Emily.dickinson gay

On the basic level of homoerotics, Dickinson writes love and longing poems explicitly addressed to women. For example, “Ourselves were wed one summer– dear” (F596A, J631) dated 1863 and explored in the earlier upload on Marriage, can be read as a marriage between two “Queens,” who have to give each other up. Or “The day undressed herself” (F495A, J716), which we discussed in the post on Mothers because it was sent in a letter to Elizabeth Holland, the woman Dickinson regarded as her mother figure. Dickinson augments the homoerotic sensuality of this poem, a detailed description of a strip-tease, by sending it to be read by a woman.

Dickinson also writes poems that play with gender roles, what scholars call “gender-bending.” We will consider one of several poems Dickinson wrote in which, according to biographer Alfred Habegger, the

tricky speaker … is not male, but a woman who as once a boy.

But in sketching out what she sees as Dickinson’s three-part “drama of rule and submission” through metaphors of electricity, Susan Juhasz finds,

Dickinson’s queerness sometimes moves beyond gender-bending to gender-transforming. In the sublime and in masoc

Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Female in the World.”

I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. (This essay is drawn from my book.)

Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be neighboring her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions present to women at the time. She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later think of as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”

Poised and serious at twenty,

~by Michaela Hayes

To wrap up CSU English’s celebration of LGBT history month, today we are taking a watch at arguably two of the greatest poets of American history, and certainly the most influential of the 19th century– Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Despite very different poetic styles, the two have a scant things in common: they both originate from the East Coast, both were born in the early 1800s, and both are suspected by modern readers to be some variation of queer. Though homosexuality in and of itself has never been “new,” the pos “homosexuality” was not actually coined until 1868. Even then and after, there were consequences from social to legal to existence “out,” so it’s understandable that conversations around their sexuality are recent. Neither Dickinson’s nor Whitman’s sexual identity is confirmed, and most of the questions about the topic are modern concerns, based primarily on their poetry (and some letters), but one thing is for sure — they are both considered founders of a uniquely American poetic voice.

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to stay that day. ~Emily Dickinson

The Secret, Daring, and Homosexual Life of Poet Emily Dickinson

When Wild Nights With Emily came out last year, some critics questioned the poet’s portrayal as a vibrant woman, who loved other women to boot. In this story from our archives, the film’s director, Madeleine Olnek, tells us about her take on Emily Dickinson—and how she was anything but dreary.

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Before she began researching the life of Emily Dickinson, Madeleine Olnek didn’t think much of the famous New England poet.

“I thought she was a miserable drudge,” the writer/director confesses.

“Everything I heard about her in college—she had agoraphobia, she was a recluse who didn’t want people to notice her work—created such a creepy, morbid image of her, I honestly had no desire to examine her poems.”

There’s not a scrap of that nervy recluse in Wild Nights With Emily, Olnek’s energetic and funny biopic of Dickinson. In its stead is a series of surprises: this Dickinson is witty, eager to be published—and a lesbian.

Dickinson, it turns out, conducted a life-long affair with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. The two passed endless letters endorse and forth (often delivered by Susan’s children), sharing brief kisses in the pant

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