Emily Dickinson, Dickinson Advised Not to Publish!, Poets and Poetry at Aspirennies.com

On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote a letter, enclosing four poems, to a literary man, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking whether her poems were “alive.” Higginson, although he advised her not to publish, recognized the originality of her poems and remained her “preceptor” for the rest of her life. After 1862 she resisted all efforts by her friends to put her poems before the public. As a result, only seven poems were published during her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican. The years of Dickinson's greatest poetic output, about 800 poems, coincide with the Civil War. Although she looked inward and not to the war for the substance of her poetry, the tense atmosphere of the war years may have contributed to the urgency of her writing. The year of greatest stress was 1862, when distance and danger threatened Dickinson's friends—Samuel Bowles, in Europe for his health; Charles Wadsworth, who had moved to a new pastorate at the Calvary Church in San Francisco; and T.W. Higginson, serving as an officer in the Union Army. Emily Dickinson also had persistent eye trouble, which led her, in 1864 and 1865, to spend several months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for treatment. Once back in Amherst she never traveled again and after the late 1860s never left the boundaries of the family's property. --David J.M. Higgins

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Dickinson Advised Not to Publish!