Emily Dickinson photograph
Public domain photograph of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

A selective list of online literary criticism for the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson, with links to reliable biographical and introductory material and signed, peer-reviewed, and scholarly literary criticism.

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Introduction [all free]

"Emily Dickinson." Excerpts of literary criticism from scholarly authorities on Dickinson. Includes a biography of Emily Dickinson and individual discussion of the following poems: 258 ("There's a certain Slant of light"); 280 ("I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"); 303 ("The Soul selects her own Society"); 341 ("After great pain, a formal feeling comes--"); 465 ("I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--"); 508 ("I'm ceded--I've stopped being Theirs); 520 ("I started Early--Took my Dog--"); An Essay by Russell Reising on "I started Early--Took my Dog--"; 601 ("A still--Volcano--Life--"); 613 ("They shut me up in Prose--"); 657 ("I dwell in Possibility--"); 712 ("Because I could not stop for Death"); 754 ("My Life had Stood--a Loaded Gun--"); 1072 ("Title divine--is mine!"); 1129 ("Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--"); 1705 ("Volcanoes be in Sicily"); About Dickinson's "Fascicles"; About Dickinson's Use of the Dash; "Why Dickinson Didn't Title." Edited by Karen Ford for Modern American Poetry at Univ. of Illinois.

"Helen Vendler's Emily Dickinson." Podcast with Harvard Prof. Helen Vendler, interviewed by Christopher Lydon, discussing Dickinson's "bald and chilling" poems, including "Aurora: beginning: Of Bronze — and Blaze –"; "Ashes denote that fire was"; "This is my letter to the world"; "I died for Beauty"; "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant"; "The fascinating chill that music leaves"; "The gentian weaves her fringes"; "Safe in their alabaster chambers"; "After great pain, a formal feeling comes –"; "God is a distant — stately Lover"; "A Spider sewed at Night"; "I know that He exists." Radio Open Source 5 Oct. 2010.

"Emily Dickinson." A biography and introduction to Emily Dickinson. Also a selection of her most famous poems and additional articles about her. Published by The Poetry Foundation, a project of Poetry magazine.

"The Big Read: The Poetry of Emily Dickenson." Reader's Guide includes an introduction to Emily Dickinson, a biography, background and her historical context, bibliography, and discussion questions. Teacher's Guide contains lesson plans and writing topics. Published by the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Emily Dickinson." A short biographical introduction to Dickinson, with text for some of her best known poems. Additional articles on Dickinson: "Isaac Watts & Emily Dickinson: Inherited Meter," and from the Poets on Poets series, Michael Ryan on Emily Dickinson. From the prestigious Academy of American Poets.

The Dickinson Electronic Archives. Emily Dickinson's Correspondence, Teaching Emily Dickinson, Responses to Dickinson's Writing, Critical Resources. Peer reviewed project, Executive Editor Martha Nell Smith, at the the Univ. of Virginia.

Emily Dickinson at-a-glance. A one page summary of Dickinson's biography, themes, techniques, and questions about selected poems, from Prof. Mark Canada.

Dirda, Michael. "Helen Vendler's new commentary on Emily Dickinson." Washington Post 9 Sept. 2010.

Wineapple, Brenda. A review of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Reviewed by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker, 4 Aug. 2008.

"Common Questions on Emily Dickinson." Prof. Donna Campbell tackles Emily Dickinson FAQs, including what kind of meter she wrote in, why she used the dash, and how one should read Dickinson.

"Spiders, the Web, and Dickinson & Whitman." Versions of Dickinson's "A Spider sewed at Night," also poems about spiders by Walt Whitman and other poets, provide a context discussing Dickinson's use of the spider in her poem. Published in The Classroom Electric 2001. Edited by Professors Susan Belasco and Kenneth Price, Univ. of Nebraska.

"Foreground and Apprentices: Dickinson and Whitman." The site explores two of the most significant literary relationships in American history: that between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and that between Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily Dickinson. The Classroom Electric 2001. Edited by Professor Susan Belasco, Univ. of Nebraska.

Literary Criticism

Browner, Stephanie. "Love and Conquest: The Erotics of Colonial Discourse in Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters." Professor Browner explores the many references in Dickinson's poems and letters to countries that were, in Dickinson's times, colonial possessions, including Brazil, Peru, Veracruz, the Bahamas, India. The Classroom Electric 2001. Edited by Professor Stephanie Browner, Berea College [free].

Dickie, Margaret. "Dickinson's Discontinuous Lyric Self." On Emily Dickinson's style and poetic techniques. American Literature 60, 4 (1988) [subscription service].

Eberwein, Jane Donahue. "'The Wildest Word': The Habit of Renunciation." On the theme of renunciation in Emily Dickinson's love poems. In Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation (1985) [subscription service].

Finnerty, Páraic. "The Daisy and the Dandy: Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde." Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 9 (April 2005) [free].

Folsom, Ed and Kenneth Price. "Dickinson, Slavery, and the San Domingo Movement." The Classroom Electric, 2001 [free].

Franke, William. "'The missing all': Emily Dickinson's apophatic poetics" [poetry and faith]. Franke explores the notion of "negative theology" in Dickinson's poems, which can be at the same time paradoxical and enigmatic, yet make its own kind of sense. Christianity and Literature 58 (Autumn 2008) [free].

Freeman, Margaret H. "Emily Dickinson." An biographical introduction. Also, Letters (1842); and Poems (1842). Literary Encyclopedia, 11 January 2005 [subscription service].

Gelpi, Albert. "Emily Dickinson's Long Shadow: Susan Howe & Fanny Howe." On the influence of Dickinson on two Language Poets. The Emily Dickinson Journal 17, 2 (2008) [summary of article only].

Gilson, Annette. "Disseminating 'circumference': the diachronic presence of Dickinson in John Ashbery's 'Clepsydra.'" Gilson discusses the notion of circularity in the poetry of John Ashbery and Emily Dickinson. Twentieth Century Literature, 1998 [free].

Guthrie, James R. "'A revolution in locality': astronomical tropes in Emily Dickinson's poetry." On imagery from astronomy in Dickinson's poetry. Midwest Quarterly, 1996 [first half of article only].

Harde, Roxanne. "'Some-Are like My Own-': Emily Dickinson's Christology of Embodiment." Harde discusses Dickinson's conflicted feelings about her Christianity and the issues that would preoccupy her religious writing for the rest of her life. Christianity and Literature 53 (2004) [free].

Hendrickson, Paula. "Dickinson and the Process of Death." On one specific subcategory of Dickinson's death poems. Dickinson Studies 77 (1991) [subscription service].

Hubbard, Melanie. "'Turn It, a Little': The Influence of the Daguerreotype and the Stereograph on Emily Dickinson's Use of Manuscript Variants." Mosaic 38 (March 2005) [free].

Lundin, Roger. A review of Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief. Reviewer David Yezzi notes, "given the housebound poet's hymnal meters, her biblical references, clipped Calvinist idiom, and enduring preoccupation with God, Jesus, suffering, death, and (her "Flood subject") immortality, the question persists: To what extent did Dickinson espouse the Congregationalist faith of her family and of her community?" Commonweal, 9 Oct. 1998 [free].

Mayer, Nancy. "Finding Herself Alone: Emily Dickinson, Victorian Women Novelists, and the Female Subject." Romanticism on the Net May-Aug 2005 [free].

Miller, Cristanne. "Names and Verbs: Influences on the Poet's Language." On the Bible as an influence on Dickinson's style. In Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (1987) [subscription service].

Morris, Timothy. "The Development of Dickinson's Style." In On Dickinson: The Best from American Literature (1990) [subscription service].

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Joyce Carol Oates on Emily Dickinson." Two essays by novelist and story writer Oates on Emily Dickinson's poetry. Univ. of San Francisco web site [free].

Perloff, Marjorie. "Emily Dickinson and the Theory Canon." Prof. Perloff considers the position of Emily Dickinson in the literary canon from the point of view of the theorists. "How, then, to explain the neglect of Dickinson on the part of post-structuralist theory? My own hunch is that it has to do with certain assumptions about poetic language and poetic process–assumptions that differentiate Dickinson from the Modernists and their Romantic precursors whose work remains exemplary for theorists from Adorno and Jameson to Cixous and Kristeva." [free]

Shattuck, Roger. "Emily Dickinson's Banquet of Abstemiousness." New York Review of Books 20 June 1996 [first half of article only].

Smith, Martha Nell and Lara Vetter. "Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem." This web project looks at Emily Dickinson's manuscript drafts and other materials to examine her poetry composition practices. Dickinson Electronic Archives. Executive Editor Professor Martha Nell Smith [free].

Vendler, Helen. "Emily Dickinson and the Sublime." A downloadable lecture by Prof. Vendler, delivered at Harvard's Houghton Library (preceded by a tedious introduction) on 31 March 2011 [free].

Werner, Marta. "'The Soul's Distinct Connection': Emily Dickinson, Photography, and 19th-Century American Culture." The Classroom Electric, 2001. Edited by Professor Marta Werner, Univ. of Maryland [free].

Werner, Marta. Writing Otherwise: Emily Dickinson and the Scenes/Surfaces of Writing." A class syllabus for exploring Dickinson's manuscripts. The Classroom Electric, 2001. Edited by Professor Marta Werner, Univ. of Maryland [free].

Wilson, James Matthew. "Representing the Limits of Judgment: Yvor Winters, Emily Dickinson and Religious Experience." Christianity and Literature, 56 (Spring 2007) [free].

Zapedowska, Magdalena. "Wrestling with silence: Emily Dickinson's Calvinist God." The American Transcendental Quarterly, March 2006 [free].

Papers from "Unfastening the Fascicles," an MLA presentation on Emily Dickinson in 1997. Bray, Robert, "Why Thoughts Are Better Than Music, or Emily Dickinson's Fascicle 18 as a Lyric Sequence"; Crumbley, Paul James, "Fascicle 1: The Gambler's Recollection"; Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson, "Dickinson's Aesthetics and Fascicle 21"; Wardrop, Daneen Leigh, "'The Nameless Pod' and Other Miscarriages of Language in Dickinson's Fascicle 28."

1998-2011 by Jan Pridmore