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In the Review’s February 27 issue, Christopher Benfey reads Emily Dickinson’s letters. “A century of writing about Dickinson has clarified important aspects of her poetry,” he writes (a Dickinson scholar himself, Benfey has contributed to that century with a dozen essays in our pages alone about her life and poetry). But, he continues:

No comparable interpretive work has been done on Dickinson’s letters. Even the most cursory immersion in these extraordinary texts makes one thing immediately clear. They are a major literary achievement in themselves, related to her poems and perhaps exceeding them in experimental energy. And yet, we don’t know how to read them.

Below, alongside Benfey’s essay, we have collected five articles from our archives about Emily Dickinson.

Christopher Benfey
‘A Loving Caw from a Nameless Friend’

A new collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters reveals them to be a major literary achievement, related to her poems and perhaps exceeding them in experimental energy.

Brenda Wineapple
Dickinson’s Improvisations

“To Dickinson, then, it seems that literature was partly improvisation, much like her inventions at the piano, which were affectionately recalled by all who heard them. She toyed with several possibilities for an individual word while playing with image patterns, line arrangement, and metrics; she did not necessarily prefer one variation over another; she did not indicate when or if a poem was ‘finished.’ What’s more, she frequently composed on snippets of paper—newspaper clippings, cut-up paper sacks—or around the edges of thin sheets, her cursive often illegible.”

—July 1, 2021

Helen Vendler
The Poet Remakes the Poem

“Dickinson’s pondering of adjective after adjective suggests the flood of intellectual or moral alternatives that are generated when the poet searches for truth. She is not assembling a group of synonyms: rather, each potential choice suggests a different angle from which to predict the success of a sermon.”

—March 10, 2016

Joyce Carol Oates
Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature

“Dickinson’s poems, and her letters as well, which seem so airy and fluent, give the impression of being dashed off; in fact, Dickinson composed very carefully, sometimes keeping her characteristically enigmatic lines and images for years before using them in a poem or in a letter.”

—August 13, 2015

Robert Craft
Amorous in Amherst

“If Dickinson’s ‘personality’ does not haunt her bedroom, the visitor there can still divine her physical presence. The white dress displayed in a glass case, now as much a part of American lore as Melville’s white whale, is even smaller than expected from her own and other people’s descriptions: ‘I have a little shape’; ‘I am…small, like the Wren’; ‘A little plain woman…in a clean white pique’; ‘A tiny figure in white.’”

—April 23, 1987

Irvin Ehrenpreis
Dickinsons in Love

I suppose Emily Dickinson had the powers of genius in her observation of people, her understanding of them, her imaginative sympathy and responsiveness. I suppose the remoteness of her father and the weakness of her mother threw the children back on themselves; and Austin, whose sensibility matched her own, became Emily’s bulwark. I suppose that with others she veiled the boldness of her mind behind a disarming, childlike exterior. Secured by this screen, by her brother’s devotion and the family’s solidarity, she could let herself reflect searchingly upon the baffling elements of our difficult life: the impersonality of nature, the existence of pain and evil, the mysteries of death and immortality, the character of God.

—January 23, 1975

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