I write of the famed American poet Emily Dickinson in the same breath as “me,”  because I’m haunted by her, you see! I feel that poetry saved my life when my first marriage collapsed as much as it saved Emily’s life to write after love failed her.

Recently, arriving home after a visit to the Emily Dickinson Homestead Museum where I’d read Ruth Owen Jones article “Neighbor and Friend and Bridegroom” revealing her well substantiated theory that William Smith Clark was Dickinson’s Mysterious Master figure in her poems and letters—I turned on my laptop computer, and out sang Dickinson’s poem “My River Runs to Thee / Blue Sea Will’t Welcome Me?” which I’d set to music, in 1976, and performed with my African harp bought in Greenwich Village at the budding of my own dedication to poetry in the days when I was among the first performance poets of New York’s mid 20th Century.

My earliest ventures into writing had been in playwriting or multimedia poetry for the stage. “The Sea Hag in the Cave of Sleep” had been produced at the Cubiculo Theatre Off-off Broadway in Manhattan and won a grant from The Creative Artists Public Service program of The New York State Council for the Arts. I had used the grant award to create the first Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk, now produced each year by Poets House. During that same early period in my writing career, I had once been featured reading Dickinson’s poetry, with Marguerite Harris, in the early 1970’s, for a radio show on Pacifica Radio, WBAI-FM in Manhattan, and I set a Dickinson’s poem to music for the lyre.

But, that day when I entered my writing studio at Wellspring House in Ashfield, the birthplace of William Smith Clark, I had not turned on that Mp3 music file when it played out of my computer. It was Spring 2003 and I’d not thought of that Dickinson song which I’d often felt to be a love poem to her “Master.” The song played from my computer all by itself as if a ghost had bid it to in the town of Master William Smith Clark, Emily Dickinson’s lover, as Ruth Owen Jone’s had written of him in an essay in The Emily Dickinson Journal, Dec. 2002, which I’d just read while visiting the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst.

I began to feel haunted by the spirit of an untold love story— so deep that it has ultimately survived the grave, as Emily Dickinson said it would, and so I dramatized it in a novel after careful study of many facts that seem to thoroughly augment it.

 To add to the ghostly feeling, when “My River Runs to Thee” played from my computer all by itself, it’s important to realize that I was housed in the room dubbed the “Emily Dickinson Room” at Wellspring Writer’s Retreat in Ashfield, Massachusetts--which as I’ve said is the  hometown of Emily’s mysterious “Master"--according to Ruth Owen Jones, Dickinson scholar. It was indeed eery to enter that room in the dark and have that old Mp3 file of a 1970’s recording, sing out, all by itself, from my computer. Since I’m not a believer in any occult phenomenon, I know there is a scientific reason why this occurred. The computer was turned on and did not turn itself on, but it did play that particular poem which I’d set to music so long ago, selecting it from several Mp3 files on my hard disc. It did startle and puzzle me and make me think, in any case, about the powerful love the great poet talks of in her poems and letters.

Wellspring House Writer’s Retreat is a half hour’s drive from Amherst, where Dickinson’s brick homestead still stands alongside The Evergreens, her brother Austin’s home. The William Smith Clark birth place, is down Main Street and around St. Joseph’s Church corner in Ashfield— very near the writers retreat, Wellspring House, where I began my novel based on Dickinson’s life.  I almost bought the old Clark farmhouse, but a another buyer beat me too it. Ashfield is also the home of Paris Press which published Open Me Carefully, the love story of Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the poet’s sister-in-law—but I’ve come to understand that Dickinson, like so many great artists, was probably, like Walt Whitman, bi-sexual in her mental orientation, able to empathize or love anyone whose intellect or sensibility she admired greatly.

Also, homoerotic relationships were common in the antebellum period when women and men were very affectionate and loving toward same sex friends without thinking of it as homosexuality in the way we define such orientations in our own times. Now, Abraham Lincoln is thought to have had such a relationship, too, unrequited or not. Also, Dickinson was “courting” Susan Gilbert in romantic letters as she read Romantic novels by the Brontess and George Eliot and others with Susan. She was likely acting out the Romantic courtship that her brother, Austin, was not properly performing. She desperately wanted Sue to be a part of her family and offer her the intellectual companionship with books she could not get from her mother, Emily Norcross, or her sister Lavinia. The intellectual comradeship she was not allowed to have so easily with men, as the sexes in Mid 19th Century Puritan society were fairly segregated, and women meant to stay in their place in the kitchen as homemakers, or at their sewing circles or Bible study classes, as Emily’s father firmly believed. Young girls and women had close friendships segregated from male society as they were. Emily’s father wrote publicly of his philosophy that woman’s place being strictly in the home. He thought it socially improper for women to publish their writings and felt that women’s education was meant merely to enrich the life of the family and help in the education of childrens.

The Dickinson homestead compound in Amherst is now a completed museum open to the public. I’ve visited Emily’s rooms and bedroom many times and seen where she looked out of her window upon Amherst’s Main Street. I saw her nephew Gib’s nursery and the parlor at the Evergreens where Emily recited poems and played the piano to entertain friends as Sue’s soirees. I’ve read several scholarly books about Emily and her family: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard B. Sewall among them. The Emily I have in mind in my novel is a more womanly one than the sickly, 17 year old girl in the well-known daguerreotype. She is more like the woman in the portrait at the back of the Sewall biography, earthy and assured. I wrote this novel based on facts disclosed by Ruth Owen Jones and others.  My Emily is a mature woman, a hearty woman of quizzical and sardonic gaze—big steady eyes that say “I’ve lived for art and love alike. I have known carnal love and I am fully a woman.” 

I feel sure that Richard Sewell, her worthy biographer, would not have included the  photo suspected by some to possibly be Emily Dickinson at 30 years in the back of his biography, if he, too, did not have a firm suspicion that it was the face of the poet at thirty or so. “Faces” were important to Emily Dickinson. I feel that she’d have wanted a more real view of herself as a mature woman to be known.  She kept portraits of George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her room. I invite all who read my book to study each feature in the photo at the back of the Sewall biography and compare it with the known daguerreotype. I’ve a feeling that those gifted with an eye for visuals, or visual artists, will agree.

I’d only just discovered that Ashfield was the hometown of Emily Dickinson’s probable “Master” of her love poems, according to the scholar Ruth Owen Jones in the December issue of The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XI, No. 2, 2002—when I went home to Ashfield from The Dickinson Museum in Amherst where I bought and read Owen Jones article. As I’ve explained, when I entered my dark room, called “The Emily Dickinson Room” at Wellspring House Writer’s Retreat, out of my laptop played, “My river runs to thee,/ blue see will’t welcome me? My river waits reply./ Oh sea, look graciously./ I’ll fetch thee brooks/ from spotted nooks./ Say Sea, take me!”  It sang out even though I’d not turned that file audio file on. I simply walked to the desk, opened the lid of the laptop and out played that music file. There must be a scientific explanation for the phenomenon, but as it played, chills went up my spine and I realized, for the first time, that it was a very intimate love song and an erotic beckoning. “Take me!” I noticed, too, the combined words ‘Will’t” and wondered if it wasn’t a deliberate pun on “Will” made by Emily when Will Clark was traveling to Europe and at sea. Jones augments her thesis about Will Clark as Emily’s lover or “Master” figure by showing how she puns on “will” and “Will” throughout her poetry—as Shakespeare did. Emily, it is well known by all us Dickinson scholars,  was thoroughly schooled in Shakespeare’s works.

 Open Me Carefully, about Dickinson’s relationship with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law, had been recently published, too, but it’s clear that though Emily had projected a love affair onto her friend Susan and had a crush on her when they were young, the act of putting all the Susan letters under one cover, omitting all the other affectionate and loving letters of Dickinson sent to friends and relatives, slants the case of Sue as the Master figure. According to several other Dickinson scholars, Emily had a falling out with Sue prior to her nephew Gib’s death in 1883, and hadn’t visited her sister-in-law Sue’s home, The Evergreens, for about fifteen years. Sue Gilbert and Emily Dickinson took very different spiritual paths and did not agree on important issue of religion. Also, Sue would have frowned severely on Emily’s affair with Will Clark, a married man, as she was a married woman and Austin eventually strayed from his marriage to Sue to have an affair with a married woman, as many eminent Victorians of Emily’s region did.

Though Emily may very well have been smitten with Susan, and projected that love onto her brother in vicarious romantic ardor, enough to cause him to marry Susan, Open Me Carefully  is only one part of the story and there is no way, from all my studies, that Susan can be the “Master” of the “Master Letters” and love poems. It simply does not fit the evidence in the surviving “Master Letters” at all. The more plausible thesis is that proposed by Ruth Owen Jones naming the first PhD. professor of botany, horticulture, and chemistry at Amherst College, and first acting president and founder of The University of Massachusetts, as an Agricultural College as “the Master.” 

Cynthia Griffin Wolff in her careful study: Emily Dickinson with its chapter on “Love and Love Poetry,” concludes, as Ruth Owen Jones did, and as I do, that nether Reverend Wadsworth of Philadelphia or Editor of The Springfield Republican, Samuel Bowles, or Judge Otis Lord, either, were the intended recipients of “The Master Letters.”  I’ve studied My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger, 2002, and The World of Emily Dickinson by Polly Longsworth, 1990. I’ve studied Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith published in 1998. I’ve devoured The Complete Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson, 1958, who devoted so much of his life to scholarly research on the poet’s writings.

I’ve seen how affectionately Emily wrote to many women and men friends with imagination, love and erotic innuendo. I’ve poured over the revelations in Austin and Mabel –-also by Polly Longsworth,, 1984—with its documented story of the secretive affair between Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd and Emily’s married brother, Austin William Dickinson. It contains the love letters of Austin and Mabel –who became Emily’s first editor, along with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for the poet’s first posthumous editions, published in 1890, 91 and 96, four years after her death on May 15th, 1886. 

I’ve looked carefully at “The Master Letters” of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin for Amhersst College Press in 1986. And read such works as A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, edited by Vivian R. Pollak for Oxford University Press, 2004, as well as subscribed as a member of The Emily Dickinson Society to The Emily Dickinson Journal. I could go on about all I’ve studied to write this novel based on fact, but let me simply say that much respected scholarship has passed before my eyes and entered my spirit and mind in the writing of what I hope is a fairly authentic historical, biographical novel.

I’ve discovered that “Emily Dickinson” became a “cottage industry” for many years after her death, her notoriety as much built around the scandal of her aristocratic New England family in the Victorian era, as around the brilliance of her poetic output. I read My Emily by Susan Howe and realized that Howe is correct in saying that there is much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that is impenetrable and much that we really don’t need to read, as much as the poems she might have finished and chosen for print had she be able to do so. But, I’ve concluded that there is new meaning in many of her works not seen there by Howe or others, especially now that a fully edited and definitive new editon by R.W. Franklin, for Belknap Press, Harvard, 1999—is accepted and in use over versions in public domain edited by Todd and Higginson. The earliest published versions of the poems are used herein for reasons of copyright as they are words used to dramatize a novel, not a biography per se.

With this novel I hope to make others aware that there’s an all  new view to be had in reading the poems with Emily’s true “Master” and probable lover in mind. Nothing I’ve read explains Dickinson’s poetry and life struggle so well as Ruth Owen Jones carefully documented article: “Neighbor—and friend—and Bridegroom” William Smith Clark as Emily Dickinson’s Master Figure.”

Why has Ruth Owen Jones been the one to unearth the identity of “The Master” when so many PhD.s of literature, and other literary scholars specializing in Dickinson, have failed to do so in their analysis of primary sources for over more than a hundred years?” I propose it’s precisely because they are not historians of the Amherst area and guides of the town and The Dickinson Museum, trained at The University of Massachusetts where the Clark papers were so readily available, as Jones is.

 Ruth Owen Jones vantage point in time and place and her knowledge of the history of her town and Alma Mater, as well as her service as a guide at the Dickinson Museum, and her intimate knowledge of local history in her own hometown, are what allowed her to mesh the chronology of Emily Dickinson’s life to Clark’s as a prominent member of poet’s society. Clark was far more famous and accomplished than Emily, herself, in his lifetime. Ruth Owen Jones lives down Amity Street from The Jones Library and around the corner from The Frost Library where much of the history of the town and its people are housed. She has served as a President or Chair of the Amherst Historical Commission and she is a gardener who researched the Victorian gardens of her town. These are the factors that allowed her to discover and note what others have failed to.

For one important fact, the dashing and charming Clark taught the poet’s favorite subjects as the first PhD. professor of Amherst College, next door to the poet’s home. He was among the first professors of science of that venerable New England institution of higher learning, founded by Dickinson’s grandfather and nurtured to fruition by her father, to invite women to attend his chemistry and horticultural lectures. Unlike Emily’s father, Dr. William Smith Clark believed that women had the right to an education and a profession as well.  One can imagine him nurturing her love of gardening, her plant conservatory, her herbarium, and her poetry with its reverence for natural wonders and Transcendentl ideas of the value of science over scripture.

He traveled widely in Europe and the Orient where he observed styles of behavior alien to Amherst’s Victorian Society, and brought his findings home to influence the town, and he went off to fight in the Civil War, just around the time when scholars agree there was a period of trauma that inspired the poet’s richest outpouring of writing. It is more than likely that he was the intended recipient of her love poems, Master Letters, and fascicles. But one must read all of Ruth Owen Jones’s footnoted findings to agree.

The important point is that reading Dickinson’s poetry and letters is so much better understood with Owen Jones’s thesis in mind. Owen Jones’s thesis enhances the poetry of Emily Dickinson and reveals a full-blown woman quite different than “The Myth of Amherst” as the author of such work.

Evidence after evidence pops up in the actual poems themselves once one is aware of the research of Jones and one of her important points is that it is suspicious that Clark—such a well known personage around and about Amherst and a known business associate of her father and brother—appears only twice in Emily’s surviving correspondence of which we only have an estimated third preserved for study. One can only surmise that he is conspicuously absent from her correspondence because of expurgation. Nearly all references to him were likely destroyed to avoid a scandal between two eminent families of the town upon whom all depended for their own sustenance and well being: The Dickinsons and The Willistons.

These two families, the later into which William Smith Clark was married, were the leaders and upholders of their Amherst society and its livelihood. Amherst University, an important industry of the town, was founded by Samuel Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s grandfather as a Puritan Seminary meant to produce Missionaries of Evangelical Puritan faith, and Samuel Williston, Clark’s father-in-law, served as a trustee of the university along with Dickinson’s father, Edward and later, her brother, Austin.

Of course, Sue Dickinson, Emily’s sister-in-law and close girlhood friend, was terribly important to ED’s development as a poet. Her importance in ED’s life as a seminal influence for her interest in writing, and reading literature, is doubtless. Sue Dickinson was an extraordinarily independent woman and an eloquent thinker who had much influence on ED’s literary genius. Without a strong woman friend like Sue Gilbert Dickinson in close association with the poet as a young woman--Dickinson might not have developed her prowess as a poet, but Owen Jones’s thesis about William Smith Clark holds water at every turn as no other does.

I needed to tell this love story with a dramatization of the facts as best I could, to finally free the great American woman poet from “The Myth” that has surrounded her for more than a century. I wanted to tell this profound love story because it is the key to understanding America’s most beloved female poet—and it’s a tale that feminist will enjoy, even if they have wanted to believe that Emily was a Lesbian who never knew heterosexual love.

More likely she was as bisexual as William Shakespeare or Walt Whitman, or Abraham Lincoln, her contemporary. Homoerotic relationships were common in the antebellum period, whether consummated or not. From her correspondence, it is clear the Dickinson was capable of erotic desire for any person who deeply impressed her with a thrilling intellect, for she herself, was indeed a genius of words and feeling and wisdom—even if not all of her poetic jottings are worth our pondering. Many are enamored of her mind and imagination and extremely curious about the clock that made her tick so eloquently regardless of much publication of her work in her own lifetime. William Smith Clark, a formidable intellect, may well have been the catalyst for her ardent and romantic imagination. During her lifetime, her writing was read by many good minds and had publication in the scribal sense in that her poems were circulated among at least forty known recipients by epistle, some of them the top editors of important literary journals of her day.

One is aware that a passionate audience was there for a passionate poet, regardless of “public” publication. An audience for her output was necessary. She could not have written such fine work only for herself, alone, as some want to believe. She had readers, lovers, friends who read her carefully. She was not isolated from the scrutiny and perusal of others. She was communicating with living beings, very intensely, all of her life. She was far less isolated than many women poets of our time, and far less isolated than I myself am at sixty-four, with her sister across the hall and her close consort, Maggie, the Irish maid, and the handyman, Tom, and seven other men seasonally employed to work the fields of her acreage. With her brother Austin and her intellectual sister-in-law, niece and nephew, in the house next door, plus Professors like William Smith Clark and students coming and going in her prominent father’s house and her dining room and parlor—the idea of “isolation” is so very exaggerated in viewing Dickinson’s work.

She was always part of a very peopled world. It would be wrong to teach the young that they can write sterling poetry in complete isolation with no home or an audience as if she brilliantly did so. No, Emily had clear headed people whom she knew would read her poems and she was fashioning her fascicles for human eyes to see, very intensely and very passionately, and that is why the poems have such resonance. They had intended audiences.

What’s strange for me is that I ‘d not pushed any key to turn on that Mp3 music file of Dickinson’s poem which I set to melody and which is stored on my laptop with many other music files of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. It just played all by itself, when I returned to my writers retreat and entered the Emily Dickinson Room where I was staying—after having spent the day at The Dickinson Compound, in Amherst, reading Ruth Owen Jones’s thesis about William Smith Clark.  I’m sure “My River Runs to Thee…” was written for Clark, her lover while he was away at sea traveling to Europe or Asia, as he did. 

I’d set it to music and sang it many times at my own poetry readings all through the 1970’s and 80’s. Why should it play all by itself from my laptop— like a ghost of a memory of a life in poetry? And just after I’d visited the Dickinson Homestead and Compound in Amherst and read Ruth Owen Jones’s thesis for the very first time! I was working on other projects and not planning to write anything about Emily Dickinson at the time. I was a lover of her best poems since college as most other American poets are. But, as I’d sung the poem through the seventies, I’d noticed that it did seem like an erotic love poem even more than a hymn to the creator. Scholars often find that double-entendre in Dickinson’s love poems. Perhaps, it was a way of cloaking her love poems to Clark in religious intent just incase they were intercepted or discovered.

When I saw the rather superficial understanding of her life and work expressed in some videos I subsequently viewed about her, one by The Academy of American Poets and one hosted and narrated by former Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, I just had to dramatize what I strongly believe, after thorough study, is a more accurate story of the essence of this poet. Visiting Wellspring House Writers Retreat in Ashfield Massachusetts, which happened to be the birthplace of Clark—seeing firsthand his humble beginnings compared to her more opulent ones, spurred me on, when out of my computer sounded this forgotten ditty that I’d sung through the 1970’s. There I was in Ashfield in Spring 2003, not even knowing yet that Clark was born here, and out of my laptop sang “My river runs to thee, blue see will’t welcome me? My river waits reply, blue sea, look graciously. I’ll fetch thee brooks from spotted nooks. Say sea, take me.”

“Poets All” was Emily’s religion as it is mine. She was actually a Transcendentalist who embraced a German sort of Pantheism, as did Emerson, William Smith Clark, her brother, and many of the other forward thinking intellectuals of her time. Emerson actually became in the end, a non-theist and a Buddhist, a fact that few seem to be aware of. There was a fervent movement among thinking and reading people to decry the restraints of Puritan dogma which were holding science back and social advancement back in Dickinson’s day, just as there is now.

So many of the fine writers of New England at that time were rebelling against Calvinist Puritanism and Creationism as put forth in Congregational Churches of the area. The struggles of anti-disestablishmentarianism were afoot finally resulting in de-establishing Massachusetts churches from tax subsidies. The separation of church and state was being strongly established. Hawthorne was writing against the hypocrisies of Puritan codes as much as Emerson was. Louisa May Alcott’s father was fighting his battles with strict and punitive methods of Puritanical  education. He was declaring as we did all through the 1970’s that children had a right to “question authority.”

Dickinson could not bear the hypocrisy she saw all around her in religious, born-again, Evangelical fervor, just as I can’t in my time as fervent fundamentalist doctrines rear their trouble-making heads to limit women’s rights and children’s rights and cause prejudice, war and terror. Putting religion before science is not necessary and only begets superstition and hypocrisy. Forward thinkers were espousing women’s right to an education and human equality for all, in ED’s day just as the peacemakers are today. They abhorred the injustices they saw around them, especially in the slavery of Blacks, often easily accepted by those who pretended to a belief in Jesus Christ. Many then, also, ignored The Sermon on the Mount, as they pillaged and fought and broadcast “fire and brimstone” over true charity and love.

I think Emily must have read Hawthorne’s “The Maypole of Marymount” –as we know her first tutor gave her Emerson’s poetry and essays to read, too— in which he argues against the evils of Puritanism and literal use of The Scriptures in the “Age of Iron” as opposed to the Spiritual Enlightenment afforded by Transcendental faith in the study of science and “Nature.” Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorn, Whitman, and Dickinson, like Douglass and Sojourner Truth,  were aware of how the evils of repressive Puritanical dogma destroyed many lives in Dickinson’s time just as religious extremism is destroying lives in ours. Many perverted the use of scripture to bind the doctrines of slavery and claimed that The Bible augmented their belief that African slaves were inferior, using scripture to prove it, while others, like Frederick Douglass and Soujourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Smith Clark, used scripture to disprove it.

George Eliot’s themes also taught of nearsightedness to social injustice and the truth of moral character as did the Bronte sisters, Dickinson’s favorite novelists. Her favorite poets spoke of love and the truth of the heart as did the poet she most worshipped, the Romantic, Elizabeth Barrett Browning whose love poems and her feminist epic Aurora Leigh were so important to ED, based on the lives of George Sand and Margaret Fuller, as it was.

Emerson, in 1836, caused a stir with his essay “Nature,” and Emily, then 6 years old, was to be profoundly influenced by his ideas by her very first real friend and tutor, Benjamin Newton, when she was nineteen. She’d already rebelled against Mary Lyon’s Revivalist Meetings at Holyoke Seminary when she came under the influence of Ben Newton who gave her Emerson to read. Emerson’s rebellion against the tyranny of New England Puritanism into the light of Unitarianism and then to Transcendentalism and finally to Buddhism with its non-theistic way of life, would bring him into a vision of nature’s intimacy with the human and the divine. He would herald Darwinian ideals. His philosophy liberated Emily from her father’s and grandfather’s strict Congregationalism. She would not fall for Puritan revivalism as the rest of her family did, including Susan Gilbert and Lavinia, her sisters and house mates. The Aurua Borealis helped spur Rivivalism and Born Again Christianity, in Dickinson’s day, just as the tsunami and The Age of International Terrorism have turned people toward Fundamentalist beliefs.

Just as my life has been clouded by fanatical religiosity in the Age of Terrorism, so was hers in the “Puritan Age of Iron,” as Hawthorne referred to it. I live in the shadow of misery created in my time by an Evangelical president who thinks that God has led him to bomb and murder the Mid-East into “democracy” as insane Fundamentalist Muslims match his ardor for self-righteous tyranny.  I hid from the Attack on New York in 2001, as Emily had to hide in her basement on Sunday mornings to keep from being dragged to church by her father, Edward, whose strictly Puritanical father, Samuel, had founded Amherst College as a Puritan Seminary for the purpose of fashioning missionaries who would fan out across the world to say that the only answer was in their idea of “Jesus”  even as they preached fire and brimstone over The Sermon on the Mount, ignoring the true essence of Christianity even as the warmongering, military profiteering American president does in our time as a puppet of war industrialists and oil barons. 

Emily would sneak down to the cellar with a candle and a book of poetry and read while her father ushered the family to church. “Some keep the sabbath going to church, I keep it staying at home, with a bobolink for a chorister and an orchard for a dome… was a poem published in the same issue of Drumbeat that published an essay by Colonel William Smith Clark, a staunch abolitionist who trained and recruited the Massachusetts 21st Regimen to fight for Abraham Lincoln’s Union Army. He is likely the one who made Emily, “Empress of Calvary and Cavalry!” He was away at sea when she wrote “My river runs to thee….Say sea, take me!” How could the computer play that file all by itself? It baffles me still, though I believe in nothing of the occult!

Yet, I’m beginning to feel I’m  haunted by Emily, born over a hundred years before me. Her poem ends, “Say sea, take me!” with such a hint of passion for her lover of “Wild Nights!” Emily seems to have been longing to run to him like a river to the sea. I can feel her sitting on the bank of a brook, thinking about how a brook runs to a river and a river runs to the sea which was carrying her lover’s ship away from her to Europe where he went to study. I can feel her composing the love poem to him and to Nature, her god. “My river waits reply…. Say sea, take me!”

Ruth Owen Jones wrote: “I propose that Emily Dickinson’s Master, the mysterious person she loved when she was about thirty, and for whom she wrote hundreds of poems and the three Master Letters, was William Smith Clark, who lived from 1826 to 1886.”  I feel that all evidence points to an agreement with that statement.

Emily died a few weeks after Clark in 1886, as if she couldn’t bear to live on without her love alive not far from her in Amherst. He lived across a wood behind her homestead and ‘Northwest” of it—around the corner so to speak—with his wife, an adopted daughter nicknamed “The Queen”  until he moved a few miles away to found The University of Massachusetts as an Agricultural School. His wife’s name was Harriet Richards Williston and her father was thought to be the wealthiest man in Western Massachusetts. I can imagine that Clark married “The Queen”  in order to advance his ambitious career as he rose from humble beginnings on the wings of his intellect and charm— one of the most important botanists of his time. Clark came from the home of a poor country doctor of Ashfield, and he was social climbing in Emily’s community of Amherst where Emily’s  family was of the cream of Amherst society. Emily wished she could “take the Queen’s place”  in her poetry.

Emily’s niece, Martha Dickinson, was born the same day as Clark’s daughter and went to school with her. I bet Emily baked cakes and cookies for the children Martha played with, including, no doubt,  Clark’s daughter, and she likely sent flower’s to his wife, too.

Could -- I do more -- for Thee --

Wert Thou a Bumble Bee --

Since for the Queen, have I --

Nought but Bouquet?

Emily was a fine gardener and a good baker, and cook, who loved to give gifts from her flower garden and her brick oven. They say liking to feed people well is a sign of an affectionate and a nurturing nature. Everyone enjoys my cooking the way they did Emily’s and there’s nothing wrong with being a good cook, even if one is mainly a poet, though Emily’s townspeople knew her more as a baker and gardener , daughter to an important politician of Massachusetts, than as a poet.

I couldn’t get Emily or the thoughts of her probable lover, Professor and Colonel William Smith Clark, out of my head as if they wanted me to tell their story at last, so buried by the censorship of her correspondence by her surviving family. And so I’ve done my best to dramatize it with my imagination. “Imagination” was a quality Emily admired greatly. She dwelt in “Possibility,”  her word for poetry and imagination.

After all, Clark was a married man, and Emily his Mistress as he was her Master, just as her Cousin Maria Whitney was likely Samuel Bowles mistress and Mabel Loomis Todd was her brother Austin’s mistress. Those Victorians were never so Victorian as we sometimes imagine them to have been. There was plenty of straying outside marriage in Emily’s day. If she had an affair with a married man, it would not be so unusual as one might think. Indeed, it’s the scandal all around Emily that made her poetry so famous after her death, more than the poetry itself, though one can’t deny the brilliance of the best of it.

Indeed, the eminent preacher of Amherst College, Reverend Beecher, was notorious for his affair with a married woman of his parish and it was written up in all the newspapers of Emily’s time. Perhaps, that’s why he left Amherst to found the Plymouth Church down the street from me in Brooklyn Heights, the church where Lincoln gave a great anti-slavery speech in Emily’s day. Beecher’s statue stands there over the “underground railroad” of the Plymouth Church. William Smith Clark was a staunch anti-slavery activist, too, and his stance drove him to risk his life in the Civil War.

Perhaps, this desire to tell of an illicit and passionate 19th century romance—a great poet with a dashing and intellectual Colonel, her Master, is the longing of a menopausal woman writer to live out in her imagination a sensual and vicarious love affair. Yet, that love affair truly does explain the poetry of the greatest woman poet of America very thoroughly, too, and it undoes the myths surrounding the poet as they’ve come down to us with such inaccuracy.

We live without the typhoid fever, malaria, and consumption that everyone died from in Emily’s day. Though Emily is supposed to have died of Bright’s disease or kidney failure, I wonder if she had Syphilis like so many people of that century did— including Abraham Lincoln—according to biographer, Gore Vidal? After all, it took only one indiscretion to contract such an ailment and there were no antibiotics then. Clark certainly liked the ladies and traveled to Europe and Asia where he may have unwittingly brought back the rampant disease to Emily—as it was hardly diagnosed to exist and few physicians of New England would have recognized its symptoms as they match so many other diseases.

Clark seems to have been a randy fellow and it would not have been entirely Emily’s fault if she  was seduced by him. Emily also died, no doubt, from a very broken heart. Nearly everyone she loved died during the last few years of her life. People were dropping like flies in those days from typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and pneumonia. Death was a real constant in her life, not any psychological obsession, but a reality. At least five of her best friends died before she reached fifteen years, and the only portrait that people accept of her as authentic is one taken at sixteen or seventeen years just after a severe illness nearly pulled her into death’s dominion along with many of her schoolmates. One thing most literary biographers often neglect to emphasize is the medical science of the times in which their subjects lived. There are few index entries if any diseases in the most eminent biographies of the poet dealing with the issues that made her “obsessed” with death in her poetry.

I can understand Emily’s passions and her starving for love and romance when I imagine her thwarted by his marriage. Romance is something we women are always starved for at any age, and in every century except, perhaps, those women who lived among the Poets of Provencal—but the Pope had that culture murdered in one of the biggest cultural genocides of history. So, as an Italian American, I was dogged by Catholicism’s Medieval ways as much as Emily was dogged by Puritanism in her 19th Century New England. Life rarely happens as fairytales promise little girls it will—but I’m sure Clark knew how to woe a woman with exquisitely romantic style.  As Jones points out, one can see that in his warm and affectionate letters—so like Dickinson’s in tone—and so unlike her stern father’s and brother’s style of writing. Though Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother heated up his life before its end with an affair he had with a pretty, married woman sixteen years his junior—Mabel Loomis Todd.

And it was Mabel who saw to the publication of Emily’s poems after Emily died in 1886. Yes, many don’t realize it was Austin Dickinson’s illicit amore who saw to the editing and publishing of Emily’s first volumes of poetry. Few poets or readers of ED are aware that it is Mabel’s drawing of Indian Pipes, one of Emily’s favorite wildflowers, that graces the cover of the first edition of Dickinson’s poems. But, Mabel, though she came to play the piano in Emily’s parlor while Emily remained sequestered upstairs—never got to meet the poet face to face. Was Emily hiding a face ravaged by syphilis? This is a scientific question, not one of sexual curiosity, as it would explain much about the poet’s later years.  Such a thought should not be shocking. Such diseases were rampant and undiagnosed in Emily’s day. Keats, Paganini, Lincoln, Neitzche, so many greats of history died ravaged by the disease, as we worry about AIDS today and must guard ourselves and practice “Safe Sex” to avoid it. But, there were no widely available condoms or antibiotics in America then. The problem—as was said— is most literary biographers pay no attention to medical history and science when they write of an artist’s life. Perhaps, syphilis was not Dickinson’s problem, and it might still shock some to imagine it was.

Clark having traveled in Europe knew how to be romantic, unlike most of the staid, monosyllabic New Englanders of Emily’s day, including her brother Austin and her father Edward, who were unaffectionate and quite laconic at home as they aged.  Generally, American men don’t seem to understand how to be as romantic as European gentlemen. Emily tried so to please Susan, the way a man would, to court her the way she imagined a woman ought to be courted with romantic letters and protestations of courtly love—perhaps because she identified so with her older brother and wished he would write such letters to Sue, his soon to be fiancée. 

Emily and I were, both the middle child who longs so to please others, being neither the privileged  oldest child or the beloved baby. When Emily was writing to Sue it was a time of relative loneliness in her life, as her brother, too, was away from home, and it was he who brought the society of interesting young men to her door. Emily was born in between her older brother Austin and her young sister, Lavinia, and she spent her whole life with them nearby. Austin living next door with Susan, Emily’s former schoolmate and close friend, and Lavinia, her sister, always just a few feet across the hall from her. The hogwash about Emily’s solitary loneliness is as has been said, exaggerated. Her sister, Vinnie was almost always there a few feet away from her, and Sue next door with Austin, her brother, in a home that welcomed dignitaries of all kinds, as did her father’s home when she was young—full of college trustees, professors, young male students.

I feel so deeply Emily’s love for Clark as I read her poetry and the Master letters—despite our lives being separated by more than a century:  Emily Dickinson born in the winter of 1830 and me in the winter of 1941. We shared frustration about the publication of our poetry, though we had admiring literary critics who encouraged us to go on and told us, as Helen Hunt Jackson did Dickinson, that she was a great poet, as Nona Balakian said I was one of the best new poets around when my first book appeared from Boa Editions in 1979.

     It’s as if I’m forced to relive Emily’s life in my mind in order to understand my own life as an American poet—but she was born of the upper crust English society of Amherst, Massachusetts—a class of intellectuals who lived on the fringe of the Brahmins of New England.  I come from Greek Albanian Italian and Polish Russian Jewish immigrants. We’re both poets of a liberal and rebellious bent, she a transcendentalist in rebellion against the Puritans. ED made poetry her means of worshipping nature and all creation, especially after she heard Edwards A. Park give a stirring sermon saying render unto poetry, that which is poetry, and render unto prose that which is prose, when he explained that beauty and truth are one, and art is the pursuit of the spiritual in “the loveliest sermon” Emily ever heard. I’m a  Green Progressive Eco-feminist and a Unitarian, but more a Free Thinker as ED was in her poetry. She’d call her philosophy Transcendentalism as her first mentor Ben did. Perhaps, when she spoke with Clark who traveled in Germany, as did Emerson, she’d call it German Pantheism  which had its influence on Emerson’s ideas in Emily’s day. Maybe, she’d just call it worship or love of Nature—with a capital “N”—as in an Emerson’s essay. Such capitalization from German writings and books was used throughout her poetry. German culture was revered in New England, as music and science had blossomed in central Europe and were imported by American intellectuals eager to advance the culture and intellect of their young nation. 

I was born in the midst of World War II. Emily lived through The Anti-slavery Movement and the Civil War which nearly took her lover away from her. I lived through the Civil Rights Movement— was nearly killed by the Ku Klux Klan, and the Vietnam war which almost took my lover from me. Now, as I live in the Age of International Terrorism, I realize that living in a time of rampant incurable diseases before the advent of antibiotics and modern medicine was even more frightening.

          Emily wrote thousands of warm and affectionate letters as a way of being intimate with friends and family. I’ve been an obsessive letter writer, too, but it’s a lost art in the age of electronic mail and cell phones. The repartee which society enjoyed then is fairly well evaporated into quick, sparse speech with little eloquence, and most people no longer relish novels and books as they did in Emily Dickinson’s time. Movies and television have taken their place. William Smith Clark was a good correspondent, too, and his letters matched the tone of Dickinson in effusive affection, as Ruth Owen Jones explains. Clark was much less austere than Emily’s silent and stern father Edward or her brother Austin—more capable of peevishness and silence than Clark was. Clark was a talker, an orator, who was the center of a social gathering, and he was as loving in his letters to his students and friends as Emily was to her school chums and cousins. 

One thing that Martha Nell Smith does not make clear enough in Open Me Carefully is the fact that correspondents were ebullient and warm, women with women and men with men in those days, regardless of their heterosexuality, and there was much affection between school chums in institutions devoid of the opposite sex, segregated as education was then. Also, Emily’s letters to Mrs. Holland and Abiah Root and others are equally demonstrative and affectionate as those sent to the orphaned Sue who was alone and far from home. Emily was no doubt attempting, grandly, to help Sue feel loved in the absence of a family that could nurture her. And she was curious to hear about what life as an independent woman far from home was all about. Plus, she wanted to keep Sue hooked into her family circle in hopes that Austin would marry her and stay near to home also. Obviously, Edward Dickinson was encouraging the relationship with the orphaned Susan whom he’d grown to admire at his Congregational Church. Edward Dickinson, too, was no doubt thinking that an orphaned bride for Austin, one without family to tempt him away, would help him keep his son to himself and his own family.

When we talk of Emily Dickinson’s life as devoid of marriage, often we do not realize that few husbands were available to Emily or her sister, Lavinia, in Amherst where there were five young women of her station to every eligible bachelor—a fact literary critics who expound on her spinsterhood should be aware of. The Civil War took many young men away from Amherst to their deaths and the “Westward Ho” movement following the decades after the Louisiana Purchase emptied Amherst of eligible bachelors, as did the Civil War. This too might explain why Emily became the mistress of an eminent married man of the town.

Also, men who had still born infants, as Clark had, were advised to leave their wives alone and deny themselves marital bliss until after the babies were born. Clark wife was always pregnant with child , they had eight children, and he’d had some of his children die early on, so no doubt he was afraid to go near his wife when she was pregnant and “confined.”

Perhaps such factors drove him into an affair with Emily. He was the most debonair man about her town, the first Ph.D. of Amherst College. Professor William Clark Smith was the chief lecturer on the subject of horticultural. He was no doubt greatly responsible for Emily’s keen interest in keeping her herbarium and conservatory of exotic plants. Though Emily Dickinson was a knowledgeable botanist and poet, she was better known in her town, as I’ve said,  for her prowess at baking gingerbread. And, she won a prize for her Indian bread when William Smith Clark was judge at the Cattle Show or country fair of Amherst.

Professor Clark taught at Amherst College when Emily’s father, Edward, was Treasurer and Trustee. Clark lived with his wife on a hill just beyond and in back of Emily’s homestead and probably crossed her property on his way to Amherst College nearly everyday. Is he the Whipporwill who sat singing on her fence post in her poems and letters? Clark wife’s father was also an important trustee and benefactor of Amherst College—a fact that would have kept Emily’s father Edward from confronting Clark over his affair with Emily. He could not risk either the scandal, the loss of his illustrious professor, or the loss of Clark’s father-in-law, Williston, a most important benefactor of the college which had bankrupted his father—a once well-to-do country squire who had founded Amherst College and fled West when the school failed financially. The Dickinson’s were living down that scandal all their lives, it seems.

Emily was of a well-to-do and very educated society of liberal men and women of her day, the forbears of the greatest spirit of this country.

Like the peace and social justice activist of our day, Emily’s family and friends were abolitionists. Samuel Bowles and William Smith Clark, her friends, rebelled against Puritan Fundamentalism and were the best ancestors of our American intellectual life— far from the idiocies of Presidents like George W. Bush with his hypocritical born-again Evangelism, his rightwing politics designed to benefit only the very rich.

Emily fascinates me as admirable on the fringe of those Brahmins of her day—Emerson, , Fuller, Alcott, Hawthorne, and Thoreau from which she seems to have gleaned her ideas of truth and poetry. If you read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” it is very clear that her originality and rebellion against the traditions of her day were formed and inspired by him. He visited her brother’s house next door by invitation of Susan Gilbert Dickinson—Emily’s girlish love—and the leader of an Amherst literary salon. Perhaps, Emily was bisexual, as she was clearly once very enamored of Susan, but then, young women of those days were very affectionate with one another and played out their romantic longings upon each other until they were old enough or ready for marriage—just as in Classical Greek society. They would visit each other’s homes and sleep in each other’s arms and it was not unusual for them to stroll hand and hand and have strong “puppy love” affairs—even if they later proved to be heterosexual.

Emily would have admired Susan’s freedom to attend school and be a teacher and earn money on her own. Emily would have longed to go to college with her brother, Austin and his friend, Clark, to teach at Amherst and earn an honorary doctorate as they did. But, she was sent away to the first woman’s seminary of New England, Mount Holyoke, instead.  Holyoke was an overly religious institution run by Mary Lyons and Lyons was caught up in the fierce Revivalism of her day. ED’s mother Emily Norcross who “didn’t care for thought,”  had attended the school before her. Emily never joined the majority of girls who were “born-again” to Jesus in the daily revivalist rituals of Holyoke. Always remaining one of the last 25 never to be “”saved.” She describes herself as “hopelessly lost” from such fervors, even writing to Higginson in her first letter to him asking about the value of her poems, that she had no religion, unlike her parents who prayed to God the Father every morning.

No doubt Emily grew up envying the position and mobility of her older brother, Austin, and men like Clark.  I well I empathize, as even over a hundred years later, my own father, an Italian patriarch, always bemoaned, in front of my two sisters and me, that he didn’t have a son. “If only I had a son to carry on the name,” he’d say, all too often—even though he too loved his daughters as Edward Dickinson did, and wanted them to have an education.

Emily, perhaps as a result of envying the power of men like Clark and her brother Austin probably experienced an “Animus possession,” with Clark—that sort of all consuming longing which is really a desire to be the other and possess the attributes of the beloved which Carl Jung has described in his writings. Austin’s handsome and ambitious friend, their neighbor, Professor William Smith Clark, was often a visitor in their home and he was considered the most congenial and charming man about town, the center of every social affair he attended. He was likely the  “Master” of her famous poems and she his “Daisy” –terms she cribbed from a romantic novel she read. While at Holyoke among overly religious girls, Emily was desperately home sick for Austin and the company of the young men of Amherst College who frequented her father’s parlor and held forth there. The intellectual stimulation they offered her was absent at Mount Holyoke where her studies were adequate but not stimulating.

 Interesting and avant guarde intellectuals attended or taught at Amherst College just adjacent to her own home built by her grandfather, a country squire who had given up much of his land and all of his fortunes to establish Amherst College. Indeed the college had bankrupted Emily’s Grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson,  and he’d fled the town, owing much debt, and leaving the first big brick house of the town to his son, Edward. Emily father knew better how to manage the family affairs. The college prospered under his management along with the town to which he brought the first steam-powered railroad—the one in Emily’s poem,” I like to see it lap the miles and lick the valleys up and stop to feed itself at tanks and then prodigious step around a pile of mountains” ….. until it stopped “punctual as a star” at the Amherst station--bringing its cargoes of exciting things and people to her town. Emily’s father was a good businessman, prominent lawyer, and politician who took that train and others to New York and then on to Washington, D.C. many times. He served in the Congress of the US and in the State Legislature, too, bringing news of all the country back to his town and to Emily’s dining table.

I can imagine that Emily as a girl, secretly dressed in her brother Austin’s clothes to have a rough outing in the woods—perhaps a hunting adventure with him—to feel the freedom that boys feel in the world, in their trousers so much more suited for sport. I can imagine them hunting for a Thanksgiving turkey in the woods behind their homestead as I have portrayed in my novel.

Death was one of her major themes, not out of mere sentiment or obsession, but because death was all too close to her all of her years. By the time she’d reached the age of the sixteen years old in that famous young portrait we all know so well of her, she’d witnessed the deaths of five of her school chums to typhoid fever or consumption or diphtheria, or smallpox! Or perhaps, congenital syphilis—a disease rampant and hardly known then! Yes, her biographers don’t often talk of the veneral diseases that is said to have ravished Abraham Lincoln’s family and felled so many geniuses of from Keats to Neitzche, but it was there among the Puritans of New England, too. It was an illness well known to Victorian England and it helped to fuel Puritan Revivalism. The otherworld is so inviting as a heaven when such hellish things lurk on earth as diseases bringing their miseries and death.  Disease and death lurked all around such 19th century poets as Emily Dickinson. Yet, I find little reference to any of the diseases so prevalent in her times in the indexes of the pre-eminent Dickinson biographies by Sewall or Hebegger,  or in the index to her letters collected by Johnson, or in her later biography. Yet entire timbre of Emily’s times and work were shaped by what she called “her flooding theme” of death when she’d often sit by the bying for days at end and help to prepare their bodies for burial as families and friends did then. She was shaped by the biological facts of the scientific and medical history of her times as much as the AIDS epidemic is shaping our Nuclear Age now!  Young people live in fear of death from nuclear war or AIDS epidemics as much as the people of her time feared typhoid and consumption! Syphilis was only beginning to be understood as a venereal disease and people, sometimes from one mere indiscretion, would suffer it, as Abraham Lincoln is said by Gore Vidal and others to have likely given it to his wife from just one brief encounter before his marriage to Mary Todd.  It is said that his children likely died of Congenital Syphilis, as Mary Todd went mad from it. 

Perhaps, that’s the trouble with most American poets and literary biographers and critics of our day. They often do not study science—not even as much as Emily herself did. She was a fine botanist and studied chemistry and botany, along with Latin and history as well as natural philosophy at Mount Holyoke Seminary. The most successful poets of the USA in day  have been men like John Ashbery, who seem to study Modern French painting and culture, and ignore the fundamental scientific facts of our lives here on this earth. Emerson’s essay on“Nature,”  does not inspire most of them. Though there are some American poets in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau who have made the study of creation and the workings of nature their subjects as much as human nature.  But, there are many who have taken up the banner of European Modernism over the traditions of Emerson and Thoreau who show the linage of Whitman and Dickinson more clearly in their work. The poets who have taken the best from these 19th Century Americans are the ones I admire most. Galway Kinnell and Mary Oliver, for two examples, do understand “Nature” as Dickinson did, but many poets of our time seem blind to what really matters, and how things actually work and thrive. The abstractions of French Modernism seem to come out of the School of Gertrude Stein and Ashbery and were not born so much of the best intellectuals of this early American land. Somehow they do not have the appeal for this American poet born of immigrants that Whitman and Dickinson have. I find them the best of an American heritage, in rebellion against Puritanism and Victorian ways. Of course, Dickinson and Sue, her sister-in-law and friends, were reading Ruskin, too. But Emerson was considered a radical in New England, freeing the American spirit from Calvinist Puritanism. Saying worship the natural creation given us, not the dictates of an outworn Bible and a hypocritical indoor preaching of it, while leaving a glorious world out of notice!

Emerson was aware how fanatical Puritanism had led to The Salem Witch Trials of Hawthorne’s grandfather’s days. He, like Nathanial Hawthorne and their friend, Bronson Alcott, were deeply interested in freeing the American mind from the dark superstitions and prejudices that had led it into the notorious and cruel debacle at Salem. They wanted to free women from the shackles of mindless superstition and give them an education. These men whom Dickinson would come to follow were among the best humanists of their time and place in New England. Whitman would be  influenced by George Sand, too, in his preaching for women’s right to liberty and fulfillment. Dickinson would be forced by her station in life to be more ladylike, but she would find her voice from Emerson’s essay On Being a Poet of truth, too, and her sister-in-law, Sue, would help her understand what it is to be independent. Yet, death from unknown and incurable diseases was rampant and allowing Puritan Revivalism to rear its head with an avid calling to otherworldly Paradise, so tenuous on earth.

While Emerson traveled lecturing and speaking everywhere throughout New England, Puritan preachers fearing to lose their control over the coffers and township taxes subsidies of their Churches were calling the heathen back to the fold. But, Emily refused their Born Again fanaticism, seeing through its hypocrisy. She lived through an era in Amherst when Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Maypole of Marymount” was the theme of the day. Who would win the American mind was the question! Would the Puritan work ethic with its grim idea of strict worship and Calvinist doctrine win out, or would the glories of the natural world and the back to nature movement, the enlightenment of the natural sciences, save New England from more Witch Trials and poor crops! Attempting to bring the American mind out of the age of occult nonsense into the understanding of earth sciences and sensible agricultural understandings  which would save its population from famine and cruel avarice was what Emerson and William Smith Clark were about!  I want to understand how Emily came through love and romance to be influenced by Emersonian ideals, for they will save us now, in this miserable Nuclear Age of a Born Again despot like George W. Bush, so ignorant of his own American culture and Europe’s and a strictly insane Christian zealot like John Ashcroft. John Ashbery will not save us from John Ashcroft as pretty and full of ennui as his verse may be. Emersonian ideals were creeping westward from Concord to Amherst and two men whom Emily would come to love passionately would bring them into her realm.  Intellectual ideas were flooding the campus of Amherst College where William Clark Smith taught biology, and botany and gave lectures on herbology, no doubt attended by Emily—as the public, including women, were allowed to attend the lectures for their own enrichment, even if they were not allowed to matriculate as students of the male seminary.

Dickinson was a botanist who took biology seriously. She was in rebellion against the Creationists and Conservatives of her time, just as I am so utterly in opposition to all Fundamentalists in mine. She hated the Fundamentalists of her day as much as I loathe them now. They are the nemesis of our Earthly realm as they were of hers. Emily was a forward thinking Humanist who put the study of religion second to knowledge of the natural sciences as I’ve desired to, also. Emily would have put a reference to consumption or tuberculosis, small pox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, perhaps even syphilis, in the index of her autobiography if she’d written one—for death and illness always surrounded her and plagued her dreams and thwarted her desires and filled her poetry and her letters with grief. Though she died at fifty, she lived longer than the majority of those she knew and loved. But Susan lived the longest of all of them to eighty-five, and Susan wrote Emily’s obituary for the newspaper. There’s never been a better estimation or critique, or understanding of her poetry, than Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the intellectual companion of her life, offered about her work after her death.

Girls were so repressed then—even more than now in America. Still, as I’ve said, I grew up always hearing my father longing for a son. “If only I had a son to carry on the name!” He’d bemoan if we women,  three sisters, and no son, as we were, upset him. Women were just beginning to bloom out of their shells in Emily’s day, and in mine, those dark shells in which so many Mid Eastern women are imprisoned to this day. Think of it.! Birth control only came into use in America in my mother’s lifetime, a mere three years before I was born. My mother was of the first generation to be given the vote. And, oh what a battle the suffrage movement was, taking much suffering and endless activism over a full century to complete from its inception.

The women’s rights movement was only newly born in Emily’s time. Her father was among the first of American men to believe that a woman deserved any education. Bronson Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne were all part of that movement to educate women, and to question Puritanical authoritarianism—as much as they were believers in abolition of slavery. They were greatly influenced by Margaret Fuller, a great Free Thinker.  I had to emerge from Catholicism into life—not such a different trip—along with my repressed Italian aunts, none of whom attended even the state college three miles from home that I did. And this was against my father’s best advisement, in 1956.  Why Susan Dickinson would chose Catholicism in her later years, except that it offered absolution of sins where Puritanism didn’t, is beyond me. She was so independent a woman for her time that she was an example to Emily of a woman who read books and thought and expressed herself well. Perhaps, abortions and the loss of her sons drove her to embrace a European Religion of the more culturally enlightened Europeans she met in Italy and Germany.

Lavinia and Emily Norcross Dickinson, Emily’s sister and mother, were content to be homebodies who practiced housekeeping above all reading or writing.     

We’ve been interested in the mystery of Emily’s romance, as reams of speculation have been written about it. Why? Was it because her brother’s affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, a liberated woman, and Emily’s affair with William Smith Clark, another rebel from Calvinism, coupled with the prestige of their lineage in the town of Amherst, that made Austin Dickinson and his friend and neighbor, William Smith Clark, horseman of the Apocalypse of Puritanism as it made Emily Dickinson the Mystic Poet of New England, the former Belle of Amherst!  The two men were friends and among the finest horsemen of Amherst, Massachusetts.  Ah, those bearded, nineteen century gentleman! They can really turn one’s head more than the American jocks of my lifetime in this troubled land on its way to a fall like Rome! I’ve come to loathe baseball and football and I dare to say it.  Marianne Moore was a fool to love it so just because it was a cute thing for an old maid lady to do in those days! Argh, the last time I visited Emily’s home in Amherst the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox were battling it out in the last game of the World Series and blitzing out the real news of the day on the cover of The Boston Globe. Instead of wondering where their 87 billion in taxes will go for a miserable quagmire in Iraq where young men are dying, the young men left at home are raving drunk over who will win the World Series while the World Serious is coming to an end, both politically and environmentally. Those who know all the batting averages and players do not know or care who their congressperson is or how he or she votes for or against their demise and their children’s air and water and schooling or their parents’ social security and healthcare! They will revel in drunkeness, just as the Puritans were always drunk on sour mass and hard cider as they destroyed each other and the homes of the Indians in ignorance.

Though really!  My rendition of Dickinson’s poem began to play from my laptop computer without my bidding! I’ve still not found a scientific explanation for it! I entered the Emily Dickinson Room at Wellspring House in Ashfield --the town where William Smith Clark was born to a poor country doctor and his wife--just as I returned from touring Emily’s homestead and Austin’s mansion, The Evergreens--for the third time! And “My river runs to thee,” began to play as I opened my laptop. Think of that!

As I listened to Dickinson’s poem play from my computer’s speakers, I knew that the poem I’d set to music was written for Professor Clark. It was heartfelt for him away at sea as much as for natural creation which Emily worshiped more than an abstract idea of God. She was a Unitarian at heart, as was her first mentor and tutor whom she loved so much. Mr. Newton, a fellow who was apprenticed to her father as a fledgling lawyer and who died so young and broke Emily’s heart was broken with his death. The  first closing of her life. Her first tutor was a Unitarian like Emerson and Thoreau, a liberal who belied the stricter form of religion in which Emily was raised by her  Congregationalist parents. Newton gave Emily a book of Emerson’s poems to read and taught her to free her mind from the dictates of Puritanical thought. It’s interesting that the only poem Emily published in Helen Hunt Jackson’s anthology, A Mask of Poets, an important anthology at the time—was the poem of Emily’s about success being counted sweetest by those who don’t succeed—and it was thought to be Emerson’s poem by most who read it. Yes, if Susan was Emily’s role model for an independent thinking and reading woman, Emerson was the greatest literary influence on Emily’s work along with Shakespeare, of course. Well, my father had me reading Shakespeare and memorizing his lines from a very early age, too. I could recite much of Shakespeare with passion by the time I was twelve or fifteen. The Bard is quintessential to a poet’s studies, but I’ve a feeling that many contemporary poets of America today, hardly read him. They seem to read other contemporary poets more to learn how to write. And, there’s the pity!

        William Smith Clark—Emily’s lover and mentor—was often at sea, going to Europe or the Orient to find exotic plants that he could bring back to Amherst for his school of botany, and for Austin’s lawn and Emily conservatory and his own fine garden at the college and at home. After all, he was the first president of The University of Massachusetts  which he helped to found as an agricultural school. But, earlier, he landscaped a magnificent garden for study at Amherst College and he was very found of water lilies. Emily kept an water lily pond which she planted herself—no doubt with seeds brought back to Amherst by Clark. Most of our American state colleges started as agricultural schools during that period. Agriculture was so important to the burgeoning country then as the population began to grow and the rural land was more and more farmed to feed the cities—and all the young men were escaping Westward. The New England countryside needed to be farmed better and young men tempted to stay and farm her.

    Professor Clark was among the most learned men of his society and the latest edition of The Dickinson Journal says he was surely the “Master” of her heart, and, the recipient of her poems. Oh, Lavinia destroyed most of the correspondence to and from him, of course, and that’s why we’ve always thought it was The Reverend Wadsworth of Philadelphia, or the Editor of The Springfield Republican, Samuel Bowles, but they were not her primary love. Her real lover, a married man, was the one Lavinia would have hidden at her request when she asked that her letters be burned after her death.  Emily requested their affair never be discovered and wanted all of her papers burned, but Lavinia saved the poems and accidentally only three letters of the correspondence in rough draft mixed in with the poems. That’s why Dickinson is such a mystery to unravel.

Only part of her output of letters containing her autobiographical details was saved. The most passionate and scandalous parts no doubt burned by Lavinia as she’d requested. Clark loved his children who still lived in the town with their mother, Queen Williston Clark. They attended Emily’s church and he’d only died about three months earlier. Emily died about twelve weeks after her beloved Master, unable to go on without him.  It’s said she died of Brights Disease, a disease of the kidney’s. But, I bet she succumbed to that disease by refusing to eat or drink because of her grief over Clark’s death. It’s not too grisly a way to die, to just stop drinking or eating. The endorphins take over and one fades away, fairly painlessly, and can write an epitaph: “Called back!” Actually the title of a book her little cousins loved. And Emily loved children very much, probably longed for her own as William Smith Clark loved his dearly. Those intellectual cousins ended up in a literary salon with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other important writers of the day. 

          Was Emily “called back” to Heaven or Eternity or Immortality by God or by William Smith Clark who died just a few weeks before her? That’s the question!

The affair with Clark is so clearly documented with excellent scholarship in the December 2002 issue of The Dickinson Journal. I’d been devouring that issue in the garden of the Dickinson Homestead just before I went back to Wellspring House Writer’s Retreat in Western Massachusetts, to Ashfield, where Clark was born, in the Pioneer Valley as it’s called, to open my laptop and hear her poem sung by me, a composition I’d done back in the 1970’s though it was now Spring of 2003. The journal by Ruth Owen Jones carefully documents the union and friendship of Emily and Clark, and even says that all the fasicles of her poems were likely written for Clark and sent to him via people who often visited both the Dickinson and Clark homesteads, adjacent to a common wood. 

And there’s the gold wedding ring Emily always wore with the word “Philip” inscribed inside of it. Clark was the finest horseman and horse breeder in Amherst, after all, and “Philip” means “horse lover” in Classical Greek. Then there’s all that intrigue about the “Northwest Passage”—the name that Emily gave to the back staircase of the house which led to five different possible exits, the staircase above a small dark hallway with an etched glass window on its door which led to her room and also out into the garden and out to the path that led to Austin’s estate next door and through the woods to William Smith Clark’s house beyond where his wife always lounged pregnant with the eleven children she would bear  him. He was said to have had affairs with many women and he was, indeed, a randy fellow who had traveled in Europe and experienced the far less Puritanical, mores there in circles outside Victorian England. He even went to Japan among the Geishas to found a school of botany and horticulture there, and he brought German Christmas Trees with all their sumptuous treats and joys back to Amherst to scandalize what had been, in his time and Emily’s, a Puritan fast day.

And, we have to understand how important horses were in Emily’s day. Emily’s brother Austin Dickinson who lived next door to her homestead on Main Street in The Evergreens—an Italianate mansion built for him by his father to entice him to stay in Amherst and not go West—was also a good horseman—and,  he was a close friend of William Clark Smith, Emily’s probable “Master” of the Master poems and letters. Yes, William Clark Smith was probably Emily’s secret “husband,” the man who made her “Empress of Calvary and Cavalry,” the wife without the decree!  Colonel Clark led a regimen into the battles of the Civil War.

Austin Dickinson, friend to Clark, shared his love of horses and horsemanship and used to come thundering into the driveway and up to the Dickinson barn with a great flourishing fury that would excite all the animals and make the women of the household giggle with protest. His horse would rear up as he shouted “Woe!” and the chickens would scurry away.  Lavinia’s many cats would cower and run, and Emily’s big black dog, Carlos, scamper, yapping, behind the barn. Emily and her sister Lavinia—with whom she spent her entire life, their bedrooms always across the hall from each other—would run out to greet Austin, their debonair brother, with a mixture of love and envy.

“Austin, you’ve scared every animal in the barnyard half to death!” Lavinia would scold.

“Ah, Austin, you’ve frightened Carlos and all the birds in my garden with your heavy gallop up our driveway. It’s not necessary. You’re not coming from Virginia, but only from Northampton! And, you’re not Paul Revere! But, you’ve nearly taken off like Pegasus into the clouds over the North Church Tower! Let me up into the saddle with you! I’ll show you how to gallop lightly!”

Now, Little Sister, ladies have to ride in carriages as you very well know. You can’t fling your legs over such a stead as this and give him a good kick to make him rear up into the sky, as I! Your brocade skirts must go all to one side and you have to calmly trot! That’s the difference between men and women!”

“Oh, Austin, it’s not fair! I’d love to take him for a jump over the front gate. Let me try!” Emily might tease aghast at the sight of the new Arabian horse Austin would have bought with the advice of Clark, his business partner in a land deal.  Even as she enjoyed Austin’s manly grace with  spride. She was a bit in awe of the debonair figure he cut upon his horse, his cape thrown back, his hat jauntily leaning to one side. Her handsome brother was called “the catch of the town,” a brother to be proud of in every way—a clever, accomplished lawyer. Emily envied his mobility as she loathed having to stay home among the dusters overseeing the housework and serving for her ill mother as Lavinia did. The sisters had to substitute as wife to their busy father as their mother always taken to her bed with headaches could not help at laying the table for his distinguished guests who came from all over the state and country. Emily and Lavinia were charged much of their lives with managing the busy homestead and its three day-servants.

Emily was not that spinster many have made her out to be, that ghostly recluse in white all her life that your high school literature text said she was. Your college literature text was as wrong about her, no doubt as the web site of the Poetry Society of America is today. If you were of my generation, you got a very wrong impression of America’s most famous woman poet. I’m of the baby boomer generation  which wants to free all women and liberate them from the stereotypes of their day. That’s partly why I’m writing this, aside from the fact that I’m haunted by Emily Dickinson wherever I go now, and I must write out her story, so that you can understand the best part of American culture from which she came, the part that was in rebellion against Puritanism, the part of earlier American society which was good and decent and belied the stupidity of Puritanism which still rears its ugly iron head in the fanatical religious rightwing of our day—so immured in business profit above human life and poetry.

Emily was not of that ugly Puritan mercantile Society that has come down to us in the likes of Mr. Bush who has stolen our presidency and wrecked havoc with the final bits of our democracy, though some texts mistakenly say she was a weird Puritanical recluse. She was a rebel against Puritanism like Hawthorne, and like Emerson whom she read and met at her brother Austin’s house. She was in pursuit of the spirit of truth, not money. She no doubt knew of Margaret Fuller’s and Bronson Alcott’s, Louisa May’s father’s radical ideas of education. They were men that believed women had the right to an education and a profession That children had the right to question authority, that scientific exploration of nature was more important than dogma, that indeed, it was a means of appreciating the wonders of creation. They did not subscribe to crony capitalism as Mr. Cheney so obviously does!

Emily believed in science and biology and botany, and was an avid reader and accomplished botanist who followed the lectures of the first Ph.D. of Amherst College, Dr. William Clark Smith, professor of horticultural science. She attended his lectures as he built the garden at Amherst for the study of exotic plants. She no doubt helped to impune her Treasurer and Trustee father of the college to finance Clark’s garden project on the campus.  Emily believed in studying nature even more than going to church. She wanted to worship natural creation itself, in all its wonder. She did not feel that one had to “keep the Sabbath going to church.” She wanted to “keep it staying at home with a bobolink for a chorister and an orchard for a doom!”

That’s where I feel so close to her. I keep thinking proudly, an agnostic pantheist of sorts like me! Emily, like me, was a liberated woman for her time—an anti-Puritan. She was not interested in the “dimity convictions” of gentlewomen of her day. And even though my father said to me, “Why should a girl go to college. It’s a waste. You’ll only get married and have babies! You don’t need college, I went anyway.”

Emily read books that men read and worked in her conservatory and kept her own herbarium. At Mount Holyoke, she studied biology and physics and mathematics, as well as literature and history and geography. She read profusely. Her father’s friend was Webster, the American lexicographer, and she grew up studying words from the start. That is why her vocabulary is so exquisitely poised. Emily lived by words, words in poems, words in letters to many friends, words of longing, grief, love, wisdom and truth as beauty. Thousands of letters! Nearly two thousand poems! Emily was no slouch. That’s for sure—and she was no mere ghostly recluse in white, not at all. There is much more to understand of who Emily really was and why she was not read in her time. And, why she was so read after her death.

I’m an American poet, somewhat published in my lifetime, unlike Dickinson, but probably as unknown to you as she was to the people of her town as a poet. She was better known for her gingerbread. Yes, Emily was a wonderful baker, and baking was tons of work then, too. One had to fire up the brick oven and tend it carefully or the bread crashed, the cake fell. One had to bake from scratch, measuring the ingredients from big barrels of flour and sugar, and one had to collect the eggs from the hens and whip or churn the cream and butter,  and it took hours of labor. Emily would snatch a moment to write a thought that came to her on the back of a cocoa wrapper or a scrap of recipe paper as she baked. She’d put it in her dress pocket to ponder later at her writing table. As I’ve said, Emily was so good a baker, she won a prize at the Country Fair when William Clark Smith was judge of the baking contest that year.

I imagine Emily’s conversations with the “Master” of her love poems in my head quite constantly now. Ever since I visited her house in Amherst for the sixth time this past spring and stood beside her paisley shawl draped across her antique sleigh bed. Ever since I stood beside the Franklin stove in her bedroom, saw the cradle she was rocked in, the white house dress she is supposed to have worn, saw the window where she sat at her small writing table, the window from which she lowered cookies and cakes to the children playing on the front lawn of her big brick Federal style house on Main Street, the window from which she lowered notes to friends and to a grounds keeper, a servant who delivered them, under his hat, through the woods to Mr. Clark’s servant. Saw the “Northwest Passage” as she called the back stairs which led up to her bedroom, the secret place where she may have had more than one rendezvous in the dark with the “Sweet William” of her love poems—after he’d walked her along the garden path from The Evergreens back to The Homestead following a soiree in Susan Gilbert Dickinson’s parlor.

I can imagine him walking her through the trees, his arm around her waist, as they trod along the garden path “just wide enough for lovers to walk side by side” the dirt path which joined her brother’s house to her father’s is still there. The stars would have shown in the sky. The night air would have been laced with the aroma of pine in autumn and honeysuckle in summer. Emily would have thrilled at William’s hand around her waist. His breath whispering in her ear. His beard brushing her cheek as he joked or spoke of what exotic plants he’d just imported for their studies and her herbarium, her conservatory. 

 I’ve not been able to get her likely affair with William Clark Smith, out of my head. Why she has taken over my mind and imagination so, I don’t know. Of course I read her best poems in college and have many of them by heart. I had a rough idea of her life in Amherst, but now I’ve begun to study it, her letters, the ways of the times in which she lived. Emily is obsessing me. Why? Is it that I want to understand what it feels like, what it was like to be such a fine poet and not be much read in one’s lifetime. Is that what fascinates me now at sixty-four after my own lifetime in American poetry? Is it the solitude, the thrill of words on paper in solitude, that compels me?

 

“For it is not meters, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture all it’s own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genius the thought is prior to the form.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” 1841

 

 

Emily read Emerson as I have. She was trying to say something of truth, not just write silly, glorious nihilistic abstractions or witticisms like a John Ashbery or a David Lehman of my time. Like Emerson she believed in Beauty as Truth. Like Keats, she died for it, indeed, died twice before she finally died for it.

Emily wrote of violets and daises, but she loved to walk in the woods as much as Thoreau did--to discover the new things there, the truth of life and sunlight and shadow and decay and Beauty, there, yes Beauty with a capital “B” and Truth with a capital “T” as Emerson wrote them in his essay against craft without content which must have influenced her marvelously and made her rebel against Higginson’s and Susan’s attempts to make her conform to the traditional poetic style of her day with its perfect rhymes and pretty meters, the sort of verse Emerson preached against because it was devoid of thought and meaning. A poem should first mean and then be would be Emerson’s creed. Emerson insisted that it is the thought that sends us into poetry, not the technique of writing in his essay, The Poet, whom he saw as the priest of nature herself.

Emily wanted her poems spoken and lifted off of the page as she used “dashes,” the way texts on elocution used them, to imitate the human breathe, the word as spoken, the pause as held by the tongue. She could punctuate as well as any, and her grammar was learned, but she deliberately chose the “dash” of the spoken text, the breath mark of the books on oral interpretation of her day.

Dickinson was a poet of meaning, misunderstood in her time, but not by Helen Hunt Jackson or by Mabel Loomis Todd. And her sister-in-law Sue, knew, best of all, that Emily’s poems were good, “hard as granite.” Emily was not a lonely little wretch without a support system at all, but surrounded by women who understood her work and encouraged it. The important women in her life understood her better than the men, but the men have been her editors and biographers and come to appreciate her too, though it was Mabel, Austin’s mistress, who got her published after her death and sent Susan—her closest mentor—into the shadows for many years. If it was Sue who nurtured her intellect early on, it was Helen Hunt Jackson, a successful writer and social activist of her time,  who called her a great poet and urged her to publish her work even as Higginson told her not to dare such unorthodox style. It was women who nurtured her art with conviction, and it was a woman intellectual companion, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law, who inspired her early mental growth and independence of spirit!

Why she is so famous today but did not publish in her lifetime, and what drove her pen, are questions which fascinate me as an American poet, not because I do not see the intelligence and brightness in her poems, the original note she struck like a bell, but because there is more to this legend than I’d been told years ago in college when her writing attracted me and made me memorize some of her best works so that they are stuck in my head –singing there everyday as I relive her life, and feel the excitement in her flesh as she longed and patiently waited to see her lover. She wrote to him with such passion for life and love. She was a lover of science and scientist in dark days of the republic. Knowing her story makes her poetry more accessible. I feel her frustration and her passion and identify with it, empathize with it, but that is what great poets do, create empathy. I hope I have created additional empathy for the truth of her life and the meanings in her poetry with my novel. That was my mission.

 

©  2006 by Daniela Gioseffi, New York City. All rights reserved.