The Emily Dickinson Project

"Who was Emily Dickinson?" is a question that scholars and fans have been asking for years. It's difficult to put her in a box because, in a way, Emily Dickinson was many people at once. She was a woman. She was a passionate poet. She was a flower-lover and gardener. She was fond of children. She was mysterious. She was unusual. She was reclusive. She was a quiet rebel. She was witty. She was a reader and a letter-writer. She was a daughter, a sister, and a friend. She saw the world in a unique fashion, expressing her private thoughts in letters and poems throughout her life. In her work, she approached heavy subjects such as religion and mortality, along with more lighthearted, traditional subjects like love and nature.  However, beneath it all, Emily Dickinson was human. She was a human who had childhood experiences that shaped her as she grew up and thoughts and feelings that needed to be expressed. That's exactly what Emily Dickinson did––she expressed the human e...

Over the course of her lifetime, Dickinson wrote hundreds of letters to many different recipients. While she is known for her poetry, Emily Dickinson's letters were also forms of art, the prose just as beautiful and poetic as her official poetry. In fact, these two often coincided because she frequently included poems with her letters or simply wove them into the prose itself to create letter-poems or prose poetry. In this post, I will examine a few of the recipients of Dickinson's letters, their relationships, and the contents of some of the letters themselves.  SUSAN DICKINSON ("SUSIE") Arguably one of the most influential friendships Dickinson had during her lifetime, Dickinson's relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, not only produced beautiful letters, but it also produced a great deal of poetry as well. Emily frequently shared her poetry with Susan, in which turn, Susan would read and provide feedback on it. Together, in this manner...