women worldly affairs and he has a very strong sense of civic responsibility, particularly as far as education is concerned.
- [06:29]
She's rather idyllic, doesn't he? In her early years, this small town, the dances they have with each other, the wealthy part of it anyway. And was it like that? She was active, she went to dances, she was.
- [06:41]
Open that up a bit, yes. The house that she lived in, the Dickinson homestead and the house next door, the Evergreens, which is where her brother and his wife eventually lived, were sort of the social centres in a way of Amherst. So the college, the highlight of the college calendar is the commencement ball and that is held traditionally at the homestead and various visiting lecturers and dignitaries would stay at the Evergreens. So for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to lecture in Amherst and stayed with Dickinson's brother Austin and his wife Susan Gilbert. So I think in her teens and twenties at least, she did participate in this very sociable atmosphere.
- [07:24]
She had a good education and considering the education that was not given to most women at the time or girls at the time, hers was good.
- [07:30]
She had a good education, she attended the district primary school, one room schoolhouse. But the really important part of her education came between the ages of 10 and 17 and she went to Amherst Academy. So Amherst Academy is affiliated to, closely related to Amherst College and there's a very, very broad liberal curriculum at Amherst Academy. So she studies.
- [07:53]
Is this for girls only?
- [07:55]
It a girls section. It's not co educational but it does have a girls section and so she studies Latin and history but she Also studies science. She studies biology and chemistry and geology and experimental science. And that kind of knowledge is vital to the poetry, I think.
- [08:11]
Is she going. Is she moving around in a group, in her peer group all the time? Is she very affianced to those people? Do we see a group there, a group of academic little women?
- [08:21]
Well, she does have a group of women friends. She's very close.
- [08:25]
I was using that ironically, folks. Also referring to another writer in more or less the same district. Right. Can we continue?
- [08:32]
She has a group of women friends. One of her closest friends, Susan Gilbert, whom her brother marries, is somebody that we might talk about in detail a bit later. But really, I think Dickinson's family is so important to her in those early years. I think her brother is actually her closest ally, at least until his marriage. And there's also a younger sister, Lavinia. So those young people and a number of friends from the academy, yes, they did socialise together very much.
- [09:00]
But to return to my intervention, was there. Are there any connections in the background, in the social life with Little Women, with Louisa Malcolm's Little Women?
- [09:09]
I'm not sure about that.
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You're not sure either? No. Let's move on, then. Okay, Linda. It seemed to me, reading, that there was something about the life that was portrayed by Louisa Malcott was in part of the life I've read from the notes you give me, that was lived by Emily Dickinson. But we're going to move on. Right, Linda? Linda Friedman. Her life was in Puritan New England and so heavily conditioned by religion. Can you tell us how heavily?
- [09:37]
Linda Friedman
Pretty fundamentally, I think, is the answer. Amherst was an interesting place to go, grow up in many ways, and one of those ways was that it was positioned. It was one of the last sort of real outposts of Puritanism, I think, at a time when a much more liberal Christianity was growing up in the intellectual centres of Boston and New York. And it was connected to those centres. And as Fiona said, Emerson, who was one of the sort of key players, I think, in that world, you know, visited Amherst. So it wasn't entirely detached from it. But the church that she attended was a Congregationalist church. It was a place where people would be encouraged to stand up and make very emotional conversions to God, to religion. Now, Dickinson herself, as a. As a woman, she stopped going to church, rather famously, when she was in her 20s, she stopped, but as a child and a teenager, young teenager, she still went. And she went very regularly. And this was important in many ways. In one sense, I think her Puritan heritage Gave her something to react against, to ironise, to satirize. She quite famously rejected the Puritans, industry and morals and every righteous thing she called it. But it, more importantly, I think, fed her imagination and her sense of poetic vocation. And one of the reasons for this, I think, is that actually her first, one of her first and most affecting experiences of fiction was in the context of a religious experience. When she went to church, when she heard these very, very powerful sermons being given by the ministers, she was absolutely fascinated by what their words could do. When she was 14, she came back from church, she wrote to her brother Austin, with whom she was very friendly. She was very close, and he was away at the time. You know, I've just come back from church very hot and faded. It grows very interesting. Zion lifts her head. I overhear remarks signifying Jerusalem. And you can see. I mean, this is very characteristic of Dickinson, this detachment, this observation of an emotional intensity around her.
- [12:12]
Melvyn Bragg
And her continuing fascination in a very small way, because her life became the outside life was a very small way with preachers and the idea of sermonizing, the idea of preaching and the congregational part of the Unitarian thing, which came from this country and hammered away at the sermons. But can I move on to reclusiveness? The age of about 25, after her mother's death, she became reclusive. She had become reclusive gradually, or it was sudden. What happened and why do you think she became such a recluse? To live virtually in one room, not to see people, except to have family. And even that seems very much now and then dressing, this business of dressing in white. Let's get that out of the way. How did that start?
- [12:55]
Linda Friedman
Well, that, as they say, is the million dollar question. We don't know is the answer. What we do know comes, I think, from one of her letters, which she wrote in 1860. She wrote at the age of 31 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was a new kind of friend and mentor of hers. And she wrote, I had a terror since September. I could tell to none. That's the bit I picked out. Yeah. So the. So I see she had terror that.
- [13:25]
Melvyn Bragg
She can't speak, and this terror. And it's fascinating what she was terrified by, whether it was out of body experience or some kind of breakdown. She doesn't name it. It was the terror that drove her into that room on her own. I'm glad you said that, because when I read all this stuff, I thought, I bet that's what started well.
- [13:41]
Linda Friedman
But that's the bit that Jumps out of us. And actually the end of that sentence I could tell to none. And so I sing as the boy does by the burying ground because I am a. So there are clues there. And these clues have, I think it's fair to say, preoccupied Dickinson scholars. Was it a grief? Is that what she means? Was it the war? Is that what she means? Was it a lost love? Was it a heartbreak? Was it the onset of mental illness? Did she have something we would recognise as agoraphobia? I don't know, but certainly the way in which she presented it to Higginson was as a shock, as a fear.
- [14:26]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, as a terror. It sounds like lots of terrors people have known about. Good porridge, Finnerty. What prompted her to start writing?
- [14:39]
Porich Finnerty
Well, I think Dickinson starts writing maybe sometime in the 1850s.
- [14:45]
Melvyn Bragg
She's in her early 30s, though. 20s. Early 20s, sorry, 1830.
- [14:50]
Porich Finnerty
A couple of valentines are published early on in newspapers, in a student magazine. And then sometime in 1858, she starts to collect her poems together into little booklets. So she takes a piece of stationery, she writes on all four sides, and then she binds that piece together with another piece of stationary into booklets. So why she starts, I guess she's inspired. She sees herself as a poet in her discussions with her sister in law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, there's a sense in which they are poets. They're inspired by works that they've read by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Robert Browning, by the Brontes.
- [15:31]
Melvyn Bragg
By Ruskin.
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Porich Finnerty
By Ruskin, yes. She says she really likes Ruskin. So I think she's inspired, she's driven to produce these booklets, these 40 booklets between 1858 and 1865. And these make up about 11,000 of her poems.
- [15:53]
Podcast Advertiser
So.
- [15:53]
Porich Finnerty
And later on, she doesn't bind them.
- [15:56]
Melvyn Bragg
That's 11,000. Sorry, sorry, I beg your pardon?
- [15:59]
Porich Finnerty
Eleven hundred poems. Eleven hundred poems in.
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Melvyn Bragg
Eventually there's nearly 1800. But these.
- [16:03]
Porich Finnerty
Yes, yes. So 1100 poems. And then the other side, after 1865, she continues to put these, these booklets together, but she doesn't bind them. And then we've got lots of drafts. We've got a position in. In the latter half of her life where she's actually sending more poems out to people. So in the first half of her life, before 1865, she seems to be keeping them. She seems to be. It's kind of a record of her work and she sends some out, but in the. In the latter half of her life, she sends a lot out in letters and she. She wants to communicate to the work.
- [16:40]
Melvyn Bragg
When you say sending them out, you're sending them out to somebody to say, look, I. I'm too far away from my own mind. I can't judge this. Could you help me in this?
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Porich Finnerty
Yes.
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Melvyn Bragg
Or she says, putting them in lay. She's not sending them out to be published.
- [16:51]
Porich Finnerty
No. And my understanding of Dickinson, she's not interested in publishing. It's. It's. It's kind of one of the things. The mystery. I mean, one of the mysteries of Dickinson is how can somebody be such a great poet and not seem to want to be published? She does want certain people to recognize her. She wants Thomas Wentworth Higginson to recognize her.
- [17:08]
Melvyn Bragg
Is it to recognize her or to tell her that her poems are alive? That's the word she. In what sense does she want to be recognized?
- [17:15]
Porich Finnerty
I think she wants. I think, yes, she wants them to say that they breathe, that they are alive. She asks Thomas Winter Higginson. But I think she wants other people to know that she's doing this. Certain people. Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. And Helen Hunt Jackson, a notable novelist and poet. She wants some of the important people in today, and I think she said sets the groundwork for her posthumous publications by contacting these people. So I think on one level, yes, she wants some sort of validation for what she's doing, but I think on some level, she wants people to know, important people to know.
- [17:51]
Melvyn Bragg
When she's writing to these important people, are they writing back?
- [17:53]
Porich Finnerty
Yes, they are.
- [17:54]
Melvyn Bragg
What are they saying?
- [17:55]
Porich Finnerty
They're writing back and they're begging her to publish. Helen Hunt Jackson begs her to publish. Thomas Wentworth Higginson's a bit wary about her publishing. Samuel Bowles publishes some of her works in the Springfield Republican.
- [18:07]
Melvyn Bragg
So we have to say that in her lifetime, only 11 of her poems were published, 10 against her wishes.
- [18:13]
Porich Finnerty
Yes. Yes. And the wonderful.
- [18:15]
Melvyn Bragg
So she didn't really want to be published. She's sitting there on her own in this room, writing for the sake of writing.
- [18:21]
Porich Finnerty
Writing for the sake of writing, but also for the sake of sharing. In the latter half of her career, she shares the poems with others. She writes occasional verse. You know, when somebody dies, she sends a poem that's appropriate. You know, there's a sense in which she's engaging with. With those friends, those close friends, and those important people within.
- [18:41]
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- [19:11]
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- [19:42]
Porich Finnerty
Within the world.
- [19:45]
Melvyn Bragg
Fiona Green Is it possible to encapsulate the recurring themes in Amina Dickinson's work?
- [19:53]
Well, there are 1800 poems, as we've said.
- [19:55]
Well, just a few of the recurring themes.
- [19:58]
Well, some. Some of the early editions of Dickinson do categorise the poems under headings like Life, Love, Nature, Time and Eternity. And of course, those are her themes, but they're also the recurring themes of lots of other lyric poets. So to get at perhaps the character of the writing, it's helpful to think of branches of knowledge that intrigued her. So for example, she's really interested in geometry. She writes about circumferences and angles. She's very excited by experimental science, so she thinks about proof and evidence. She's very, very intrigued by geology. And there are volcanoes and earthquakes and rocks in the poetry. And one thing I've noticed that she's very curious about is anatomy. So through those 1800 poems, you will find fingers and feet and bones and brains. So she has this very particular attachment to earthly existence and its corporeal forms, but also an interest in transitions between that physical world and a metaphysical sphere.
- [21:01]
She wants to know what's beyond.
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She does want to know what's beyond, doesn't she? But perhaps most importantly, she's interested in the medium that might translate between those spheres, and that is the medium of language. So above all, Dickinson is interested in.
- [21:18]
How could it translate between those. I'll come to you in one second, I promise. I promise. Linda, Just a second. We just finish this remark. Yeah. How does she. Why does she think it'll translate? What's her reason for thinking it'll translate?
- [21:29]
It becomes in the end for her a theological question because she's interested in transitions between the word of God, the Logos, the word incarnate in Christ, and the faulty language that poets have to use. What she calls this loved philology.
- [21:45]
Linda. Linda Pruden.
- [21:46]
Linda Friedman
Yeah, I think that's. That's absolutely right. She. She has a poem which I think is really helpful, actually, in trying to understand her negotiation of this. This idea of the beyond and what it means to her poetry. And it's a poem which begins, this world is not. Conclusion. A species lies beyond. And I think, you know, if we just stop for a moment to think about the word choices there to describe the. The beyond. Species is a scientific term. So she's immediately bringing these different vocabularies and interests and ways of understanding, ways of negotiating the limits of our understanding, the limits of what can be known, and different ways of fathoming the unknown to bear on this problem. You know, species is a category we can perhaps know and understand. It's a language of science, but it also has its limits.
- [22:36]
Melvyn Bragg
She's also trying to string thoughts together. The thought behind and the thought before. How are they connected?
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Linda Friedman
Yes, quite. And she's very, very interested, and especially in that poem, in how we understand a paradox. She's always. And I think this is an important thing to remember when you're thinking about the way in which Dickinson negotiates these issues, is she's actually often much more interested in satirizing attitudes than she is in satirizing objects, religious attitudes. So in that poem, she satirizes faith as a sort of naive girl. She said, faith laughs and sketches, skips and rallies, blushes if any sea plugs, plucks at a twig of evidence and asks a vane the way, you know. And she's sort of playing on natural theology's desire to look towards evidence as being something you might do in vain. She ends by satirizing the revivalist church. She says, you know, much gesture from the pulpit, strong, Hallelujah's role. But then her final lines are, narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul. I think I've got that right. And I think, you know, you really have a sense there of this. This sort of questing, probing drive as she's playing.
- [23:53]
Melvyn Bragg
And she still returns to the soul. She does. She satirizes it, but she by no means rejects it.
- [23:58]
Linda Friedman
Absolutely, you're quite right that ambivalence is at the heart she satirizes, but she is driven by talk of the resurrection.
- [24:07]
Melvyn Bragg
And I hope we come to that, because it's a wonderful book. But. But come Back to you, Parik. We have a relationship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and with other men. I'm not foraging for anything other than talking about her poetry. But can you describe. Was there the same pattern parabola to all those relationships? One or two of them. That'll do.
- [24:36]
Porich Finnerty
Okay. Well, I guess, Manny, Dickinson's scholars focus on two main relationships with men, and that's Charles Wadsworth, who is a preacher. And Dickinson probably hears him when she goes to Philadelphia in 1855. She hears him. And then there's Samuel Bowles, who I already mentioned, who's the editor of the Springfield Republican. Both were married men, and Dickinson seems to have had some sort of relationship with them, a friendship with them, a very powerful and important friendship with them.
- [25:06]
Melvyn Bragg
Was it a friendship on both sides.
- [25:07]
Porich Finnerty
Or was it her friendship on both sides? I mean, Wadsworth comes to visit her in our. He writes to her, and she has some sort of spiritual crisis, and he's there to help. Samuel Bowles is an editor who's very close to Dickinson's brother Austin. And so they're kind of part of a group in a way. There are two or. Sorry, there are three Master letters, which.
- [25:33]
Melvyn Bragg
They're called Master Letters.
- [25:34]
Porich Finnerty
They're called Master Letters. They basically are Dickinson addressing a master figure. And people wonder, is this Charles Wordsworth that she's writing? Is it Samuel Bowles, or is it some. She made it up.
- [25:46]
Melvyn Bragg
What distinguishes them? Before we go to who they're to. Why are they distinguished and why are they called Master Letters?
- [25:51]
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- [25:51]
Porich Finnerty
So they're addressed Dear Master.
- [25:52]
Melvyn Bragg
Right. Okay. And what distinguishes them?
- [25:54]
Porich Finnerty
Well, in many ways, they're drafts. So there's no evidence that she actually sent them to somebody. What distinguishes them? They're very hyperbolic. They're very metaphoric. She describes herself as Daisy, and she plays as she often does in her poems. She switches positions.
- [26:11]
Melvyn Bragg
But you still haven't got what they're talking about.
- [26:13]
Porich Finnerty
Well, they're basically letters in which Daisy. Daisy addresses Master, and she sort of says, oh, you've abandoned me. Oh, you've rejected me. Have I offended you? Why don't you write to me? Why are you not engaging with me anymore?
- [26:30]
Melvyn Bragg
Self tormentation.
- [26:31]
Porich Finnerty
Self tormenting. And in many ways, you see some of that in the letters or sorry, in the poetry as well. You see speakers who feel abandoned or rejected by this man and this man who seems to be off limits. Forbidden love. You get that in the poetry. You get that in the Master letters. There's some sense that this master is not available to her and that Ultimately, their relationship has to be postponed. So this is one of the reasons that the master letters are so discussed by Dickinson's.
- [27:00]
Melvyn Bragg
Just to preserve the design. You said she went to Philadelphia. She went there once. In Washington once. That before she became a recluse.
- [27:07]
Linda Friedman
Yes.
- [27:07]
Melvyn Bragg
After the age of 25, she went nowhere, out of her house. So just to come back online.
- [27:11]
Porich Finnerty
Yes, yes, Good.
- [27:12]
Melvyn Bragg
So we know we are Fiona Green. Her neighbor is Susan Gilbert. In the next house, there's a homestead and there's a house that her brother built for him. His wife. Him and his wife, of course, Susan Gilbert. And became very, very close, an intense friend for a while now. What was the name? I don't want to. I mean, they were very close friends. And she sent her poems to Susan Gilbert, who sent replies back. As I read from the notes that you three have given me, which were. Which said, no, you must change this, that doesn't work, and that sort of thing. She took notice of it as well. Can you say more?
- [27:43]
Yes. Dickinson's relationship with Susan Gilbert is perhaps it's one of the most important relationships of her life and perhaps one of the most fraught as well. I think it is right to say that Dickinson's early letters to Susan Gilbert are love letters. They're very impassioned, they're very demanding. She's mournful when Susan is away. And of course, one of the things I think they're love letters.
- [28:05]
So love letters generally are letters of declaration. These are letters declaring that. So she declaration that some. That the lover who sends the letter wants something to happen. In that case, what is she wanting to happen in these letters?
- [28:18]
That's the question. Does she want something to happen? And of course, the intriguing aspect of all of Dickinson's letters is that we don't have the other side of the correspondence, because apart from a handful of letters, the letters that Dickinson received were destroyed at her death. So it sometimes feels when you're reading the letters to Susan that she's writing into the void, that there was no response. But of course, that's partly an accident of history. We don't have the replies. They may have been equally impassioned.
- [28:44]
But it is possible to have loving friendships with your sister in law without them being called. I'm just trying to get a dart to the heart of the love idea in this. And then we move on. You can't say because there's no response.
- [28:59]
Perhaps what we should talk about is the really teasing question, which is whether Susan had a part in drafting the poems because Dickinson sent her 250 poems to the house now next door. And many scholars have thought recently that there was a kind of workshop going on between the homestead and the evergreens, that Susan was Dickinson's first editor, in a way. And we do have one example of a poem that Dickinson rewrote because Susan Gilbert wasn't satisfied with it. And we do have Susan's letters in that case. It's a poem called Safe. It begins safe in their Alabama chambers.
- [29:37]
That's right. Inside the tomb and then outside.
- [29:41]
That's right. So she's describing the dead awaiting the resurrection. And then she describes what they're missing, the outside world. And she begins with a very pretty picture of babbling bees and birds. And Susan doesn't like it, and so Dickinson rewrites it. But what's really striking to me is that when Dickinson rewrites it, she has a very firm structure within which she's writing. So she goes from light, laughs the breeze, then she rewrites it. Grand go the years, Then she rewrites it. Spring shakes the sills. What she's got there is a metrical structure and a grammatical structure that keeps the language in motion. And in a sense, her correspondence, whoever they are, also give her a structure within which to think. So to some degree, it seems to me, it doesn't matter if they reply. It doesn't matter what they think. It's that epistolary space that helps her to keep moving.
- [30:34]
Sorry, hold on. You say it doesn't matter if I reply, but you've got this one wonderful example where Susan Gilbert did reply, and Emily Dickinson changed it twice and dramatically changed it. So it did matter that she did reply.
- [30:47]
It matters that she. That she asked Dickinson to change it. But this is not a workshop in which Susan Gilbert is rewriting the poems. And I think she's redirecting the poem.
- [30:58]
I mean, you're the great act expert, and I'm just here. But she's redirecting the poems very spermly and very effectively. I'm asking you first, and then the others can dump in, because it's a fair point.
- [31:13]
She's saying, I am not suited with the second verse. Emily, it seems to me that your universe doesn't hold a peer for that verse. So one of the things she's doing is praising the poem that Dickinson has sent her and wondering if she can herself match up to that achievement of her depiction of the dead awaiting the resurrection.
- [31:34]
Okay, Linda and Parry want to get a new first part.
- [31:36]
Porich Finnerty
Just to say that's the only example we Have. And it may be the case that Dickinson never sent any further examples to Sue. And shortly after that, she writes to Thomas Wentworth Higginson and she sends that poem like. And one of her. I don't know whether it was her first, maybe it was her second version, but was the one that Dickinson was happiest with. I see no evidence, from what I understand of Dickinson, that she changes things in any other example, except for that one.
- [32:02]
Melvyn Bragg
That's because you don't have examples.
- [32:04]
Porich Finnerty
No, there are no examples.
- [32:05]
Melvyn Bragg
No. Well, yeah. So there's no evidence.
- [32:07]
Porich Finnerty
There's no evidence.
- [32:08]
Melvyn Bragg
But you can speculate from that one example, surely. I'll get off this topic. You want to say something, Linda?
- [32:13]
Linda Friedman
I was going to take it. You mentioned something about her correspondence and how we see her kind of developing her thought through her correspondence with these people and her poetic. I was going to sort of take it to the correspondence with Higginson because he was somebody to whom she did send poems as well, clearly asking his opinion on them. And I think that provides, in a way quite. That correspondence provides quite a nice juxtaposition with her correspondence with sue to open up the discussion a little bit to what did these other people.
- [32:46]
Melvyn Bragg
So what did he say?
- [32:48]
Linda Friedman
Well, Higginson and Dickinson had a really interesting relationship through letters which Dickinson kind of set the terms for, really. She first wrote to him in response to an editorial he printed in the Atlantic Monthly, which was Letter to a Young Contributor, where he gave advice to novice poets. And the understanding, I think, was that he was giving advice to poets he thought were women poets, writing to him, often under male pseudonyms. And he told them in this kind of how to get their stuff published. And one of the things he said was, you know, court your editors with soft, soft words and mild persuasions or something like that. You can kind of get the gist, you know, like, get. Get on their good side. And Dickinson then wrote to him with this rather aggressive stance of intimacy. And I think it does make a really nice juxtaposition with the sue letters, because Higginson is somebody with whom she. I don't think she was remotely in love in any way. We would recognize that. But somebody who she wrote to sometimes quite literally verbally baring herself. She, you know, she. She laid. She gave verbal descriptions of herself. Well, the first one, the rather famous one, was I am small like the wren My hair is bald like the chestnut burr and my eyes dark like the sherry in the glass the guest leaves. So, yeah, she's playing and it's funny and she was very witty I think this is something that gets a bit lost in. In the earnestness of Dickinson's scholarship, actually, is her incredibly good sense of humour. And she's describing herself as leftovers, you know, as something cast aside. She plays repeatedly on the idea that she was physically small and she was physically small. She was about 5 foot. She did. She and her sister associated themselves with the Bronte sisters. They had this romantic idea that they were living, as the sisters did, in Haworth.
- [35:01]
Melvyn Bragg
Can we get to the American Civil Warwick, which. Those years. Amherst was very distant from the Civil War, but like everywhere else in America, was involved. And of course, people went there, took part in the war, came back dead sometimes. In one particular instance where she was wrote about, and she was particularly active as a poet at that time. Is there a connection?
- [35:22]
Porich Finnerty
Yes, I think so. I mean, for many, many years, I guess, Dickinson scholars have focused on. On Dickinson's poems about suffering and death and have read them, as you know, about Dickinson. Whereas I think more recently, people have thought about the way in which Dickinson is writing so many poems between these years of the Civil War, and they've looked again at those poems of suffering and death and thought, well, actually, maybe Dickinson is imagining what it would be like to be a soldier or what it would be like to have somebody in your family lost in the war. There are other poems. For example, the name of it is Autumn, where Dickinson turns autumn into a bloodbath, you know, where there's veins and arteries being slashed and basins of blood. So there's a clear sense in which Dickinson, reading about the war in newspapers and periodicals, she's bringing them into her poems. She's bringing the imagery into her poems. There's this poem, My Portion of Defeat Today, where she talks about piles of solid moan and there's a sense of.
- [36:21]
Melvyn Bragg
The men with straight backs.
- [36:22]
Porich Finnerty
That's right. They never stand up again. And this piles of solid moan. And every time I think of that myself, I think of the battle and I think of the moaning bodies that haven't been taken away to the hospital yet that are dying. Dickinson seems to capture that way out way in Amherst. She seems to be able to imagine what it's like to be somebody else, what it's like to be a soldier.
- [36:43]
Melvyn Bragg
It's wonderful opening that. And the boys with bright broken. You want to say something about lovely piano.
- [36:48]
Yes. The curious thing about that wonderful poem, it's a very, very vivid picture, an unflinching picture of dead bodies, scraps of prayer and death's surprise stamped visible in stone. But It's a poem that begins, my portion is defeat today. So actually, curiously, she's using that very, very material description of a battlefield as a trope to talk about her own inward conflict. And sometimes during the Civil War, it's not clear what is standing for what. There is a very moving letter, actually, about one of the greatest losses to Amherst during the Civil War, and that was the death in battle of Fraser Stearns, who was the son of the president of Amherst. And when she writes about the death of Fraser Stearns, Dickinson uses the resources of religious language and literary language to sort of wrap up and to convey this terrible loss in a comforting way. So she imagines his dying moments as though he's a Christ figure. He asks for water. He dies in his commanding officer's arms. She then, when she imagines his funeral, she draws in the charge of the Light Brigade. Tennyson's poem actually features quite often in poetry.
- [38:08]
How did she get there?
- [38:09]
She talks about the cortege passing through Amherst, and she says, classmates to the right of him, classmates to the left of him. You can hear her with Tennyson's cannon to the right of them, and so on. But then she says something really disturbing. After all this kind of contrast, comfortable, more comfortable rhetoric, she says, no one was allowed to look on Fraser. The doctors wouldn't allow it. So there you get to the heart of it. What is there in that closed casket? What is there under the wrappings?
- [38:43]
That's right, the casket is closed so that nobody could see how damaged this boy was. Yes. Yes. That's very powerful. Linda, you wanted to come in?
- [38:51]
I did.
- [38:52]
Linda Friedman
I think it's true that she's fascinating by, and very kind of emotionally connected to the idea that people on the battlefields and people around the battlefields and people who have men on the battlefields are being repeatedly bereaved with a kind of speed that they can't keep abreast of. And one of the indications, I think, we get through this is again, through her correspondence with Higginson, who was a military man. He was. He led one of the first army regiments of black soldiers, actually, in the American Civil War. And he was away fighting for a good period of the time in which he knew Dickinson. And actually, during this period, he, because he's presumably really quite busy, isn't writing to her so much. And she writes to him, you know, rather piqued, actually, that he isn't writing to her. And you can feel in those letters her frustration, actually, that she is quite removed from what's going on and that she feels a distance that she's trying to bridge possibly in, you know, in her poetry between people who are actually living those day to day experiences on the battlefield and her own empathic and kind of intellectual engagement with the Civil War when she is so far away from the reality of that fighting. And she does feel it as a distance, but what brings her into it is that she has, and she knows she has a very, very profound understanding of grief and bereavement.
- [40:35]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes. That features again and again and again. And also this reclusive woman actually was writing to people all over the place, was bringing the world outside inside the entire time. Nothing more, so never more so than the Civil War, which is why we're running it. Porik, where do you find her? Where do you find her? At her most vivid, for me, it's.
- [41:00]
Porich Finnerty
The imagery of violence. Actually. Some of the volcano poems, particularly one the of of her most famous poems, My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun, in which My life had stood a loaded gun. So it's a poem basically spoken by a gun. It's spoken by somebody who is engaging with a sort of a master figure. Master, an owner who identifies it. So the gun is of potential power. It's waiting to be identified by the master. And once it is identified, the gun serves the master and goes out, hunts the doe, does things to protect the master. And we have then a very strange relationship if we assume the speaker is a woman, a woman gun who is protecting the male figure rather than the other way around. And then the poem ends. Though I than he may longer live, he longer must than I, for I have but the power to kill without the power to die. And then Dickinson is bringing up the idea of being an artifact of being an object, being of use to somebody else. And then by being that, not having the opportunity of immortality of a life that humanity would have. I think for me, that's the potential power, the secret power that is very, very important in Dickinson's volcano poems as well.
- [42:22]
Melvyn Bragg
We're coming back again, Fiona, to this, as it were. She goes around, but in the end it comes back to a very strong religious core, doesn't it? And particularly the resurrection, particularly the beyond. And there's a poem about them in the alabaster. Can you talk about her preoccup? Is it a preoccupation?
- [42:42]
You tell me, a preoccupation with what happens after death? Yes, she imagined. One of the most curious poems of hers is the one that imagines itself being spoken by a dead woman. So a fly buzzed When I died. So that's the dying moments. The speaker. The speaker is dying and there interposes a fly between herself and the window. And there Dickinson is thinking about, partly about the material world and the density of the material world still being a kind of veil between her and what lies beyond. But she's also thinking very physically about what happens when people die. So thinking of a fly buzzing in a death room has some quite unpleasant connotations. So again, I think she is very attached to physical life and mournful about what is lost when the physical body is left behind. And that comes through very much in her letters of condolence, too. She's very good at imagining, almost too good at imagining what a parent loses when a child.
- [43:55]
What do you mean almost too good? I don't get it.
- [43:57]
Well, she writes letters of condolence. For example, there's a letter to her sister in law when Susan's son Gilbert dies at the age of eight. And it's a terribly moving letter and I'm not sure it would be comforting because it is so wonderful at depicting the child alive. She's wonderfully good at depicting a playful child, remembering the things he said. And what she tries to do in that poem is make this curtailed life seem complete.
- [44:29]
I get it. Yeah. Linda, we're near the end now, but. So she dies and the story. Massive letter. Sorry, this massive poem, nearly 1800 discovered. And people think her sister in law and friends think they should be published. Let's cut to the. They are published first in a ward, then another ward, then another ward, and they become very popular and so on. Can you tell us, can you give us some idea of the first readers, the early readers of these poems, by someone who'd been known, if at all, as an eccentric?
- [45:03]
Linda Friedman
Yeah. Well, the first edition of her poems was published in 1891 and edited by Higginson and by Mabel Loomis Todd, who it was slightly delayed. It was five years after her death because of a bit of a family quarrel, because Mabel Loomis Todd had been having an affair with Dickinson's brother. So that didn't go down terribly well. But once they finally did come out, Higginson wrote the introduction in and he presented. Sorry, Higginson wrote the introduction and he presented Dickinson as something of a. He compared her to William Blake, actually, and presented her as a painterly poet in order to excuse the unorthodoxies of her form, because I think he realized that this. That these poems would be rather startling to people.
- [45:50]
Melvyn Bragg
But they took to them.
- [45:52]
Linda Friedman
Yes, they did.
- [45:53]
Melvyn Bragg
Full of Dashes. Well, not.
- [45:54]
Linda Friedman
No, he normalized in the beginning originally.
- [45:59]
Melvyn Bragg
And now back again, full of dashes and such as. But they normalized at the beginning.
- [46:03]
Linda Friedman
They normalized.
- [46:03]
Melvyn Bragg
They gave.
- [46:04]
Linda Friedman
He gave them titles. He put in what we would recognize as conventional punctuation, full stops, commas.
- [46:09]
Melvyn Bragg
And quite soon, they just took off. I'm sorry.
- [46:11]
Grainger Advertiser
They did.
- [46:11]
Linda Friedman
I mean, partly.
- [46:12]
Melvyn Bragg
And I've got to ask Par, if I can move finally to you for briefly, how has it built her reputation? You make huge claims for it in your notes.
- [46:21]
Porich Finnerty
Okay. Well, I think Dickinson is a global figure today, as she said. This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me. Well, I think the world is engaging with Dickinson now. We've got translations in French, in Japanese, in Chinese, in Polish, in German. She's an international figure. She's recent film from Terence Davis. We've novels about Dickinson in her life, fictionalized versions.
- [46:43]
Melvyn Bragg
And we had. We have to leave it. I'm very sorry. Thank you very much, Fiona Green, Linda Friedman, and Parik Finnerty. Next week will be Jacob discussing Louis Pasteur, the father of microbiology, whose vaccines have saved thousands of people. Thank you very much for listening.
- [46:57]
Linda Friedman
And the In Our Time podcast gets.
- [46:59]
Melvyn Bragg
Some extra time now with a few.
- [47:01]
Linda Friedman
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [47:04]
Melvyn Bragg
So, what did we miss out that was important?
- [47:07]
I wanted to come back to something Porrek said, actually, which was that Dickinson hadn't wanted to publish because it seems very contradictory to me. You know, she sends 40 poems to Samuel Bolt, who's the editor of a newspaper that publishes poetry. She doesn't say, will you print them? But she must have known that he might. And then again, she says things like, publication is as foreign to my nature as firmament to Finn, she says, which is very riddling little thought.
- [47:35]
Porich Finnerty
I think that's a brilliant question. I think for women in the day, obviously, celebrity and fame is something that's problematic, but you can have it as long as it got for you by somebody else. So if Samuel Bowles publishes her poems, or if sue sends poems to somebody, then it's somebody else that's creating your fame. Dickinson said, if fame belonged to me, I could not escape her. If she does not, the longest day will miss me on the chase. So I think for Dickinson, I think she doesn't mind being published as long as it's somebody else that's doing it. It's not her actively seeking it out, because that would go against her sense of privacy or sense of reticence. And I think that would be my answer.
- [48:12]
Linda Friedman
I think there's also a distinction between posterity and fame. And I think posterity is something that we. That I think she definitely wanted. I don't think you keep your poems that carefully. You make them into little books like that. You think so much about publication, I mean, because she does write a lot of poems about how. How she doesn't, you know, you can read them quite easily about how she doesn't want publication. And it is a little bit. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. You know, publication is the auction of the mind of man. It's very hyperbolic, but it fits into.
- [48:42]
Porich Finnerty
Being a woman in that.
- [48:43]
Linda Friedman
Of that class.
- [48:44]
Porich Finnerty
And yeah, it fits a narrative.
- [48:45]
Linda Friedman
But she's good at styling herself. She's good at, you know, performing certain roles like that.
- [48:52]
Melvyn Bragg
Perhaps the question actually isn't, shouldn't be so much why didn't she publish? Because we kind of get stuck on that, don't we? But what were the poems for? And that, in a sense, I wonder if they. The value of the poems to Dickinson, in large part, is that they're her way of thinking, that she has this extraordinarily rhythmical language that is in her head in which she can turn over problems that perplex her, especially when the soul is in pain, she says, but also the soul at leisure begs you give it work. So poetry is her occupation in this very strong sense.
- [49:29]
Linda Friedman
Sense.
- [49:29]
Melvyn Bragg
It keeps this very agile mind occupied. And in that way, it may be a secondary question whether anybody else is going to read it.
- [49:38]
Linda Friedman
And I think it's worth saying as well that we call them poems and we have been used to call them lyrics. She didn't use the word lyric ever. She sometimes called them poems. The word she used most often was thought. So I think it's absolutely right to think of her poems as thinking exercises and ways that we can. Poems we can think with if.
- [50:02]
Melvyn Bragg
If you like any idea how she passed her time and she's sitting writing, but you can't even. 1700 poems in quite a long writing lifetime is. Isn't all that much time at a desk unless you write them all. So, I mean, I'm being not facetious, but trying to get hold of what did she do? I mean, did she sit at her desk and read? Did she sit in an armchair?
- [50:21]
She did read a lot. And she. She read aloud. She read the newspapers to her sisters, to her sister. She.
- [50:29]
Porich Finnerty
You know, we shouldn't assume that Dickinson is writing about herself. And I think, you know, Dickinson was a great fan of Robert Browning, of dramatic lyrics and Therefore, many of those poems could be written from the perspective of somebody else. And, you know, we mentioned the soldier poem, but there's. There's a poem twas. Twas just decided this time last year I died, where Dickinson seems to imagine being a soldier who has died and then has the poem present the year that the soldier misses, you know. And so I think you have a sense of Dickinson not as just somebody who is writing about herself, but who's thinking about others, who's imagining herself from somebody else's perspective. And that's something I think I would like to stress, you know, to listeners or to.
- [51:13]
Linda Friedman
And I think you see it grammatically as well. One of her favorite hinges, if you like, in grammatical hinges is the simile in her poems. And this is because, I mean, she begins one poem, we see comparatively, she begins another. Unto like story Trouble has enticed me, which is exactly, I think what Porik is saying, which is. Which I agree with entirely, that she is looking to perspective.
- [51:39]
Melvyn Bragg
What about the phrase the cleaving of the mind? I think that might take us somewhere towards the terror.
- [51:44]
I felt a cleaving in my mind as if my brain had split. She will more often write about the brain than about the mind. Actually, she has them together there. I felt a cleaving in my mind as if my brain had split. That's a terrible headache. Perhaps she was physically fragile in many ways. So there's been a suggestion that she suffered from epilepsy and that that might in some way diagnose the fitfulness of the poetry and that obviously we can't be sure about those kinds of claims. But what she has in that poem, when she's trying to join the thought behind unto the thought before. What she has in that poem is a perfect ballad stanza. That's what holds it together when your mind is falling apart.
- [52:33]
All the forms were sort of hymns, ballads. I can see why she should keep compared with Blake because of the apparent simplicity of the style in both cases.
- [52:41]
Yes, yes. So she learns from Isaac Watts, amongst others.
- [52:46]
Linda Friedman
I mean, she plays with common metre. That's. And common meter is the meter that you get in something like Amazing Grace. That's. So you've got eight syllables, then six syllables, stressed, unstressed. But she plays with them. So she doesn't always have eight syllables. Sometimes. Sometimes she has seven. So she's a little. She's a little bit unorthodox with the form.
- [53:05]
Melvyn Bragg
She compared to the sort of radical experiment that she makes with grammar and syntax and vocabulary and simile actually the stanza form is the. Is the conventional thing. She bends it and twists it a little bit and does some fun things with rhyme. But that's the. That's the structure, I think.
- [53:23]
I think our producer wants to make you an offer you're not allowed to refuse.
- [53:26]
Frank Skinner
Really?
- [53:26]
Melvyn Bragg
Sorry to interrupt that, but would you.
- [53:27]
Frank Skinner
Like tea or coffee?
- [53:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Coffee. Coffee, yes.
- [53:29]
Porich Finnerty
Coffee, please.
- [53:30]
Grainger Advertiser
This episode of In Our Time with.
- [53:32]
Melvyn Bragg
Melvin Bragg was produced by Simon Tillotson and first broadcast in May 2017.