Sunday, March 27, 2016

Emily Dickinson's Letters



"A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone
 without corporeal friend."

-  Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson,  June 1869 (L33)


"Una carta la siento siempre como la inmortalidad, porque es la mente sola sin el amigo corporal. Deudores en nuestra conversación de la actitud y del acento, parece que hay un poder espectral en el pensamiento que camina solo -me gustaría agradecerle su gran amabilidad, pero nunca intenté levantar las palabras que no puedo sostener"

Emily Dickinson (1830-1866) regarded letters as a “joy of Earth” (L960). Cryptic and allusive in style, dazzling in verbal effects, and sensitively attuned to her recipients, Dickinson was a prolific and gifted epistolary artist. 
Scholars estimate that the printed editions of her letters represent only about one-tenth of the letters Dickinson actually wrote, and there are about a thousand letters to a hundred friends and family members, which constitute an extensive and revealing record of the poet's intellectual interests and emotional journeys.
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. 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.  Her later letters, often more epigrammatic, include condolence messages for grieving friends, notes to her brother's family next door, and, of course, poetry. 
Many of them can be read in The Dickinson Archive, where the Amherst College has made available all of their Emily Dickinson manuscript holdings.

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