Poetess emily. Emily dickinson - poems

Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA - May 15, 1886, ibid.), American lyric poet.

Dickinson was the second of three children in the family; they stayed close all their lives. The younger sister Lavinia lived in her parents' house and did not marry, and the older brother Austin lived in the next house after marrying his friend Emily. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler, was one of the founders of Amherst College, and her father, Edward Dickinson, served as the college treasurer (1835-1872). A lawyer and member of Congress from 1853-55, he was strict and stingy with affection, although not an evil father. Emily's mother was not close with the children.

Dickinson attended Amherst High School at Mount Holyoke Seminary for Women (1847–48). The seminary had a compulsory religious education along with the usual, and Dickinson was pressured to make her a practicing Christian. She, however, resisted and, although many of her poems speak of God, she professed skepticism until her death. For all her doubts, she was prone to strong religious feelings; this conflict gave her work a special tension.

Strongly impressed by the works of R.W. Emerson and E. Bronte, Dickinson began writing poetry herself around 1850. Her literary mentor was Benjamin F. Newton, a young man who studied law at her father's office. Only a few of her poems can be dated to the period before 1858, when she began to rewrite them in small, hand-sewn books. From her letters of the 1850s. the image of a lively, witty, slightly shy young woman arises. In 1855, Dickinson traveled with her sister to Washington to visit her father, who was then in Congress. On the way, they stopped in Philadelphia, where she listened to the famous preacher, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth - he was to become her "dearest friend on this earth." He was a somewhat romantic image; it was said that he had experienced great sorrow in the past, and his eloquence in the pulpit only emphasized his tendency to meditate alone. He and Dickinson entered into a correspondence on spiritual matters; perhaps his orthodox Calvinism in contrast well set off her rational constructions. His harsh, strict faith shook the beautiful-minded notions of the good world that were characteristic of Emerson and other transcendentalists.

In 1850, Dickinson began to correspond with Dr. Josiah J. Holland, his wife, and Samuel Bowles. Holland and Bowles edited the Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), a newspaper that focused on literature and even printed poetry. The correspondence lasted for many years, after 1850 Dickinson addressed most of the letters to Mrs. Holland, a woman capable of paying tribute to the sophistication and wit of their author. Dickinson tried to interest Bowles with her poetry, and it was a big blow to her when he, a man of clear mind, but conservative tastes, failed to appreciate them.

By the end of the 1850s, during a period of increased creative activity, she fell in love with a man whom she named the Master in the drafts of three letters. It is impossible to identify him with any of the poet's friends, but it could be Bowles or Wadsworth. This love shines through in the lines of her poems, “They lost their rights to me” and, “What a delight! What a delight! " Other verses reveal the collapse of this love, its gradual purification and development into love for Christ and spiritual union with him.

Poems by Dickinson, 1850s relatively traditional in feel and form, but since about 1860 they have become experimental both in language and prosody, although in metric terms they are largely based on the poetry of the English author of church hymns I. Watts, Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Dickinson's predominant poetic form is the iambic tricotrain quatrain, described in one of Watts's books, which was in Dickinson's home library. She also resorted to many other poetic forms and added complexity to even the simplest dimensions of church hymns, constantly changing the rhythm of the verse in accordance with the plan: sometimes slowing it down, then speeding it up, then interrupting it. She renewed versification, widely using imprecise rhymes, deviating to varying degrees from the true ones, which also helped to convey the idea in all its tension and internal contradiction. Striving for aphoristic brevity, she cleared poetic speech from unnecessary words and made sure that those who remained were alive and accurate. She was fluent with syntax and liked to put a familiar word in an unexpected context, in order to puzzle the reader, attract his attention and force him to discover a new meaning in this word.

On April 15, 1862, Dickinson sent a letter and four poems to the writer T.W. Higginson, asking him if there was "life" in her poetry. Higginson advised her not to publish, but acknowledged the originality of the poems and remained Dickinson's "mentor" until the end of her life. After 1862, Dickinson rejected all attempts by friends to bring her poetry to the public. As a result, only seven of her poems were published during Dickinson's lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican.

The peak of Dickinson's creative activity - about 800 poems - fell on the years of the Civil War. Although she looked for the themes of her poetry in herself, and not in external circumstances, the alarming situation of the war years was probably transmitted to her work, increasing its internal tension. The hardest was 1862, when her friends were far away and in danger: Bowles was on treatment in Europe, Wadsworth received a new parish and departed for San Francisco, Higginson served as an officer in the army of the northerners. Dickinson developed an eye disease and had to spend several months in 1864 and 1865 in treatment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Returning to Amherst, she did not leave anywhere, and since the end of the 1860s. never went outside the house and the area adjacent to it.

After the Civil War, Dickinson's poetry began to decline, but she increasingly strove to build her life according to the laws of art. In her letters, which sometimes reach the perfection of her poems, the poet's everyday experience is captured with classical aphorism. When, for example, an acquaintance insulted her by sending him and her sister one letter for two, she replied: “A common plum is no longer a plum. Politeness did not allow me to pretend to be pulp, and the bone is not to my taste. " By 1870, Dickinson wore only white and rarely went out to visit; her retreat was jealously guarded by her sister. In August 1870 Higginson visited Amherst and described Dickinson as "a little ordinary woman," reddish and all white, who handed him flowers as a "calling card" and spoke in a "soft, frightened, gasping, childish voice."

Dickinson's last years have been marred by the deaths of many of her loved ones. She suffered the hardest death of her father and 8-year-old nephew Gilbert, which was reflected in her most heartfelt letters. Judge Lord of Salem, Massachusetts, with whom Dickinson fell in love in 1878, was her father's closest friend. The drafts of her letters to her beloved reveal a tender later feeling that the Lord reciprocated. Jackson, a poet and famous novelist, understood the greatness of Dickinson's poems and tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to print them.

Shortly after Dickinson's death, her sister Lavinia decided to publish her poems. In 1890, Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by T. W. Higginson and M. L. Todd, was published. Several other collections were published between 1891 and 1957, including Dickinson's unpublished poems.

The main themes of Dickinson's poems, expressed in the language of confidential home conversation, are love, death and nature. The contrast between the poet's calm, secluded life in the house where she was born and died, and the depth and intensity of her laconic poetry has sparked a lot of talk about her personality and personal life. Dickinson's poems and letters portray a passionate, intelligent woman and an impeccable master who turned into art not only his poetry, but also correspondence and life itself.

Until the age of 25, she led a life typical of a young girl of her time. She did not marry and, according to the custom of the old maidens, gradually moved away from society. By the 1860s, Dickinson had become almost a recluse, and after the 1870s she never left home. Probably, this form was taken by her aspiration of every artist for solitude, since it was then that she seriously devoted herself to poetry. It cannot be ruled out that there were elements of religious hermitism in her rejection of the bustle of the world. The only literary person with whom she maintained a relationship was the writer and critic T.W. Higginson.

Getting acquainted with the complete collection of her lyrics (1,775 works), you are convinced that only about a tenth of them are real works of art, and 25-50 of them can be ranked as masterpieces. These are small poems that amaze with the beauty of form and richness of thought. Dickinson varies several main themes in her work, and her works can be divided into 4 groups. The first consists of poems, which deal with the principles of her artistic creativity (strategy of thought, its embodiment in words, the ratio of "periphery" and "center" in the hierarchy of important poetic themes) and about the poetess's perception of the world, i.e. about what in this world is poetically valuable to her. She reveals to the reader what poems she wants to write and how they should be perceived. The last point of her aesthetic theory - artistic perception - is associated with the second group of poems dedicated to nature. In the simplest of them, an attempt is made to cover the whole variety of natural forms and phenomena; when it turns out that this is practically impossible, she creates a cycle of more complex works about the disappearance of these forms; further, having discovered for herself that the main property of matter is motion, she writes a number of original poems in which nature is presented as a process. If the outside world eludes the poet, Dickinson returns to his only reality - the inner world, as evidenced by the third group of her poems, where the two poles of human emotions - ecstasy and despair - are embodied, they are much more productive poetically than more moderate feelings. Finally, since ecstasy and despair are inseparable from the spiritual aspirations of the individual and her expectation of an inevitable end, they inevitably introduce another theme into Dickinson's work - a person's hope for immortality, and the poems of this section constitute the pinnacle of the poet's work.

An academic collection of Dickinson's poems in 3 volumes was published by T. Johnson in 1955; he also published in 1958 a three-volume edition of her letters.

Out of hundreds of wonderful poems I have read by Emily Dickinson, I have chosen the most beloved ones here, accompanying them with an excellent, in my opinion, translation into Russian. I could not find the authors of several translated verses.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson(1830, Amherst, Massachusetts - 1886, in the same place) - American poet.

During her lifetime, she published less than ten poems (most sources name the numbers from seven to ten) out of one thousand eight hundred, written by her. Even what was published underwent serious editorial revision to bring the poems in line with the poetic norms of the time. Dickinson's poems have no analogues in her contemporary poetry. Their lines are short, titles are generally missing, and unusual punctuation and capitalization are common. Many of her poems contain the motive of death and immortality, the same plots permeate her letters to friends.

Although most of her acquaintances knew that Dickinson wrote poetry, the scale of her work became known only after her death.

The spider - from itself - spins
Silver ducks -
Unwinding like a dancer
Shimmering skein -
His calling is to decorate
The wretchedness of our walls
As if from emptiness - creating
Your wondrous tapestry -
From thought - to weave the whole world -
And a rainbow - from the darkness -
So that in an hour - hang down in a lump
From the mistress's broom -

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

The Dickinson family held a venerable position in Amherst, Massachusetts. The poet's grandfather was one of the founders of Amherst College, where her father served as treasurer, simultaneously practicing law and political activities - he was once even elected to the US House of Representatives. The grown children did not fly out of the nest: the older brother Austin, having married, lived in a neighboring house, the younger sister Lavinia, like Emily, did not marry.

The main event of Emily Dickinson's youth was, apparently, friendship with a young lawyer Benjamin Newton, who was practicing in her father's office. He directed the reading, taught to admire great poetry, to understand the beauty and greatness of the world. He left Amherst in 1850 and died three years later. Much later, Dickinson recalled: "When I was just a girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality, but he dared to get too close to him and never returned."

In separation from Newton, Emily matured the idea of ​​devoting her life to poetry. But after the death of an older friend, the source of her poems dried up. A new breath came in the late 1850s, at the height of an epistolary romance with a forty-year-old Philadelphia priest, Charles Wadsworth. Whether it was love, emotional attachment or mystical closeness, one thing is clear - it was a feeling of exceptional intensity. It gave rise to a real creative explosion: it is estimated that in just three years, from 1862 to 1864, she wrote more than seven hundred poems.

In the same 1862, it happened that Emily Dickinson began a correspondence with the famous New England writer Thomas Higginson, who became her constant correspondent and “poetry mentor” for many years, as well as the publisher of her first collection of poems - but after the death of the poetess.

I put the words “poetic mentor” in quotes because their relationship was peculiar: in each letter Emily asked Higginson for assessment and advice, called herself a humble student, but never took his advice and continued to do everything in her own way. And he pointed to the mistakes and flaws in her poems - incorrect rhythms and rhymes, strange grammar - everything that was Dickinson's individual, in many ways innovative manner, and that only critics of the 20th century were able to adequately assess.

Emily Dickinson's literary heritage is about eighteen hundred poems, most of which were found in a dresser after her death, and three volumes of letters, many of which are no less remarkable than her poems.

Grigory Kruzhkov

(from the preface to E.D.'s own translations of poems)

**************************************** **************************************** ******************

***
They say that "Time assuages" -
Time never did assuage-
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age-

Time is a Test of Trouble,
But not a Remedy-
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady-

They said: "Time heals."
Never heals.
Suffering, like muscles
Only the years will strengthen.

But time is like a test
For those who survived.
Has it gotten easier over the years?
Well, that means he wasn’t sick.

(translation?)

Too few the mornings be,
Too scant the nigthts.
No lodging can be had
For the delights
That come to earth to stay,
But no apartment find
And ride away.

The days are too short here
And the nights are meager
So they can
Focus
Delight that they wanted to live here,
But did not find shelter
And they flew away.

(trans. Leonid Sitnik)

The Road was lit with Moon and star—
The Trees were bright and still—
Descried I — by the distant Light
A Traveler on a Hill—
To magic Perpendiculars
Ascending, though Terrene—
Unknown his shimmering ultimate—
But he indorsed the sheen—

A star over the field - and the moon
Silvered the slope -
The distant traveler on the hill
Surrounded by radiance -
What heights he is storming -
The sad son of the plains?
But this distance and milky light -
He justified - one -

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

To mend each tattered Faith
There is a needle fair
Though no appearance indicate
"Tis threaded in the Air

And though it do not wear
As if it never Tore
"Tis very comfortable indeed
And spacious as before

To neatly conceive
Torn Faith -
Need an invisible thread -
Out of thin air - for example -

Invisible needle stitch -
Take a look - that's how clever -
And again she is intact -
Shines like a new thing!

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

How much the present moment means
To those who "ve nothing more -
The Fop - the Carp - the Atheist -
Stake an entire store
Upon a Moment "s shallow Rim
While their commuted Feet
The torrents of eternity
Do all but inundate -

How much does a moment mean to those
Who is rich only in them!
Rake - Dandy - Atheist -
Cherished - like a treasure -
One fleeting moment -
While at your feet
Boils - flooding them -
Immortality stream -

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The wrinkled maker lie

Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria -

One random line
Sometimes it catches the eye -
When the creator is cold and a trace -
The infection of phrases is strong -

And after whole centuries,
Maybe you will breathe -
The fog of that despair -
That malaria shivers.

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

I held a Jewel in my fingers -
And went to sleep -
The day was warm, and winds were prosy -
I said "" Twill keep "-

I woke - and chid my honest fingers,

The Gem was gone -

And now, an Amethyst remembrance

Is all I own -

I squeezed amethyst in my hand -
And went to bed -
“He's mine, - I whispered through my sleep -
There is no evil in him. "
Woke up - where is my talisman?
Disappeared - in a dream -
Only amethyst sadness -
Remained for me -

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

If you were coming in the Fall,
I "d brush the Summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As Housewives do, a Fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I "d wind the months in balls ---
And put them each in separate Drawers,
For fear the numbers fuse ---

If only Centuries, delayed,
I "d count them on my Hand,
Subtracting, til my fingers dropped
Into Van Dieman "s Land,

If certain, when this life was out ---
That yours and mine, should be
I "d toss it yonder, like a Rind,
And take Eternity ---

But, now, uncertain of the length
Of this, that is between,
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee ---
That will not state --- its sting.

Whisper that you will come in the fall -
And I'll brush off the summer
Like a bored bumblebee
Sticking to the window
And if you have to wait a year -
To speed up the count -
I wind the months into balls
And I'll put them in the chest of drawers.
And if there are centuries ahead,
I'll be waiting - let it be
Ages float like clouds
To the overseas paradise -
And if the meeting is destined
Not here - in another world,
I'll rip off life - like a husk -
And I will choose eternity -
But I - alas - do not know the term -
And the day is hidden in the fog -
And waiting is like a wasp
Hungry - sarcastic.

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

It dropped so low - in my Regard -
I heard it hit the Ground -
And go to pieces on the Stones
At bottom of my Mind -
Yet blamed the Fate that flung it - less
Than I denounced Myself,
For entertaining Plated Wares
Upon My Sliver Shelf -

Has fallen so low - in my eyes -
I saw - how he -
Suddenly broke into pieces -
Making a sad ringing -
But it was not fate that I scolded -
And only oneself -
What she has lifted up is such an object -
To such a height -

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

Not all die early, dying young—
Maturity of fate
Is consummated equally
In Ages, or a Night—

A Hoary Boy, I "ve known to drop
Whole statured — by the side
Of Junior of Fourscore— "twas Act
Not Period — that died.

Not everyone who died young
Untimely wilted -
There is a young man - gray-haired,
Childish - an old man.
Fate is fulfilling
Who managed to become himself -
Acts account, not years
Decides - who is ripe.

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

To pile like Thunder to its close
Then crumble grand away
While Everything created hid
This - would be Poetry -

Or Love - the two coeval come -
We both and neither prove -
Experience either and consume -
For None see God and live -

Pile up worlds - like thunder -
And blow them to dust -
So that everyone and everything shuddered -
This is about poetry -

And about love - they are equal -
Both - Flash -
And - Darkness - who saw God -
That will not be alive -

(per. Grigory Kruzhkov)

The Dying need but little, Dear,
A Glass of Water's all,
A flower's unobtrusive face
To punctuate the Wall,

A Fan, perhaps, a Friend's Regret
And Certainty that one
No color in the rainbow
Perceive, when you are gone.

What do we need in the hour of death?
For lips - a sip of water,
For pity and beauty -
There's a flower on the nightstand
A parting glance - a soft sigh -
And - so that for someone's eyes -
From now on, the color of the skies has faded
And the light of dawn went out.

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

Thought dies, they say
Only spoken.
And I will say
What is this moment
She is born.

EMILY DICKINSON

Dear Jerome Salinger, Harper Lee and Thomas Pynchon, take a look! In the pantheon of literary recluses, you all come second. The first belongs to the humble poet in Amherst, Massachusetts, who brought the recluse author to life long before you three star-avoiding writers were born.

How much did Emily Dickinson love solitude? So much so that often, "visiting" friends, talked to them through the door, staying in the next room. So much so that when she saw strangers approaching her house, she ran away screaming: “Janet! Donkeys! " (quoted from David Copperfield, her favorite novel). So much so that friends who have come a long way to see her often make her not in the mood to communicate. “Emily, you damn rogue! - Dickinson scolded her friend Samuel Bowles in one of these situations. - Stop fooling! I came to you from Springfield itself, so get down immediately! " Emily gave up, left her room and as if nothing had happened started a conversation with Bowles.

Why did Dickinson take such pleasure in hermitage? She usually answered such questions evasively, with gestures depicting how she locked herself in her room, and making it clear that such a turn of the key is an expression of maximum freedom. Some associate her escape from the world with the psychological consequences of unhappy love. Others believe that in this way she reacted to the death of her dog Carlo, who always accompanied Emily on her walks around the city. Maybe she was just trying to avoid church services. “Some people honor Sunday by going to church,” Dickinson once remarked, “and I honor it by staying at home.” Whatever the reason, in 1869 the poet openly declared: "I will never leave my father's land and enter no other house or city." And she kept this vow for the rest of her life.

To be honest, Emily Dickinson's isolation from the world was not so absolute. She continued to communicate by ponte with her friends and relatives. She played the role of a happy housewife - she baked bread, took care of the garden and greenhouses, looked after her bedridden mother. She also tried to establish contact with the neighbour's children, lowering them from the second floor window of all sorts of treats in a basket. Sometimes Emily left the house and took part in their games, but as soon as she noticed the approach of an adult, she immediately ran away and again dissolved in her world of darkness and loneliness.

By the way, it was a really dark world - both literally and figuratively. Modern researchers believe that Dickinson suffered from rheumatic fever - a painful inflammation of the iris of the eye, forcing her to avoid any kind of light. Dickinson attended the Women's Seminary of Mount Holyoke College, but when she was asked to sign an oath of adherence to the Christian faith, she refused and left the school. Finding no solace in her studies or religion, Emily turned to poetry. Dickinson wrote about two thousand nameless, succinct and vague poems, using her own unique syntax and punctuation. During the life of the poetess, only a few works were published, and even those did not cause a wide response. Critics scoffed at the "incoherence and formlessness of her verses," describing Dickinson as "an eccentric, dreamy, semi-literate recluse, living in one of the seedy villages of New England, who cannot disregard the laws of gravity and grammar with impunity." A columnist from the At-Lantic magazine was even less restrained in his epithets: "These poems clearly belong to the pen of a hypersensitive, withdrawn, unable to control herself, albeit a well-bred hysterical old maid."

It is not surprising that the poetess left an order after her death to burn all of her works. Her sister Lavinia tried to fulfill Emily's will, but, having already set on fire hundreds of papers and letters, she opened one of the poetess's writing desk drawers and found a needlework box containing more than a thousand handwritten poems - some were scrawled on the back of the recipes, others just on some old scraps of paper. None of the poems had a title or serial number; many were only fragments of something larger. With the help of her compassionate neighbor Mabel Loomis, Lavinia managed to get them ready for publication. The first small collection of poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890. Six copies were sold in five months. More than twenty years have passed since the beautiful woman from Amherst hid from the world in her refuge, and finally her innermost thoughts about life, death, God and the power of imagination became the property of the whole world. Half a century later, Dickinson will enter the pantheon of America's greatest poets.

WHITE MIRACLE

From the surviving daguerreotypes, a pale, thin and completely harmless-looking woman looks at us. However, she knew how to make people nervous. “I have not met anyone who would have drained my mental strength in such a way,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her literary mentor, confessed after the first meeting with Emily. - Yak did not touch her with a finger, and nevertheless she seemed to have drained me to the bottom. I am glad that we are not neighbors. " Perhaps the best example of Dickinson's mannerisms was her legendary all-white outfits - perhaps they served as a subtle hint of a Puritan understanding of sin, or maybe they just gave an excuse not to leave the house and not go to expensive tailors. However, whatever the true reasons, Dickinson remained true to her snow-white wardrobe to the end. After her death, she was dressed in a white flannel shroud and buried in a white coffin.

JUST RELAX AND YOU WILL HEAR ...

There is a popular belief that almost any poem by Dickinson can be sung to the tune of the "Yellow Rose of Texas" or the religious anthem "Amazing Grace." Maybe the seer poet transmits some signals to us through space and time? No, it’s unlikely. It's just that most of her works are written in iambic tetrameter, the same rhythm is used in the songs mentioned.

WORD IN LETTER "L"

When the neighbors called Dickinson “talented, but not like everyone else,” they may not even have suspected how right they were. Scientists are increasingly expressing the point of view that America's favorite, the poet, the blue stocking, was in fact a hidden lesbian. As evidence of the secret life that Emily Dickinson allegedly led, supporters of lesbian theory cite her difficult relationship with school teacher Susan Gilbert, who in 1856 married the brother of the poet Austin. Dickinson and Gilbert were unusually close. They exchanged streams of letters, many of which looked like love notes. Here is what Emily wrote to her future daughter-in-law in April 1852:

“Sweet hour, blessed hour, how could I be transported to you or bring you back here at least for a little while, just for one short kiss, just to whisper ... I thought about it all day, Susie, and I'm not afraid of anything anymore, and when I went to church, these thoughts overwhelmed me so much that there was no room at all for the words of the pastor. When he said, "Our Father in Heaven," I thought, "Oh, sweet Sue." - I think about love and about you, and my heart is filled with warmth, and my breath stops. There is no sun now, but I feel the sunlight penetrating into my soul and turning any time into summer, and any thorn into a rose. And I pray that this summer sun will shine on My Far Away, and that the birds around her will also sing! "

And what did Susan Gilbert herself think about such enthusiastic speeches? We will never know. After Emily's death, the Dickinson family burned all of Susan's letters to the poet. Maybe the family feared that the truth about the relationship between the two relatives would come out?

WRITE ABOUT THAT YOU DON'T KNOW

The well-known writer's rule, "Only write what you know," does not apply to Emily Dickinson. In some of her poems, she describes the sea coast, and after all, Dickinson has never been at sea in her life.

EMILY DICKINSON WAS SO UNPOPULABLE, STEERING THE DOCTORS TO “EXAMINATE” HER THROUGH THE CLOSED DOOR.

MENTOR AND STUDENT

More than a hundred years have passed since Dickinson's death, and scientists still have not been able to find out for certain who is hiding behind the mysterious address "mentor", which is found in a whole series of passionate love letters written by the poetess when she was a little over thirty. It is assumed that after establishing the identity to whom these messages were addressed (apparently, it was a male lover much older than her), it will be much easier to decipher the psychosexual background of Dickinson's poetry. Candidates for the title of "Dear Master" include the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a priest from Philadelphia; Samuel Bowles, editor of a Springfield newspaper; and Professor William Smith Clark, founder and president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College.

LOYALTY TO YOUR WORD

Dickinson did not betray her reclusive lifestyle even on the verge of death. When she was suspected of having an incurable form of jade, she only allowed the doctor to examine her through the half-closed door.

CALL FROM AROUND

Obviously, Dickinson felt the end approaching. Shortly before her death, she sent a hastily scrawled note to her cousins ​​Louise and Frances: “Little cousins, my name is back. Emily". This short farewell: "My name is back" - became the epitaph of the poetess.

Silent, but merciless

Once the most taciturn of America's presidents, Calvin Coolidge, visited Amherst, visited the house of the great poet and was disappointed - if, of course, his traditionally laconic commentary expressed disappointment. After a long and detailed tour of the poet's home, the president was allowed to examine several rare and valuable Dickinson manuscripts, to which the Silent Calvin responded: “Written in pen, right? And I dictate. "