Ex Libris: Emily Dickinson

The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass. Public Domain

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) frequently comes to mind as a mistress of solitude, the poet of more than 1,800 poems who began avoiding social engagements early in life. Yet in her review of a new edition of Dickinson’s correspondence, “The Letters of Emily Dickinson,” Meg Schoerke points out that the volume and scope of her written communications belie this impression of a recluse. Her letter-writing was “extensive enough to puncture myths of Dickinson as antisocial, fearful of other people, and oblivious to the temper of her times.”

Dickinson had as well a second collection of friends, perhaps less often noticed. She once wrote of them, “The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul—BOOKS.” As Schoerke wrote, the poet kept company with:

“a multitude of authors, not only what twenty-first-century critics and readers would call ‘canonical’—the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and contemporaries such as Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, the Brownings, and the Brontës—but also songs and ballads, poets and novelists well-known in the nineteenth century but unfamiliar now, plus a steady diet of topical material: newspaper and journal articles on current events, scientific discoveries, and travel.”

With such an inventory at hand, selecting the books that most deeply influenced Dickinson might seem impossible. Fortunately, she revealed some of these mentors in her letters and conversations.

A restored 1848 daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, a foundational American poet. (PD-US) end 

Foundations

Though she disliked doctrine, from childhood Dickinson read the King James Bible, growing so familiar with it that she quoted passages in her letters and conversation. The rhythms and diction of scripture certainly affected her own style, and at times, her choice of subject for a poem. In the Dickinson Collection at Harvard University, we find 19 Bibles from that household, and this was in the days before the plethora of translations that exist today.

As in so many homes of that time, William Shakespeare was also a staple. As a youth, Dickinson joined a Shakespeare group, where members read aloud from his plays and poetry. “While Shakespeare lives,” she wrote to a friend years later, “literature is firm.”

Another influence during Dickinson’s teenage years was her study of natural philosophy—biology and physical science—at Amherst Academy. Reflecting the strong interest in these topics at that time, the Academy stressed these subjects in the classroom. Dickinson reveled in these studies.

Textbooks like Almira Lincoln’s “Familiar Lectures on Botany” especially appealed to her because they connected science and religion. An abbreviated online biography of Dickinson clarified that this scientific emphasis “reappeared in Dickinson’s poems and letters through her fascination with naming, her skilled observation and cultivation of flowers, her carefully wrought descriptions of plants, and her interest in ‘chemic force.’”

Contemporary Influencers

The 19th century was an age rich in poetry and fiction, and Dickinson mined those treasures for all they were worth. Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot were novelists then making their mark—Eliot was one of her favorites—and she consumed their books along with the works of poets like Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Tennyson. They were lifelong mentors whom she read both for pleasure and for edification.

Her favorite poet, and the most influential, was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She hung a portrait of Browning in her room. Upon learning of Browning’s death in 1861, she wrote, “Silver perished with her tongue.” To an editor and acquaintance who was traveling to Italy, she requested a favor should he visit Florence’s English Cemetery: “If you touch her grave, put one hand on the head, for me—her unmentioned mourner.”

A 1896 photo of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb. PD-US

The Eclectic Reader

In her article “Emily Dickinson Personal Library,” Avil Beckford listed over 100 of the volumes that were a part of Dickinson’s collection of 150 books. Because she lived in Amherst, a vibrant literary community, and because her sister-in-law Susan, also a lover of the written word, shared books and periodicals with her, Dickinson’s resources were far greater than many of her contemporaries.

The reading list Beckford provides reveals what we might suspect, an acute interest in the books written by her fellow New Englanders. Here are works by Hawthorne, Henry Ward Beecher, Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow. Here too are the literary lights mentioned. The presence of five Charles Dickens’s titles, for example, signify the enjoyment she must have taken from his novels.

A glance through this inventory also reveals that Dickinson had a taste for earlier classics, like Goethe’s “Faust,” “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis, and John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.”

In a poem often anthologized, familiar to many who made its acquaintance in their school days, Emily Dickinson offered this celebration of books, a reminder that the delights and benefits of reading are available to all:

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul –

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