When T. H. Johnson numbered all Dickinson’s known poems for his three-volume edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), he used such clues as handwriting differences to infer the order of composition. “This is my letter to the World” was assigned number 441. It was written in the early 1860s, probably in 1862, when Dickinson was most prolific, averaging a poem a day.
In “The Soul selects her own Society—,” written around 1862, Dickinson might be speaking about herself. Contemporary scholars have offered various explanations for Dickinson’s with-drawal from society, including thwarted love and physical disabilities. The poems themselves support the theory that her reclusiveness was the determined, willful act of someone who wished to encounter life on her own terms. This view is supported by the affirmation in “The Soul selects her own Society—” of an individual’s freedom to choose associates.
Most critics agree that “Because I could not stop for Death—” is one of Dickinson’s best poems. The writer and critic Allen Tate has written that it is “one of the greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail. . . . Every image is precise and . . . fused with the central idea.” The poem was written in 1863 and published in 1890 in the first collection of Dickinson’s work.
As a member of a solid New England family, Emily Dickinson was immersed in the Puritan tradition, and for many years she attended church services twice each Sunday. Many of her poems deal with religious subjects, often with questions about the relationship of the individual soul to God and about immortality and the afterlife. In “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” the speaker imagines her own death, expressing with brilliant irony her fears about the transition from this life to the next.
Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, Dickinson homestead, Amherst, Massachusetts.
What role does nature play in your life?
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