Envelope Poems

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The book is an art object, with transcriptions of her handwriting facing facsimiles of the scraps of envelopes she wrote upon, some of which you can see through to the other side. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy―addressed to no one and everyone at once.

It’s stunning, revelatory, and it functions as a key text to Dickinson’s oeuvre: seeing it demands a tectonic shift in the way we read her, brings her back to us even more extremely idiosyncratic than we could have guessed. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. The poems of Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household. In 2013, Harvard launched the Emily Dickinson Archive, with the coöperation, if not exactly the blessing, of Amherst, which insisted on open access to all manuscripts.In the 1850 national census, Dickinson listed her occupation as “keeping house”; the scraps might have kept her as she did so. Much of Lavinia’s pile ended up at Amherst College, the cornerstone of its special collections; Susan Dickinson’s batch went to Harvard, along with several household treasures that had been preserved at the Evergreens. Dickinson was born to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period.

The envelope poems suggest the current exhilarating paradox of Dickinson’s work: her unique actions of mind are bound in unusually dramatic ways to slips of paper a hundred and fifty years old or more, rarities whose near-perfect reproductions are nevertheless now widely and freely available online. Soon, a wide readership formed and her posthumous fame grew, nourished by the stories people passed around. When, in 1866, Dickinson’s “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” appeared in the Springfield Daily Republican (under a title likely chosen by its editors, “The Snake”), Dickinson complained to Higginson that, among other problems, she was “defeated . The pleasures and the challenges of this kind of reading are impossible to ignore; next to a clear facsimile of these manuscripts, a print version seems, at best, a kind of crude trot.Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy—addressed to no one and everyone at once. Most of the scraps remained in Amherst’s archive, curiosities sought out by tenacious Dickinson scholars but unknown to the public at large. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. It does feel almost invasive, reading the passing thoughts and ideas of Emily Dickinson she never likely envisioned being published in a book for me to read.

The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Although a very prolific poet—and arguably America’s greatest—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. The Gorgeous Nothings is proof that one of our most important poets can still amaze and teach us new thing about the practice of poetry.Dickinson’s handwriting, though occasionally illegible, isn’t like the script in a Cy Twombly blackboard painting; it is meant to be read. But, of course, it is her words that are foremost, the shortest of these (of less characters than one can use on a Twitter post) being my favorites, though a slightly longer one (none are long) near the end was intriguing, as it was written on three small sections of a flattened-out envelope and can be read at least two different ways depending on how it is turned.