19 pages • 38 minutes read
Emily DickinsonA Clock stopped—
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Upon the first publication of her poems posthumously in 1890, Emily Dickinson became one of the preeminent voices of American poetry. Despite the questionable edits made by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson that strove to render her work in more conventional terms, Dickinson’s rebellious spirit captured audiences. Perhaps those on the forefront of the rapidly moving 1890s appreciated her vigor. Her resistance to tradition, plus her unique stance in observing the world around her, has caused her continued renown.
Dickinson, along with Walt Whitman—contemporaries who never met—had unique voices that broke with the traditional establishment, those poets who used strict rhyme, meter, form, and predictable subject matter. Both iconoclasts embraced more intimate subject matter, but while Whitman’s style was sprawling and inclusive, Dickinson’s was compact and revolutionary.
Writing in common meter rather than iambic pentameter, Dickinson concentrated on precise observations of the world around her, using detailed images of everyday events and objects in a quick cadence. Witty and subversive, she often verged on dissent. She was far more interested in the personal struggle than religious surety or convenient salvation. Distinctly elliptical, she would often render the truth through metaphor, trusting that the reader could riddle out the connections she was making from line to line. As the rare woman of the period who studied formally, Dickinson could also draw on her vast knowledge of botany, astronomy, mathematics, and natural history for these interwoven images.
Inspired by the language of William Shakespeare and the characterizations of the Brontë sisters as well as the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Dickinson created her own bank of memorable poems, which in turn inspired future poets. The reevaluation of her work in the 1950s and beyond solidifies the artistic rebellion she used to create her work. Her provocative subject matter, language, use of dashes, and unconventional rhythms remain hard to emulate but a worthy aspiration to contemporary audiences.
Textual Context
The story of the posthumous publication of Emily Dickinson’s poems is controversial. When her sister Lavinia discovered Emily’s 1,800 poems after Dickinson died, Lavinia felt they should be published. She first approached her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Emily’s long-term friend and confidante. Susan had already seen approximately 270 of the poems that Emily had sent her during her lifetime and had often given the poet advice. Susan planned an inclusive volume that would include “letters, humorous writings, illustrations” (See: Further Reading & Resources).
However, Lavinia found Susan’s extensive editorial process too slow and contacted Mabel Loomis Todd about the project. Mabel, the wife of a professor at Amherst College, was also the long-term mistress of her brother Austin Dickinson, Susan’s husband. Todd agreed to the project and started work on the poems with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a well-known literary supporter, who had also communicated extensively with Emily by letter during her lifetime. The first volume was published in 1890 and was quickly succeeded by a second volume in 1891. Another volume of poems appeared in 1896. These volumes were filled with extensive edits and replaced Emily’s unconventional style with more conventional choices (i.e., dashes were replaced by periods and interline capitalization was removed). Todd also made sure to downplay references to Susan Gilbert Dickinson.
A legal quarrel complicated matters and the remaining Dickinsons and Todds continued to put out rival volumes for several years until their deaths. It was only in 1955 that Thomas H. Johnson prepared a new edition from both sets of manuscripts and published them as The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Johnson placed the poems in chronological order and undid some of the Todd-Higginson edits. In 1980, Ralph Franklin published The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, attempting to reproduce the order of the small books of poems Emily created. Franklin also published the Master letters (1986), which are discussed in many biographies.
In 1990s, three feminist critics—Marta Werner, Ellen Louise Hart, and Martha Nell Smith—wrote scholarly works that challenged the 1870s-1890s texts, looked at the original handwritten poems, tried to reproduce Dickinson’s visual style, and reestablished the importance of Susan Gilbert Dickinson’s role in Emily’s career.
In reading Dickinson, all of these variations in publication must be remembered as they can make the difference between interpretation. For example, the 1896 version of Line 4 of “A Clock stopped—” says, “Can’t put the puppet bowing,” but both Johnson and Franklin transcribe the line as “Cant put the puppet bowing” (All transcripts are available at Emily Dickinson Archive website). This changes the reading of the poem.
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By Emily Dickinson
