Timeline part Two

"Safe in thier Alabaster chambers" is published

 Mar 1, 1862

On March 1, 1862, Emily's poem beginning with the 
line "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" was
published by the Springfield Republican under
the title "The Sleeping".

Letter to a Young Contributor

Apr 1862

In 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Letter to a Young Contributor" appeared as the lead article in the Atlantic Monthly. 

Higginson was a man of letters and a social reformer who was in favor of women's rights. His article, which was published in April 1860 was full of advice for struggling writers. 

Its publication seemed almost like a sign for both Emily and Sue had been brainstorming names of prominent literary figures whom they could approach with Dickinson's poems since December of the previous year. Upon reading the article, both women believed that Higginson could be the objective critic Emily needed to assess the literary merit of her poems.

First Letter to Higginson

April 15, 1862 

On April 15, 1862, Emily sent Higginson a short note along with four of her poems. The following day, Higginson picked up Emily’s letter at the post office. Opening it, he found "a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town." It began with these words: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?" Emily effectively asked him to be her mentor in hope that she can find in him the kind of mentor or supportive critic that Benjamin Newton had been before he died. In his response, Higginson was encouraging, but not effusive in his praise of her verse. In fact, he urged her not to seek publication too early because impressed by the lively and imaginative character of her poems, he thought it lacked form. 

Emily was taken aback by Higginson's response. She sent the poems certain that they would overawe Higginson, who would urge her to publish immediately. His response crushed her so that she stayed in bed for a week before responding. 

Higginson also asked Emily if she had ever read Whitman, whose poetry had a similar rough structure. Emily replied and the two continued corresponding regularly. And after having read more of her poetry, Higginson made his admiration for Emily's talent more obvious, telling her that she was a gifted poet but should take the next couple of years to study form and polish her verses. Nonetheless, Higginson found Emily's enigmatic and extraordinary letters sometimes baffling, sometimes annoyingly oblique, and often enchanting. 

Emily persistently and humbly sought out Higginson's advice on her poetry but, she never heeded it. She did not change her poems to please him. During the Civil War, Emily continued to send Higginson letters which he read in his tents during the evening. However, their correspondence lagged for about eighteen months during the war; Higginson was wounded, and busy with other war-related matters. Dickinson took his silence as rejection. Nonetheless began a decades-long correspondence that ended only at Emily’s death.

Charles Wadsworth sails for San Francisco

May 1, 1862  

On 1 May 1862, Charles Wadsworth moved with his family to a new pastorate at the Cavalry Church in San Francisco, leaving him out of Emily's reach. His decision may have been a long time in the making and some of Emily Dickinson's biographers believe that her physical collapse and mysterious illness two years earlier was brought on by this news, which Wadsworth himself delivered during his first visit to Emily in March 1860.

“Blazing in Gold, and Quenching in Purple"

Feb 29, 1864 - Apr 2, 1864

On 30 March 1864, Samuel Bowles' the Springfield Daily Republican anonymously published Emily's poem "Blazing in Gold, and Quenching in Purple". Before the Springfield Daily, however, the poem was already published on the Drum Beat a month earlier in 29 February 1864. It was then published for the third time on the Springfield Weekly Republican on 2 April the following month. All publications, however, were anonymous.

Flowers - Well - if anybody", is published

Mar 2, 1864 - Mar 16, 1864 

Emily's poem beginning with the line "Flowers - Well - if anybody" was published under the title "Flowers" in four newspapers during March 1864. It was first published by the "Drum Beat" on March 2, followed by the "Springfield Daily Republican" on March 9, the "Springfield Weekly Republican" on March 12, and the "Boston Post" on March 16. under the title "Flowers"

Some keep the Sabbath Going to Church

March 12, 1864 

Emily's poem beginning with the line, "Some keep the Sabbath Going to Church" was published by the Round Table on March 12, 1864 under the title "My Sabbath"

Meets Lord Otis

April 1865

By 1865, Emily's eyesight had deteriorated badly and she left Amherst to see a doctor in Boston for treatment in 1 April 1865. While in Boston, she roomed with her cousins Louise and Fanny Norcross. During this time, she met Judge Otis Lord, an old friend of Edward Dickinson's who was working in nearby Cambridge when Emily was in Boston. 

The two became fast friends and despite the nearly 20-year difference in their ages, they found much in common with each other. The two began corresponding and some of Emily's later letters to Lord suggest that they might have had romantic aspirations for their friendship. 

A year after their meeting, Lord's wife died in 1877. And Emily wrote to him: "My lovely Salem smiles at me I confess that I love you." While this declaration does not necessarily amount to a frank profession of love, some scholars have suggested that the theme of loyalty found in many of Emily's poems refer to Otis Lord. 

"A narrow fellow in the grass" is published

Feb 14, 1866 

On February 14, 1866, the Springfield Republican published Emily's poem beginning with the lines "A narrow fellow in the grass" under the title "The Snake."

Austin Dickinson’s second child, Martha, is born

Nov 29, 1866

On 29 November 1866, Austin and Sue's second child, Martha

Higginson and Emily meet for the first time

Aug 16, 1870

In 1870, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily Dickinson would finally meet face to face. In early August, Higginson wrote Dickinson a note saying he would be in Amherst for business around the fifteenth and would like to come see her. She replied saying she would be delighted to finally meet him. After dropping off his suitcases at a hotel in Amherst, Higginson arrived the Dickinson home. There are detailed facts of the meeting, because Higginson wrote a letter to his wife that night. 

While waiting for Dickinson in the parlor, he spotted two of his recent books displayed on the shelves. When Dickinson did enter the room, she looked almost like an apparition, holding two day lilies in her hands. She held the flowers out to Higginson, whispering: "These are my introduction." The two had a lengthy, odd conversation. 

Higginson spent most of the visit staring at the unusual woman in wonderment and trying to guess at the meaning of her inscrutable statements. Their conversation that day ranged from her dog, Carlo, who was now dead, to Shakespeare, to her poetry. Dickinson gave Higginson a picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's hands as a parting gift.

Emily's father, Edward, dies in Boston.

Jun 16, 1874

On 15 June 1874, Emily's father, Edward Dickinson left for Boston to attend the first session of the legislature. The night before he left, he and Dickinson shared a quiet evening together in the parlor where she played the piano for him and he seemed unusually mild and reflective. Although he and Emily had had their differences, Emily loved his father immensely, and she was his favorite child. 

When Edward left the following day the rest of the Dickinsons stayed home, as they usually did whenever Edward travels. The next day, 16 June, Austin appeared in the doorway holding a telegram from a doctor in Boston. The note advised the family to hurry to Tremont House where Edward Dickinson was staying as Edward was gravely ill. However, as Lavinia and Austin hastened to prepare the horses, the family received another telegram saying that Mr. Dickinson was dead. 

Emily's father's death marked the beginning of her complete seclusion. During this time, couldn't even bear to see her brother's wife, who lived next door, but told her it was because of "idolatry not indifference." When the Dickinson's servant sometimes approached her to ask for instructions, she would run from the room.

Emily's father's funeral

Jun 19, 1874 

On 19 June 1874, mourners were packed into the Dickinson house in Amherst. Emily remained in her room during the funeral. She had made a lovely funeral wreath of daisies and this was the only adornment on her father's coffin. For a week after the funeral, Emily wandered around the house in a daze

Emily's mother is struck with paralysis.

Jun 15, 1875 

One year after Edward's death, Emily Norcross Dickinson, Emily's mother, suffered a paralytic stroke and a long period of illness thereafter on 15 June 1875. 

This period of time may have had more influence on her seclusion from society than any other, but it was also a way for the mother and daughter to become closer than ever before. For Emily, it was also just another small step away into her upper room--into her writing. 

Vinnie said that one of the "daughters must be constantly at home." She explains her sister's seculsion by saying that "Emily chose this part." Then, Vinnie said that Emily, "finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it..."

Susan and Austin Dickinson’s third child is born

Aug 1, 1875

On 1 August 1875, Susan and Austin gave birth to a third child, Thomas Gilbert. Ned who was fourteen by this time, and Martha who was nine called their little brother Gib. Gib, with his long blond hair and rambunctious spirit, was a delight to everyone, especially Emily who spoiled him. His birth brought joy to Emily, and the Dickinson family, who just lost his father a year earlier and was worried by her mother's illness.

"Success is counted sweetest" is published

Nov 20, 1878 

First published on April 27 1864 in the "Boston Daily Union", the poem was republished as part of a collection in 1878 after Helen Hunt Jackson, one of Emily's friends, asked her to anonymously contribute a poem to the publication A Masque of Poets for its "No Name Series." 

Emily who was reluctant about the idea wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, pleading him to advise against submitting a poem, since she was too kind-hearted to refuse Hunt without a valid excuse. However, Higginson refused, and Emily finally contributed a poem called "Success is Counted Sweetest!" The book was then published in the collection in 20 November 1878.

Dr. Charles Wadsworth dies

Apr 1, 1882

In 1882, Emily received an unexpected visit from Dr. Charles Wadsworth, after not seeing each other for twenty years. Wadsworth was already 68 years old, with three grown children. During the visit, Wadsworth told Emily that she has always reminded him of his youngest son, William, in her love for plants and animals. It will be their second and last meeting because a few months later, on 1 April 1882, Wadsworth died of pneumonia.

Mabel Todd causes a rift between Emily and Sue

Sep 1882 - Jan 1883

By September 1882, Emily was already turning away nearly everyone who visits her. However, when a neighbour, Mabel Todd, came to visit she did not turn her away, although she did not exactly see her, either. Instead, she let Mabel wait for her in the parlor, where Mabel began playing the piano. Emily sat in the darkened hallway foyer and listened, then slipped into the kitchen and had her maid bring Mabel a glass of sherry and a poem before disappearing upstairs. 

A few months later, in January 1883, it became obvious that Austin had taken an interest in Mabel and she became his mistress. Sue barred the woman from their home. She was banished for eight months until Austin insisted that Mabel be allowed to visit. Emily tried everything in her power to reconcile the two women to no avail. And to make matters worse, the loving relationship between Sue and Emily was strained because she allowed Austin and Mabel to meet in the living room of the Dickinson home.

Emily's mother dies

Nov 14, 1882

Emily cared for her mother for the final seven years of her life, until her mother died on November 14, 1882. In a letter to Mrs. J.C. Holland, she wrote: "The dear Mother that could not walk, has flown. It never occurred to us that she had not Limbs, she had Wings--and she soared from us unexpectedly as a summoned Bird--" 

Emily could not understand what it meant: the death of her mother. She had experienced so much death in her life, not only with the deaths of friends and acquaintances, but the death of her father, and now her mother. She had wrestled with the idea of death; she had feared it; and she wrote many poems about it. In "'Tis so appalling," she wrote, "Looking at death is dying." So, her mother's final end was hard for her, especially after such a long illness. 

Emily wrote to Maria Whitney: "All is faint indeed without our vanished mother, who achieved in sweetness what she lost in strength, though grief of wonder at her fate made the winter short, and each night I reach finds my lungs more breathless, seeking what it means." In the end, Emily's mother might not have been the genius that her daughter was, but she influenced Emily's life in ways she probably didn't even realize.

Emily’s nephew, Thomas Gilbert, dies at age eight

Oct 5, 1883

Thomas Gilbert Dickinson, also know as Gilbert or "Gib" died due to typhoid fever on 5 October 1883, which he contracted when he went swimming with his friend Kendall Emerson at a swimming hole the month before. He died in a first floor bedroom in the Evergreens known as "The Dying Room." 

On the night that he died, Emily broke her almost 15 years of isolation to come see him. For the first time in 15 years, she left her house and crossed the massive lawn towards her brother's. Gilbert was Emily's favorite nephew and his death affected Emily mentally, as well as physically, that she developed an agonizing pain in the back of her head and began vomitting. She also fell ill afterwards and was confined to bed for two months. 

In the few years that followed, Emily turned her attention to Gilbert's little friends, sending them letters and mailing them cakes at Christmas time. She wrote: "Missing my own boy, I knock at other trundle-beds." The loss of her mother and of Gilbert, within one year, was the cruelest experience Emily Dickinson ever had. It also marked the beginning of her own decline. 

Another friend, Otis Lord, dies

Mar 13, 1884

In April 1884, Emily received news that Otis Lord had died on 13 March 1884, just a few weeks before she herself was diagnosed with an advanced case of Bright's Disease, or nephritis-an inflammation of the kidney. Shortly thereafter, Emily was effectively an invalid. She rarely left her bed and never wrote poetry. In the winter of 1885, Dickinson chose to refuse more medical examinations. As she lay back against her pillows, weak and sick, Dickinson composed her last poem, "So give me back death."

Emily Dickinson dies from Bright's Disease

May 15, 1886

In early May 1886, Emily seemed to sense her impending death and wrote a short note to her cousins Louise and Fanny Norcross, which said only: "Little Cousins, Called Back, Emily." 

A few days later, on May 13, she complained to her sister Lavinia that she felt especially ill and that it was becoming difficult to breathe. Later that day she fell into a coma. The family held a vigil around her bedside forsixty hours, and on the evening of 16 May 16 1886, Emily Dickinson died of Bright's disease.

Susan Dickinson, Emily's friend an sister-in-law, penned her obituary. It was a loving portrayal of a strong and brilliant woman, devoted to her family, her friends and to her writing. As Susan wrote in the obituary: 

"As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship, sitting thenceforth, as some one said of her, "In the light of 'her own fire." Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid untill within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not be- cause she was insufficient of any mental work or social career-- her endowments being so exceptional--but the "mesh of her soul," as Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work."

Emily's funeral takes place.

May 19, 1886

Emily's funeral was held in the Homestead. Upon her request, she was buried in a robe of white flannel. Her siblings placed her white coffin in the library and, prior to the funeral service, allowed only a select number of Emily's friends to view her in the casket, which included Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 

During the funeral service, the 15th chapter from Corinthians, a chapter that Emily loved, was read. Colonel Higginson also read Emily Brontë's poem "Last Lines" - another of Emily Dickinson's favourite. Emily's white coffin was then placed on a bier of pine bough adorned with vanilla-scented heliotrope, a Lady's Slipper orchid and a "knot of blue field violets". Lavinia, her sister, placed two heliotropes in Emily's hand and whispered to Emily that they were for her to take to Judge Lord. 

Emily was buried next to her parents at West Street Cemetery in Amherst and the epitaph on her headstone bore the same words as the text on the note she sent to her cousins: "Called Back."

Posthumous publication and editing

1890

After Emily's death, her sister Lavinia, discovered forty of Emily's fascicles containing all the poems she has written in her lifetime. Not wanting to let these poems go to waste, she contacted two of Emily's friends - Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson – to help in getting them published.

The two collaborated in collecting these poems, with Todd initially collecting and organizing the material and Higginson editing. They edited the poems extensively in order to regularize the manuscripts' punctuation and capitalization to late nineteenth-century standards, occasionally rewording poems to reduce Dickinson's obliquity. 

After some time, the fist volume of Emily’s Poems was published in Boston in 1890, which became quote popular, such that by the end of 1892 eleven editions had sold. It was followed by Poems: Second Series in 1891, which ran to five editions by 1893. After which, a third series was published in 1896. Two volumes of Dickinson's letters, heavily edited and selected by Todd (who falsified dates on some of them), were also published in 1894.

This wave of posthumous publications gave Dickinson's poetry its first real public exposure, and it found an immediate audience. Backed by Higginson’s and William Dean Howells’ favorable notices and reviews, the poetry was popular from 1890 to 1892. 

Emily receives negative reviews

Jan 1892

Following her posthumous publication, Emily Dickinson’s poems received negative critical opinion after an influential negative review was anonymously published by Thomas Bailey Aldrich in the Atlantic Monthly on January 1892. As Aldrich wrote:

“It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson....But the incoherence and formlessness of her — versicles are fatal....[A]n eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar.”

Emily's niece publishes her poems

1914

In the early 20th century, Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published a series of further collections, including many previously unpublished poems, with similarly normalized punctuation and capitalization; "The Single Hound" emerged in 1914, "The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" in 1924, and "Further Poems of Emily Dickinson" in 1929. 

Other volumes edited by Todd and Bianchi emerged through the 1930s, releasing gradually more previously unpublished poems. With the rise of modernist poetry, Dickinson's failure to conform to nineteenth-century ideas of poetic form was no longer surprising nor distasteful to new generations of readers. A new wave of feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her as a female poet. Her stock had clearly risen, but Dickinson was not generally thought a great poet among the first generation of modernists, as is clear from R.P. Blackmur's critical essay of 1937:

“She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars....She came, as Mr. Tate says, at the right time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of sophisticated, eccentric vision. That is what makes her good — in a few poems and many passages representatively great. But...the bulk of her verse is not representative but mere fragmentary indicative notation. The pity of it is that the document her whole work makes shows nothing so much as that she had the themes, the insight, the observation, and the capacity for honesty, which had she only known how — or only known why — would have made the major instead of the minor fraction of her verse genuine poetry. But her dying society had no tradition by which to teach her the one lesson she did not know by instinct.”

Emily's poems -- unedited

1955

In 1955, a new and complete edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry by Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was published. The three volumes of this edition formed the basis of all later Dickinson scholarship, and provided the Dickinson known to readers thereafter. The poems were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, were strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and were often extremely elliptical in their language. They were printed for the first time much more nearly as Dickinson had left them, in versions approximating the text in her manuscripts. A later variorum edition provided many alternate wordings from which Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention, had been forced to choose for the sake of readability.

Later readers would draw attention to the remaining problems in reading even Johnson's relatively unaltered typeset texts of Dickinson, claiming that Dickinson's treatment of her manuscripts suggested that their physical and graphic properties were important to the reading of her poems. Possibly meaningful distinctions could be drawn, they argued, among different lengths and angles of dash in the poems, and different arrangements of text on the page. 

Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using many typographic symbols of varying length and angle; even R.W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems, which aimed to supplant Johnson's edition as the scholarly standard text, used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely. Some scholars claimed that the poems should be studied by reading the manuscripts themselves.