But this can only partially explain Dickinson’s state of mind. It does not address her special capacity to capture what has been called by Dickinson critics the “depressive experience” and transform it into metaphor, a phenomenon over which they have puzzled for decades. Consider the opening and closing verses from one of Emily Dickinson’s best known poems:
Discussion
The most productive years of Emily Dickinson’s writing career seem to divide themselves into two 4-year blocks. The first was marked by a seasonal pattern. Of course, her preference for summer is well-known. Summer is mentioned over five times more than any other season throughout her collected poems
(19). And although the long, cold New England winters themselves may have influenced her productivity, the Dickinson house, including the bedroom where she did much of her writing at night (personal communication, Polly Longsworth, Ph.D.), was well supplied with wood-burning stoves and whale-oil lamps. Thus, her decline in productivity during the winter months seems more a reaction to the season than to the weather or the lack of daylight by which to work. Wintertime was accompanied by thoughts of death. There is no question that Emily Dickinson suffered painful losses, the deaths of family and friends whom she mourned in letter and verse. But her periods of grief appear prolonged and seasonally weighted toward the winter months. For example, a November 1858 letter to a friend stated, “I thought perhaps that you were dead.…Who is alive? The woods are dead”
(12, L195). Even the end of summer marked the anticipation of winter—and of death as well. A September 1859 letter noted: “Indeed, this world is short, and I wish, until I tremble, to touch the ones I love before the hills are red—are grey—are white…” (L207).
The year 1860 continued with a seasonal pattern of productivity but to a lesser extent than during 1858 and 1859. The following year, 1861, seemed to anticipate the seasonal pattern once again. Indeed, the dreaded onset of winter was handled humorously in August of that year. Dickinson wrote: “I shall have no winter this year…I thought it best to omit the season…” (L235). But suddenly the seasonal pattern of the previous 3 years was disrupted with the onset of a severe emotional crisis in the fall of 1861 (to be discussed).
What can we make of the seasonal pattern in Dickinson’s early work? On one hand, it reflects the uncommon sensitivity to seasonal fluctuations found in the work of many artists
(16,
20). In Emily Dickinson’s case, it is possible that it may also reflect a recurrence of the melancholia she described as an adolescent, now marked by a seasonal pattern, with recurrence during the winter months.
But what could account for the sudden surge in productivity beginning in 1861–1862, a surge that overrode the previous seasonal pattern? In April 1862, Dickinson wrote her advisor, Thomas Higginson, of a “Terror—since September [1861]—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—”
(12, L261) (“sing” was a word Dickinson used to refer to writing poetry). There was no further direct reference to “the Terror” in her letters, although she received a note of concern from a clergyman friend that read, “I am distressed beyond measure at your note, received this moment—I can only imagine the affliction which has befallen, or is now befalling you” (L248A). The rest of that year, 1862, seemed a blur to Emily Dickinson, and although she composed 277 poems in 1862 alone, she wrote a half-humorous but puzzled line to a friend in December: “I don’t remember ‘May.’ Is that the one that stands next to April?” (L245).
A characteristic overlap between spring or autumn creative peaks and the onset of manic periods has been described in many artists
(16). Perhaps the crisis Emily Dickinson described in 1861–1862 signaled a switch in polarity of mood. Such speculation is supported by the fact is that Dickinson’s productivity rose dramatically in 1861 and 1862; i.e., during the very time she was experiencing “the Terror,” Dickinson produced a flood of poems. This second 4-year period of productivity, 1862–1865, accounted for far more poems than any other period in her life. Indeed, she seemed so overwhelmed by this new, sustained burst of energy that she completely discounted those earlier (1858–1861) productive years. In the April 1862 letter to Higginson referred to previously, she described her career as a poet: “I made no verse—but—one or two—until this winter”
(12, L261). She seemed to date her own creativity to the time of “the Terror.”
“The Terror” marked the onset of a prolonged surge of creative energy and the beginning of the most productive period of her life, 1862–1865. New ideas followed one another with extraordinary rapidity. Those 4 years account for over one-half of the almost 1,800 poems written during her 33-year writing career. The change in mood can be found in her letters, formerly one of gloom, to one of elation. There was a cognitive change as well, as she wrote of her work, “My business is to love………My business is to sing.”(L269).
Critics have long puzzled over the marked alteration in poetic form in Dickinson’s work after 1860. It has been described by one of them as the sudden development of several simultaneously expanding metaphors, creating an experience that required a new kind of reading
(21). There had been not just a quantitative change in her writing but a qualitative one as well. Dickinson herself recognized this new, expansive creative form. Her almost constant stream of ideas, combined with a newfound energy, marked a new creative period. But she also saw it as a kind of fragmentation in a letter to Higginson: “I…cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize—my little Force explodes—and leaves me bare and charred—”
(12, L271). For in addition to the marked changes in mood and cognition, her behavior had changed as well. The meticulous binding of poems into themes, or “fascicles,” by hand from 1858 onward had become disorderly
(5). She recognized the process, apologizing to her preceptor Higginson for the disorganization, sending him more poems to critique and adding, “Are these more orderly?”
(12, L271).
Kay Redfield Jamison, in her book
Touched With Fire, listed Emily Dickinson among the artists with probable major depression or manic depressive illness but offers no supporting data
(16). This study of the periodicity in Dickinson’s writing career offers data suggestive of affective illness during her productive years. First of all, Dickinson described herself as suffering from a “fixed melancholy” in adolescence, during which she dropped out of school
(12, L11). Her own beloved lexicon, Webster’s
An American Dictionary of the English Language (22), described melancholy, when prolonged, as a “disease.” It seems possible, considering recent research studies of community populations
(23) that have identified high recurrence rates of affective illness in adolescents with vulnerabilities such as female gender and depressive cognitions, that this melancholy may have recurred in seasonal form at the beginning of Dickinson’s most productive years. These years divide in two, the first 4 generally characterized by an increase in productivity in the summer and a reduced poetic output and pessimistic mood in the winter. This pattern was interrupted by an emotional crisis that she described as “a Terror,” signaling a second 4-year phase of expansive creativity, a fever to write, and an intensity clearly dating from the
time of “the Terror.”
Why did Dickinson characterize the onset of this creative burst as “a Terror”? Fearfulness has been described as one way in which artists experience the arousal of creativity
(16). And although the word “terror” may not typify the onset of mania or hypomania today, the same biologically determined process may have been experienced differently in different historical periods. In any case, the 8-year productive period described previously is not inconsistent with the symptom profile of bipolar II affective disorder, “the Terror” perhaps signaling a sudden frightening change in polarity.
Emily Dickinson has long been considered a complex figure by her biographers, with many contrasting, if not contradictory, sides to her personality: withdrawn and reclusive on one hand; assertive and ebullient on the other. Another possible explanation is that she may have suffered from a recurrent affective disorder, with the well-known emotional and cognitive fluctuations that are part of its course. Such speculation addresses the mystery of her poetic drive; i.e., critics have wondered why the bulk of Dickinson’s work was produced in a period of a few short years, with the drive suddenly coming to an end
(24).
Emily Dickinson’s physician, without knowing it, may have helped solve the mystery of her mental state some years later, when Dickinson was 53: “The Physician says I have ‘Nervous Prostration,’” she wrote a friend. “Possibly I have—I do not know the Names of Sickness”
(12, L873). Nervous prostration was a condition that was by then subsumed under the diagnosis of neurasthenia, an illness characterized by anxiety and depression
(25). Emily Dickinson’s “Nervous Prostration” might have been the end result not only of her earlier documented panic and agoraphobia but of a possible bipolar disorder as well. Recent evidence from genetic research
(9,
10) has suggested that panic may indeed be a bipolar marker. But it was not until many years later that Kraepelin described manic and depressive mood swings and separated them from dementia praecox. Thus, Dickinson’s physician diagnosed nervous prostration, then a catchall for symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Jamison, in her investigation of the overlapping of depressive, manic, and creative states, has found high rates of bipolar disorder among artists, especially poets
(16). Andreasen
(26) found these creative abilities and mood disorders to aggregate in certain families. What is the evidence of such a pattern in the Dickinson family? There is some. The behavior of Emily Dickinson’s paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the black sheep of the family, has confounded Dickinson biographers for years. A founder of Amherst College and an eminent civic leader, he was described by the president of Amherst College as “one of the most industrious and persevering men that I ever saw”
(24, p. 35). But his periods of energy and enthusiasm appeared to alternate with depression. First accumulating then losing the family fortune, exiled from Amherst to the Midwest, he was remembered by his daughter: “It seems as if his depression of spirits caused his sickness which terminated his life”
(24, p. 38). The eminent Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall noted this “breakdown” and suggested that Squire Fowler exhibited traits that became more extreme in succeeding generations
(24, p. 38). Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s own references to his mood swings can be found in letters before and after his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1795. Needing only 4 hours’ sleep at night, he characterized himself as having “burned out my candle and made the clock strike thirteen” on one hand and at other times complaining of melancholy and “general debility pervading my constitution” on the other
(27, MS797301).