New Photos Of Emily Dickinson ?
September 06, 2012
Photo of the renowned poet Emily Dickinson has surfaced. By Mark Shanahan & Meredith Goldstein
Photo of the renowned poet Emily Dickinson has surfaced.
By Mark Shanahan & Meredith Goldstein,The Boston Globe
“Rarely photographed” does not accurately describe Emily Dickinson. There is exactly one authenticated photo of the famously reclusive poet — a daguerreotype showing her as a teenager in 1847. But a second photo believed to be Dickinson has just surfaced, and scholars are excited.
“Emily Dickinson is an icon in American literary history, but our image of her has been frozen,” says Martha Nell Smith, a professor at the University of Maryland who is credited with bringing the new image to light. “This powerfully changes our image of Dickinson.”
Born in Amherst in 1830, Dickinson spent her entire life in and around the tiny Western Massachusetts town. She was the subject of a 1976 Broadway play, “The Belle of Amherst,” starring Julie Harris, and her stately home near the Amherst College campus is now the Emily Dickinson Museum.
But for all of that, Dickinson has remained something of a riddle. Smith says the celebrated poet’s supposed back story is almost a cliche: She wore white, toiled in isolation, and wrote because of a broken heart. That there are almost no photos of her only enhanced the myth.