Questions to ask Emily Dickinson

Who Emily Dickinson was

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in the Homestead, her grandfather's brick house on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died in the same house on 15 May 1886. Her father Edward was a lawyer, treasurer of Amherst College and a member of Congress from 1853 to 1855. Her brother Austin married her close friend Susan Gilbert in 1856 and lived next door at the Evergreens. Her younger sister Lavinia never married and lived with her all her life.

She went to Amherst Academy and spent one year (1847 to 1848) at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. From her thirties she left the house less and less, and in later years she spoke to many visitors only through a half-open door. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems. After her death Lavinia found the manuscripts, including about forty booklets Emily had copied out and sewn together by hand, now called the fascicles.

She has already been interviewed once

On 16 August 1870 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the critic she had written to for eight years, visited her at the Homestead. That night he wrote down what she said in a letter to his wife. It is the nearest thing to a real interview with her, and it is the best model for yours: he asked little and recorded her words carefully. Read it (Letters, ed. Johnson, no. 342a) before you write your questions.

Two tips follow from it. Keep questions short, because she answers sideways and at length. And ask about concrete things (her garden, her dog Carlo, a circus going past, a book she loved), because she talks about big ideas through small objects. For a wax museum, set her in 1862: 31, writing a poem almost every day, and just starting to write to Higginson.

Questions about Amherst, family and the Homestead

What the record says: her letters are full of her family's routines, her baking (she won a prize for her bread at the 1856 cattle show), the garden and the conservatory her father built for her. She kept a herbarium of more than 400 pressed plants as a girl, now at Harvard's Houghton Library.

1. What was your father like at home, as opposed to in Congress?
2. Why did you press and label hundreds of plants as a girl?
3. What do you grow in your garden, and which flower would you choose to be?
4. What did Lavinia do for you that nobody else could?

Questions about faith

What the record says: at Mount Holyoke, during a religious revival in 1847 to 1848, students were sorted by whether they had professed faith or still had hope, and Emily remained among those who did not profess. In a letter to Higginson of 25 April 1862 she described her family as religious, except herself, saying they addressed an eclipse every morning whom they called their Father. Many of her poems argue with God, death and the afterlife.

1. Why would you not stand up and declare your faith at Mount Holyoke when nearly everyone else did?
2. Do you believe in an afterlife, or do you only hope for one?
3. You write about death as a polite gentleman with a carriage. Why make death so courteous?

Questions about writing and publishing

What the record says: on 15 April 1862 she sent Higginson four poems after reading his advice to new writers in The Atlantic Monthly, with a short note that begins by asking whether he is too deeply occupied to say if her verse is alive. Higginson advised her to delay publishing. About ten of her poems appeared in her lifetime, all unsigned, mostly in the Springfield Republican, and editors changed them: when A narrow Fellow in the Grass was printed in 1866 as The Snake, she complained to Higginson that the punctuation had been altered.

1. Why did you write to a stranger whose essay you had just read?
2. Did you want to be published, or not?
3. What do your dashes do that commas cannot?
4. Why did you sew your poems into booklets that nobody else saw?
5. How did you know when a poem was finished, when you often kept several alternative words?
6. Who were you thinking of in I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Questions about Susan, love and loss

What the record says: Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson was her friend from youth, her sister-in-law next door and the first reader of many poems; Emily sent her hundreds of letters and poems. Scholars debate whether the love in those letters was romantic, and the book Open Me Carefully (1998) collects them. Three drafts of letters to an unknown “Master” survive. In her late forties she had a loving relationship with Judge Otis Phillips Lord, a widower and friend of her father, who died in 1884.

1. What did Sue's opinion of a poem mean to you?
2. Who was the Master, if you will tell?
3. Did you think of marrying Judge Lord?
4. Your nephew Gilbert died in 1883, aged eight. How did you write about him?

Do not push for a label. She did not use our categories, and an honest project can say that the evidence is debated.

Questions about staying home and wearing white

What the record says: she had painful eye treatment in Boston in 1864 and 1865 and seems to have rarely left Amherst after that. In later years she dressed in white, and a white cotton dress said to be hers survives. Neighbours' children later remembered her lowering gingerbread to them from her window in a basket. Historians give several explanations for her withdrawal (eye trouble, anxiety, a deliberate choice to protect her writing time) and none is proved.

1. Why did you stop leaving the house, in your own words?
2. Why white?
3. Do you feel lonely, or simply private?

Sample answers from the record

Question: How do you know whether something is poetry? Higginson wrote down her answer the night he met her:

Question: Why don't you go out more?

Question: How did religion feel to you at nineteen?

Question: Higginson asked for a photograph. What did you send? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: she had none, she wrote in July 1862, and described herself instead as small like a wren, with hair bold like a chestnut burr and eyes like the sherry a guest leaves in the glass.

Questions she could not answer

• How her poems became famous. The first book, Poems (1890), was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson after her death.
• How those editors added titles, smoothed her rhymes and replaced her dashes. Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition was the first to print the poems as she wrote them.
• Television dramas about her life.
• Telephones or recordings. She knew the telegraph and the railway, which reached Amherst in 1853 thanks partly to her father.

Where to read her words and see her handwriting

The Emily Dickinson Archive, an open-access site led by Harvard University Press with partner libraries, shows photographs of her manuscripts, so you can see the dashes and the alternative words for yourself. Project Gutenberg has Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, the 1890s editions (useful, but edited). Wikisource has the same poems and some letters. For a full, accurate text use Johnson's or R. W. Franklin's edition in a library.

If you would like to practise questions aloud, Yuga has an AI recreation of Emily Dickinson built from her poems and letters. It is not her and it can make mistakes, so quote the letters and manuscripts in your work. For other poets, see famous poets in history and our questions to ask Edgar Allan Poe.