3 Responses to Notes in Emily Dickinson’s pocket – “Our share of night to bear” (Life, 2)

1. wordcloud9 says:

   June 3, 2016 at 8:30 am

   Thanks Joy – we are so fortunate that all those Emily poems on scraps of paper didn’r get lost or thrown away.
2. Joy of Fishes says:

   June 3, 2016 at 9:57 am

   Good morning, Nona! Emily’s work came so close to being lost, and, astonishingly, was not published in her original form until 1955. From Wikipedia:

   While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.[2] The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson’s poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.[3] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

   Although Dickinson’s acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886 — when Lavinia, Dickinson’s younger sister, discovered her cache of poems — that the breadth of her work became apparent to the public. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955. Despite some unfavorable reception and skepticism over the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarding her literary prowess, Dickinson is now almost universally considered to be one of the most significant of all American poets.[4][5] ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson

   Click through the link for a very sweet portrait of Emily and her sibs as children.
3. wordcloud9 says:

   June 3, 2016 at 10:01 am

   Thanks Joy! It is quite a story.

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