Emily Dickinson

For the longest while I knew not much more of Emily Dickinson than a single favorite quote: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

To read her poetry and letters for me bears out this image of a life startlingly lived, of a mind ecstatic with the experience of existing--and of ceasing to exist.

...I'd like to look a little more [the previous lines concern dying]
At such a curious earth!

To delve further into this mind, I will simply let her words speak for themselves. Below, then, are some snippets from poems and letters, taken from LL's book "Selected Poems & Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Robert N. Linscott."

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
_________________

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
Were I as tall as they?

Has it feet like water-lilies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!
Oh, some wise man from the skies!
Please to tell a little pilgrim
Where the place called morning lies!
_________________

I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl,
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
...
_________________

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
_________________

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.
_________________

Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door;
Or has it feathers like a bird,
Or billows like a shore?
....
_________________

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
_________________

And finally this, which gives some insight into perhaps the loneliness of her mostly reclusive life. Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world, that never wrote to me." Does all writing, that goes unheard, share some of the following sentiment?

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

And if that writing is heard after one is dead, as was the case for her, does she somewhere feel the accolades we express to her? I like to think so.