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It was while fulfilling this request that Lavinia discovered Emily’s poem manuscripts.Įven Dickinson’s earliest editors recognized the significance of Dickinson’s correspondence to understanding the poet behind the verse. All those enlisted for this first stage of introducing a remarkable poet-Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson-quickly identified the letters she had written to family and friends as too closely identified with the poems to be disregarded. Dickinson had asked that her sister Lavinia, upon the poet’s death, destroy the letters she had received during her lifetime. Her later letters, often more epigrammatic, include exquisite condolence messages for grieving friends, notes to her brother’s family next door, and, of course, poetry. Her early letters reveal much about her relationships with her friends and family, her changing attitudes toward her religious experiences, and her year away from home at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The existing letters date from 1842, when Dickinson was eleven years old, until the final “Little Cousins, / Called back” letter to Louise and Frances Norcross just before her death in 1886 (L 1046). Nonetheless, the thousand extant letters to about a hundred friends and family members are an extensive and profoundly revealing record of the poet’s intellectual interests and emotional journeys. While others may yet be recovered, many were probably destroyed, according to the custom of the time, upon their recipients’ deaths. Scholars estimate that the printed editions of her letters represent only about one-tenth of the letters Dickinson actually wrote. Cryptic and allusive in style, dazzling in verbal effects, and sensitively attuned to her recipients, Dickinson was a prolific and gifted epistolary artist. – Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 1869 (元3)Įmily Dickinson, pre-eminent poet, also distinguished herself as a writer of letters, which she regarded as a “joy of Earth” (L960). A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.