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A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse

Ted Hughes writes an introduction to the work of prolific genius and gothic heroine

Emily Dickinson: remained suspended, gracefully, in her own peculiar state of negative capability. Photograph: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections via New York Times

Lucy Sweeney Byrne
Sat Aug 8 2020 - 00:00

“Though she had a reputation among her friends for the occasional verses and poems which she enclosed in letters, Emily Dickinson’s phenomenal secret output was not discovered until after her death, in 1886, when her sister found the mass of manuscripts in her bureau.”

Thus Ted Hughes’ introduction begins, with the best-known fact of Emily Dickinson’s life (better known, perhaps, than much of the actual poetry). Unusually, when it comes to biography, this knowledge serves to enhance rather than detract from the poems themselves (a little like knowing about the opium-induced fugue that inspired Kubla Khan, or Keats’s untimely death).

Although Dickinson made some stabs at getting published, she died largely unknown, her talents unrecognised. Yet her output was enormous, her voice singular. Startlingly so, in fact. And so we must surmise that Dickinson was a true genius, who wrote solely because she was impelled to do so, rather than for recognition, glory or money (this is made all the more clear, by her idiosyncratic style – even I don’t use hyphens as often as Dickinson).

Love and death

Dickinson’s poems are poems of love, of the nature of the universe, and, of course, of death. She remained suspended, gracefully, in her own peculiar state of negative capability. She was unsure of the meaning of the world, unsure of God, creation, her life (a life which must have proved, in many ways, so unbearably disappointing). Maybe that’s why death proved so appealing – it was the only thing of which she could be entirely certain, and the only possible source of answers in a life filled with unheeded questions.

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Perhaps what’s so timelessly fascinating about Dickinson is that she possesses a voice which, by rights, we should never have heard. Most women in her world went silent to the grave, doomed to be soon forgotten. But not her. Dickinson was heard, is still heard and read today. Not only heard and read, but felt, and – deservedly – adored.

By homely gift and hindered Words
The human heart is told
Of Nothing –
'Nothing' is the force
That renovates the World