Emily Dickinson was not such a recluse after all

This is fanciful, I know, but I can’t help wondering about the great poetry that will surely be written in the early 2060s. Think about it: in the early 1960s, Sylvia Plath had her great creative outpouring, waking at 4 a.m. each day to work on the ‘Ariel’ poems that would make her name. Exactly 100 years earlier, Emily Dickinson was in full spate, writing 295 poems in 1863 alone. (Her total oeuvre amounts to nearly 1,800 poems, most of them unpublished during her lifetime.) The concentrated intensity with which these two women produced their best work has the quality of a natural phenomenon: a butterfly migration, or a swarm of plankton ablaze with bioluminescence.

To read The Letters of Emily Dickinson is to experience this phenomenon in real-time. Cristianne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell’s edition is the first since Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward’s in 1958. Along with 80 letters that have been discovered or radically re-edited, Miller and Mitchell have taken the inspired decision to add all of the 200-plus poems that Dickinson sent to various correspondents with no prose accompaniment (Johnson and Ward include just 24).

When you reach the early 1860s, these letter-poems come thick and fast, urgent dispatches from Dickinson’s darkly brilliant gift. Take poem 477, which is about death, sent in 1862 to Dickinson’s sister-in-law Susan. It begins:

He fumbles at your Soul

As Players at the Keys

Before they drop full Music on –

He stuns you by degrees.

Imagine receiving that through the post, no explanation, no additional text.

Dickinson was just 32 when she wrote those lines. The letters testify to how often her shortish life was touched by death, beginning with her friend Sophia Holland, who died when Dickinson was 14. The casualties are a 19th-century litany of typhus, ‘brain congestion’ and tuberculosis, but Dickinson was perhaps more than usually affected by these brutally routine losses: ‘I think of the grave very often, and how much it has got of mine, and whether I can ever stop it from carrying off what I love.’