On 22 January 2004, Sospeso presents Augusta Read Thomas' new homage to Elliott Carter written for Sospeso, a setting of texts by Elizabeth BIshop and Emily Dickinson, the 'New England mystic,' whose bold experiments with poetic rhythms and rhymes has had great influence on twentieth century letters.  

Dickinson was the second of three children.  The three remained close throughout their adult lives:  her younger sister, Lavinia, stayed in the family home and did not marry, and her older brother, Austin, lived in the house next door after his marriage to a friend of Emily's.  Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, had been one of the founders of Amherst College, and her father, Edward Dickinson, served as treasurer of the college from 1835 to 1872.  A lawyer who served one term (1853-55) in Congress, Edward Dickinson was an austere and somewhat remote father, but not an unkind one.  Emily's mother, too, was not close to her children.

Emily Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.  Mount Holyoke, which she attended from 1847 to 1848, insisted on religious as well as intellectual growth, and Emily was under considerable pressure to become a professing Christian.  She resisted, however, and although many of her poems deal with God, she remained all her life a skeptic.  Despite her doubts, she was subject to strong religious feelings, a conflict that lent tension to her writings.

Dickinson began to write verse about 1850, apparently while under the spell of the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Brontë and under the tutelage of Benjamin F. Newton, a young man studying law in her father's office.  Only a handful of her poems can be dated before 1858, when she began to collect them into small, handsewn booklets.  Her letters of the 1850s reveal a vivacious, humorous, somewhat shy young woman.  In 1855 Dickinson went to Washington, D.C., with her sister to visit their father, who was serving in Congress.  During the trip they stopped off at Philadelphia, where she heard the preaching of the noted clergyman, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who was to become her "dearest earthly friend."  He was something of a romantic figure: a man said to have known great sorrow, whose eloquence in the pulpit contrasted with his solitary broodings.  He and Dickinson exchanged letters on spiritual matters, his Calvinist orthodoxy perhaps serving as a useful foil for her own speculative reasoning.  She may also have found in his stern, rigorous beliefs a welcome corrective to the easy assumption of a benign universe made by Emerson and the other transcendentalists.

In the 1850s Dickinson began two of her significant correspondences—with Dr. and Mrs. Josiah G. Holland and with Samuel Bowles.  The two men were editors of the Springfield Republican, a Massachusetts paper that took an interest in literary matters and even published verse.  The correspondence continued over the years, although in the case of the Hollands most of the letters after the 1850s went to Mrs. Holland, an intelligent woman who comprehended Dickinson's subtleties and witticisms.  Dickinson tried to interest Bowles in her poetry, and it was a crushing blow to her that he, a man of quick mind but conventional literary tastes, failed to appreciate it.

By the late 1850s, when she was writing poems at a steadily increasing pace, Dickinson loved a man whom she called "Master" in three drafts of letters. "Master" does not exactly resemble any of her known friends but may have been Bowles or Wadsworth.  This love shines forth in several lines from her poems:  "I'm ceded—I've stopped being Theirs," "'Tis so much joy! 'Tis so much joy," and "Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?" to name only a few. Other poems reveal the frustration of this love and its gradual sublimation into a love for Christ and a celestial marriage to him.

The poems of the 1850s are fairly conventional in sentiment and form, but beginning about 1860 they become experimental both in language and prosody, though they owe much to the metres of the English hymn writer Isaac Watts and to Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. Dickinson's prevailing poetic form was the quatrain of three iambic feet, a type described in one of the books by Watts in the family library.  She used many other forms as well, and to even the simpler hymnbook measures she gave complexity by constantly altering the metrical beat to fit her thought:  now slow, now fast, now hesitant.  She broke new ground in her wide use of off-rhymes, varying from the true in a variety of ways that also helped to convey her thought and its tensions.  In striving for an epigrammatic conciseness, she stripped her language of superfluous words and saw to it that those that remained were vivid and exact.  She tampered freely with syntax and liked to place a familiar word in an extraordinary context, shocking the reader to attention and discovery.

On April 15, 1862, Dickinson wrote a letter, enclosing four poems, to a literary man, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking whether her poems were "alive."  Higginson, although he advised her not to publish, recognized the originality of her poems and remained her "preceptor" for the rest of her life.  After 1862 she resisted all efforts by her friends to put her poems before the public.  As a result, only seven poems were published during her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican.

The years of Dickinson's greatest poetic output, about 800 poems, coincide with the Civil War.  Although she looked inward and not to the war for the substance of her poetry, the tense atmosphere of the war years may have contributed to the urgency of her writing.  The year of greatest stress was 1862, when distance and danger threatened Dickinson's friends--Samuel Bowles, in Europe for his health; Charles Wadsworth, who had moved to a new pastorate at the Calvary Church in San Francisco; and T.W. Higginson, serving as an officer in the Union Army.  She also had persistent eye trouble, which led her, in 1864 and 1865, to spend several months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for treatment.  Once back in Amherst she never traveled again and after the late 1860s never left the boundaries of the family's property.

After the Civil War, Dickinson's poetic tide ebbed, but she sought increasingly to regulate her life by the rules of art.  Her letters, some of them equal in artistry to her poems, classicize daily experience in an epigrammatic style. For example, when a friend affronted Dickinson by sending a letter jointly to her and her sister, she replied:  "A Mutual plum is not a plum.  I was too respectful to take the pulp and do not like a stone."  By 1870 Dickinson dressed only in white and saw few of the callers who came to the homestead; her seclusion was fiercely guarded by her devoted sister.  In August 1870 Higginson visited Amherst and described Dickinson as "a little plain woman" with reddish hair, dressed in white, bringing him flowers as her "introduction" and speaking in a "soft frightened breathless childlike voice."

Her later years were marked with sorrow at the deaths of many people she loved.  The most prostrating of these were the deaths of her father in 1874 and her eight-year-old nephew Gilbert in 1883, which occasioned some of her finest letters.  She also mourned the loss of Bowles in 1878, Holland in 1881, Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882, Otis P. Lord in 1884, and Helen Hunt Jackson in 1885.  Lord, a judge from Salem, Massachusetts, with whom Dickinson fell in love about 1878, had been the closest friend of her father. Dickinson's drafts of letters to Lord reveal a tender, mature love, which Lord returned.  Jackson, a poet and popular novelist, discerned the greatness of Dickinson's poetry and tried unsuccessfully to get her to publish it.

Soon after her death her sister Lavinia determined to have Emily's poems published.  In 1890 Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by T.W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, appeared.  Other volumes of Dickinson poems, edited chiefly by Mabel Loomis Todd, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Emily's niece), and Millicent Todd Bingham, were published between 1891 and 1957, and in 1955 Thomas H. Johnson edited all the surviving poems and their variant versions.

The subjects of Dickinson's poems, expressed in intimate, domestic figures of speech, include love, death, and nature.  The contrast between her quiet, secluded life in the house in which she was born and died and the depth and intensity of her terse poems has provoked much speculation about her personality and personal relationships.  Her 1,775 poems and her letters, which survive in almost as great a number, reveal a passionate, witty woman and a scrupulous craftsman who made an art not only of her poetry but also of her correspondence and her life.

From Britannica.