Emily Dickenson and Mental Illness
Emily Dickinson is one of America's most celebrated poets, although she was virtually unknown during her lifetime. At the time of her death in 1886 she had published only seven poems, all anonymously. After her death, Dickinson's lifetime work, almost 1,800 poems were discovered in her bedroom and published by friends and family members. Of these 1,800 poems over half were written in a four-year period between 1861 and 1865. During this same period Emily Dickinson struggled with the severe disturbances in mood states, energy levels, and thinking that contribute to mental illness. The letters and poems that Dickinson wrote during this four-year span explain the poets heightened productivity, document the suffering she endured at the hands of her disease and demonstrate the emergence of her revolutionary poetic style. In April of 1862 Dickinson wrote a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson the editor and literary critic for The Atlantic Monthly. Dickinson who had only recently established her professional relationship with Higginson, confided, "I had a terror since September [1861], I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am afraid." This "terror " marked the onset of the most produc
Dickinson confirmed with a graphic revelation that she had become disoriented and was no longer in control of her own thought processes. The correspondence between the two of them continued for over twenty years. The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before - But sequence raveled out of Sound Like Balls - upon a Floor. " The bulk of Emily Dickinson's work was written during the clearly defined four- year period from 1861-1865. " On the contrary, the works of many authors and poets who suffered from manic depression were written in retrospect either after recovery or during the manic stage of the illness. These works include Darkness Visible by Pulitzer Prize winning author William Styron and The Bell Jar by feminist writer Sylvia Plath. When Dickinson was praised, it was for context, not form. tive period of her life; she composed 277 poems in 1862 alone. " The event that "terrorized" Dickinson was a severe depressive episode and the result for the poet was to "sing", a word Dickinson used to refer to writing poetry. Most of Dickinson's letters were dated but her poems were found untitled, undated, and in various written states.
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