The Tortured Poets Department: Emily Dickinson, the Transcendentalists and, yes, Taylor Swift

Emily Dickinson is probably the most famous female poet in the world. And yet – at least according to Dickinson mythology – her work could easily have gone unpublished. She wrote 1800 poems but published only 10 in her lifetime. Instead, she bound them into little bundles of paper, tied with kitchen string. These were found after her death by her sister Lavinia and after many stops and starts the first collection was published in 1890 by her friend and mentor, the critic and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was an instant hit with 11 editions in less than 2 years.

The spontaneity and freshness of the poems appealed to readers, as well as their fragmentary, transient, unfinished quality, as though they were moments of thought or feeling, grabbed out of thin air.

She wrote about death and life, ordinary objects, the natural world, light, air, love and god with a kind of improvisational vim that proved timeless.

The legend of Dickinson is more flamboyant than the writing, which is precise, miniaturist and modest. In this episode Sophie and Jonty talk about the relationship between Dickinson’s world in Amherst and her world on the scraps and fragments of paper she wrote on; the tensions between her reclusive persona and her prolific and highly professional writing life; her disdaining publication and her making sure that it would happen, and the ambiguities of her most intimate relationships. How has such a quiet and unforthcoming poet destined to become one of the most relatable, personal and confessional voices in the history of world poetry?

Books etc referred to in this episode:

Martha Ackmann These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

Diana Fuss The Sense of An Interior

Lisa Brooks The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, “No Coward Soul Am I”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod

Isaac Watts, Hymns

Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department.

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