Emily Dickinson and Félix Guattari: Difference between pages

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[[Image:Black-white photograph of Emily Dickinson.jpg|200px|thumb|right|A young Emily Dickinson, sometime around [[1846]]-[[1847]], for many years the only known photograph of her.]]
{{Infobox_Philosopher |
'''Emily Elizabeth Dickinson''' ([[December 10]], [[1830]] – [[May 15]], [[1886]]) was an [[United States|American]] [[poet]]. Though virtually unknown in her lifetime, Dickinson has come to be regarded, along with [[Walt Whitman]], as one of the two quintessential American poets of the [[19th century]].
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region = Western Philosophy|
era = [[20th-century philosophy]]|
color = #B0C4DE|
 
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Dickinson lived an introverted and hermetic life. Although she wrote, at the last count, 3,789 poems, only a handful of them were published during her lifetime - all anonymously and probably without her knowledge.
image_name = Guattari2.jpg|
 
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==Life==
name = Pierre-Félix Guattari|
birth = [[April 30]], [[1930]] ([[Villeneuve-les-Sablons]], [[Oise]], [[France]])|
death = [[August 29]], [[1992]] ([[La Borde clinic]], [[Cour-Cheverny]], [[France]])|
school_tradition = [[Psychoanalysis]], [[Autonomism]] |
main_interests = [[Psychoanalysis]], [[Politics]], [[Ecology]], [[Semiotics]]|
influences = [[Freud]], [[Lacan]], [[Gregory Bateson|Bateson]], [[Sartre]], [[Hjelmslev]]|
influenced = [[Eric Alliez]], [[Michael Hardt]], [[Brian Massumi]], [[Antonio Negri]] |
notable_ideas = [[assemblage]], [[desiring machine]], [[deterritorialization]], [[ecosophy]], [[schizoanalysis]]|
}}
'''Pierre-Félix Guattari''' ([[April 30]], [[1930]] – [[August 29]], [[1992]]) was a [[France|French]] [[militant]], institutional [[psychotherapist]] and [[philosopher]], a founder of both [[schizoanalysis]] and [[ecosophy]]. Guattari is best known for his intellectual collaborations with [[Gilles Deleuze]], most notably ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1972) and ''[[A Thousand Plateaus]]'' (1980).
 
==Biography==
Emily Dickinson was born in [[Amherst, Massachusetts|Amherst]], [[Massachusetts]], to a prominent family well known for their political and educational influence. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson ([[1775]] &ndash; [[1838]]), was one of the founders of [[Amherst College]], whose campus stands less than a mile from the family's home.
=== Clinic of La Borde ===
Born in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, [[Oise]], [[France]].{{Fact|date=February 2007}} Guattari was encouraged by psychiatrist [[Jean Oury]] towards the practice of [[psychiatry]], becoming impassioned from 1950 towards that field.{{Fact|date=February 2007}} Due to his frustrations with the theories and methods of French [[psychoanalyst]] [[Jacques Lacan]] — who both taught and analysed Guattari in the 1950s – Guattari became convinced that he needed to continue exploring as vast an array of domains as possible ([[philosophy]], [[ethnology]], [[linguistics]], [[architecture]], etc.,) in order to better define the orientation, delimitation and psychiatric efficacy of the practice. Guattari would later proclaim that psychoanalysis is "the best [[capitalist]] drug" because in it desire is confined to a couch: desire, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, is an energy that is contained rather than one that, if freed, could militantly engage itself in something different. He continued this research, collaborating in Jean Oury's private clinic of [[La Borde clinic|La Borde]] at Court-Cheverny, one of the main centers of institutional psychotherapy at the time. La Borde was a venue for conversation amongst innumerable students of philosophy, psychology, ethnology, and [[social work]]. La Borde was Félix Guattari's principal anchoring until he died of a heart attack in [[1992]].
 
=== 1960s to 1970s ===
Her father, [[Edward Dickinson]] ([[1803]] &ndash; [[1874]]), was a lawyer and treasurer for the college. He was also politically prominent, serving on the [[Massachusetts General Court]] from [[1838]] to [[1842]], the [[Massachusetts Senate]] from 1842 to [[1843]], and the [[United States House of Representatives|U.S. House of Representatives]] (to which he was elected as a [[United States Whig Party|Whig]] candidate in [[U.S. House election, 1852|1852]]).
 
From 1955 to 1965, Félix Guattari animated the [[trotskyist]] group ''Voie Communiste'' ("Communist Way"). He would then support [[anticolonialist]] struggles as well as the Italian ''[[Autonomists]]''. Guattari also took part in the movement of the psychological G.T., which gathered many psychiatrists at the beginning of the sixties and created the Association of Institutional Psychotherapy in November [[1965]]. It was at the same time that he founded, along with other militants, the F.G.E.R.I. (Federation of Groups for Institutional Study & Research) and its review research, working on philosophy, mathematics, psychoanalysis, education, architecture, ethnology, etc. The F.G.E.R.I. came to represent aspects of the multiple political and cultural engagements of Félix Guattari: the Group for Young Hispanics, the Franco-Chinese Friendships (in the times of the popular communes), the opposition activities with the wars in [[Algerian War of Independence|Algeria]] and Vietnam, the participation in the M.N.E.F., with the U.N.E.F., the policy of the offices of psychological academic aid (B.A.P.U.), the organisation of the University Working Groups (G.T.U.), but also the reorganizations of the training courses with the Centers of Training to the Methods of Education Activities (C.E.M.E.A.) for psychiatric male nurses, as well as the formation of Friendly Male Nurses (Amicales d'infirmiers) (in [[1958]]), the studies on architecture and the projects of construction of a day hospital of for "students and young workers".
The poet's mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson ([[1804]] &ndash; [[1882]]) was quiet and chronically ill.
 
Guattari was involved in the [[events of May 1968]], starting from the [[Movement of March 22]]. It was in the aftermath of 1968 that Guattari met [[Gilles Deleuze]] at the [[University of Vincennes]] and began to lay the ground-work for the soon to be infamous ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1972), which [[Michel Foucault]] described as "an introduction to the non-fascist life" in his preface to the book. Throughout his career it may be said that his writings were at all times correspondent in one fashion or another with sociopolitical and cultural engagements. In 1967, he appeared as one of the founders of OSARLA (Organization of solidarity and Aid to the Latin-American Revolution). It was with the head office of the F.G.E.R.I. that he met, in [[1968]], [[Daniel Cohn-Bendit]], [[Jean-Jacques Lebel]], and [[Julian Beck]]. In [[1970]], he created C.E.R.F.I. (Center for the Study and Research of Institutional Formation), which takes the direction of the Recherches review. In 1977, he created the CINEL for "new spaces of freedom" before joining in the 1980s the [[ecological]] movement with his "[[ecosophy]]".
William Austin Dickinson ([[1829]] &ndash; [[1895]]), usually known by his middle name, was her older brother. He later married Dickinson's most intimate friend, Susan Gilbert, in [[1856]], and made his home next door to the house in which Emily lived most of her life. Their younger sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson (1833 &ndash; 1899), often known as "Vinnie", encouraged the posthumous editing and publishing of her sister's poetry.
 
=== 1980s to 1990s ===
Dickinson lived most of her life in the family's houses in Amherst, which have been preserved as the [[Emily Dickinson Museum]]. In 1840, Emily was educated at the nearby Amherst Academy, a former boys' school which had opened to female students just two years earlier. She studied [[English studies|English]] and [[classics|classical literature]], learning [[Latin]] and reading the [[Aeneid]] over several years, and was taught in other subjects including religion, history, mathematics, geology, and biology.
 
In his last book, ''Chaosmose'' ([[1992]]), the topic of which is already partially developed in ''What is Philosophy?'' (1991, with Deleuze), Félix Guattari takes again his essential topic: the question of subjectivity. "How to produce it, collect it, enrich it, reinvent it permanently in order to make it compatible with mutant Universes of value?" This idea returns like a leitmotiv, from ''Psychanalyse and transversality'' (a regrouping of articles from [[1957]] to [[1972]]) through ''Années d'hiver'' ([[1980]] - [[1986]]) and ''Cartographies Schizoanalytique'' ([[1989]]). He insists on the function of "a-signification", which plays the role of support for a subjectivity in act, starting from four parameters: "significative and [[semiotic]] flows, Phylum of Machinic Propositions, Existential Territories and Incorporeal Universes of Reference."
In 1847, at 17, Dickinson began attending [[Mary Lyon]]'s [[Mount Holyoke College|Mount Holyoke Female Seminary]] (which would later become [[Mount Holyoke College]]) in [[South Hadley, Massachusetts|South Hadley]]. Austin was sent to bring her home after less than a year at the Seminary, and she did not return to the school. Some speculate that she was homesick, however there is also speculation that she refused to sign an oath stating she would devote her life to Jesus Christ, and realizing she no longer wanted to attend there, went home and never returned.
 
In 1995, the posthumous release ''Chaosophy'' featured Guattari's first collection of essays and interviews focuses on the French anti-psychiatrist and theorist's work as director of the experimental La Borde clinic and collaborator of philosopher Gilles Deleuze. ''Chaosophy'' is a groundbreaking introduction to Guattari's theories on "schizo-analysis", a process meant to replace [[Sigmund Freud]]'s interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, Guattari believes that [[schizophrenia]] is an extreme mental state co-existent with the capitalist system itself. But capitalism keeps enforcing [[neurosis]] as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari's post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of micropolitical means of subversion. It includes key essays such as "Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines," cosigned by Deleuze (with whom he coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus), and the provocative "Everybody Wants To Be a Fascist."
After that, she left home only for short trips to visit relatives in [[Boston]], [[Cambridge, Massachusetts|Cambridge]], and [[Connecticut]]. For decades, popular wisdom portrayed Dickinson as an [[agoraphobia|agoraphobic]] recluse. New scholarship suggests that while she was not necessarily an overly sociable person, she certainly valued her friends.
 
''Soft Subversions'' is another collection of Félix Guattari's essays, lectures, and interviews traces the militant anti-psychiatrist and theorist's thought and activity throughout the 1980s ("the winter years"). Concepts such as "micropolitics," "schizoanalysis," and "becoming-woman" open up new horizons for political and creative resistance in the "postmedia era." Guattari's energetic analyses of art, cinema, youth culture, economics, and power formations introduce a radically inventive thought process engaged in liberating subjectivity from the standardizing and homogenizing processes of global capitalism.
Susan married Dickinson's brother Austin Dickinson in [[1856]], though Susan and Emily had known each other earlier. Emily asked Susan to critique her poems, at which she began working harder than ever. Dickinson died on May 15, 1886. The cause of death was listed as [[Bright's disease]] (nephritis).
 
== Bibliography ==
Upon her death, her family found 40 handbound volumes of more than 1700 of her poems.
=== Works published in English ===
 
*''Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics'' (1984). Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Selected essays from ''Psychanalyse et transversalité'' (1972) and ''La révolution moléculaire'' (1977).
==Poetry and influence==
*''Les Trois écologies'' (1989). Trans. ''The Three Ecologies.'' Partial translation by Chris Turner (Paris: Galilee, 1989), full translation by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).
*''Chaosmose'' (1992). Trans. ''Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm'' (1995).
*''Chaosophy'' (1995), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Collected essays and interviews.
*''Soft Subversions'' (1996), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Collected essays and interviews.
*''The Guattari Reader'' (1996), ed. Gary Genosko. Collected essays and interviews.
*''Ecrits pour L'Anti-Œdipe'' (2004), ed. Stéphane Nadaud. Trans. ''The Anti-Œdipus Papers'' (2006). Collection of texts written between 1969 and 1972.
*''Chaos and Complexity'' (Forthcoming 2008, MIT Press). Collected essays and interviews.
 
In collaboration with [[Gilles Deleuze]]:
[[Image:Emily-dickinson-ca1850.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Emily Dickinson, sometime around 1850, (supposed to be) the second and only other known photo of her. Curators at the Emily Dicksinon Museum deny its authenticity.]]
Dickinson's poetry is quite often recognizable at a glance, and is unlike the work of any other poet. Her facility with [[ballad]] and [[hymn]] [[meter (poetry)|meter]], her extensive use of [[dash]]es and unconventional [[capitalization]] in her manuscripts, and her idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery combine to create a unique [[lyric poetry|lyric style]].
 
*''Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe'' (1972). Trans. ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]'' (1977).
Over half of her poems were written during the years of the [[American Civil War]]. Many suggest that the Civil War gave some of the tense feeling in her poetry. Dickinson toyed briefly with the idea of having her poems published, even asking [[Thomas Wentworth Higginson]], a literary critic, for advice. Higginson immediately realized the poet's talent, but when he tried to "improve" Dickinson's poems, adapting them to the more florid, romantic style popular at the time, Dickinson quickly lost interest in the project.
*''Kafka: Pour une Littérature Mineure'' (1975). Trans. ''Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature'' (1986).
*''Rhizome: introduction'' (Paris: Minuit, 1976). Trans. "Rhizome," in ''Ideology and Consciousness'' 8 (Spring, 1981): 49-71. This is an early version of what became the introductory chapter in ''Mille Plateaux.''
*''Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux'' (1980). Trans. ''[[A Thousand Plateaus]]'' (1987).
*''On the Line'' (1983). Contains translations of "Rhizome," and "Politics" ("Many Politics") by Deleuze and Parnet.
*''Nomadology: The War Machine.'' (1986). Translation of "Plateau 12," ''Mille Plateaux.''
*''Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?'' (1991). Trans. ''What Is Philosophy?'' (1996).
 
Other collaborations:
By her death (1886), only ten of Dickinson's poems (see: Franklin Edition of the Poems, 1998, App. 1) had been published. Seven of those ten were published in the ''Springfield Republican''. Three posthumous collections in the 1890s established her as a powerful eccentric, but it wasn't until the twentieth century that she was appreciated as a poet.
 
*''Les nouveaux espaces de liberté'' (1985). Trans. ''Communists Like Us'' (1990). With [[Antonio Negri]].
Dickinson's poetry was collected after her death by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, with Todd initially collecting and organizing the material and Higginson editing. They edited the poems extensively in order to regularize the manuscripts' punctuation and capitalization to late nineteenth-century standards, occasionally rewording poems to reduce Dickinson's obliquity. A volume of Dickinson's ''Poems'' was published in Boston in [[1890]], and became quite popular; by the end of 1892 eleven editions had sold. ''Poems: Second Series'' was published in 1891 and ran to five editions by 1893; a third series was published in 1896. Two volumes of Dickinson's letters, heavily edited and selected by Todd (who falsified dates on some of them), were published in 1894.
*''Micropolitica: Cartografias do Desejo'' (1986). Trans. ''Molecular Revolution in Brazil'' (Forthcoming October 2007, MIT Press). With Suely Rolnik.
*''The party without bosses'' (2003), by Gary Genosko. Features a 1982 conversation between Guattari and [[Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva]], the current [[President of Brazil]].
 
=== Works untranslated into English ===
This wave of posthumous publications gave Dickinson's poetry its first real public exposure, and it found an immediate audience. Backed by Higginson and [[William Dean Howells]] with favorable notices and reviews, the poetry was popular from 1890 to 1892. Later in the decade, critical opinion became negative. [[Thomas Bailey Aldrich]] published an influential negative review anonymously in the January 1892 ''[[Atlantic Monthly]]'':
Note: Many of the essays found in these works have been individually translated and can be found in the English collections.
*''Psychanalyse et transversalité. Essais d'analyse institutionnelle'' (1972).
*''La révolution moléculaire'' (1977, 1980). The 1980 version (éditions 10/18) contains substantially different essays from the 1977 version.
*''L'inconscient machinique. Essais de Schizoanalyse'' (1979).
*''Les années d'hiver, 1980-1985'' (1986).
*''Cartographies schizoanalytiques'' (1989).
 
Other collaborations:
:It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of [[William Blake|Blake]], and strongly influenced by the mannerism of [[Ralph Waldo Emerson|Emerson]]....But the incoherence and formlessness of her — versicles are fatal....[A]n eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar. (in Buckingham 281-282)
 
*''L’intervention institutionnelle'' (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, n. 382 - 1980). On [[institutional pedagogy]]. With Jacques Ardoino, G. Lapassade, Gerard Mendel, Rene Lourau.
In the early 20th century, Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published a series of further collections, including many previously unpublished poems, with similarly normalized punctuation and capitalization; ''The Single Hound'' emerged in 1914, ''The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson'' and ''The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson'' in 1924, ''Further Poems of Emily Dickinson'' in 1929. Other volumes edited by Todd and Bianchi emerged through the 1930s, releasing gradually more previously unpublished poems. With the rise of [[modernist poetry]], Dickinson's failure to conform to nineteenth-century ideas of poetic form was no longer surprising nor distasteful to new generations of readers. A new wave of [[feminism]] created greater cultural sympathy for her as a woman poet. Her stock had clearly risen, but Dickinson was not generally thought a great poet among the first generation of modernists, as is clear from [[R.P. Blackmur]]'s critical essay of 1937:
*''Pratique de l'institutionnel et politique'' (1985). With [[Jean Oury]] and Francois Tosquelles.
*(it) ''Desiderio e rivoluzione. Intervista a cura di Paolo Bertetto'' (Milan: Squilibri, 1977). Conversation with Franco Berardi (Bifo) and Paolo Bertetto.
 
=== Select secondary sources ===
:She was neither a professional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars....She came, as Mr. Tate says, at the right time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of sophisticated, eccentric vision. That is what makes her good — in a few poems and many passages representatively great. But...the bulk of her verse is not representative but mere fragmentary indicative notation. The pity of it is that the document her whole work makes shows nothing so much as that she had the themes, the insight, the observation, and the capacity for honesty, which had she only known how — or only known why — would have made the major instead of the minor fraction of her verse genuine poetry. But her dying society had no tradition by which to teach her the one lesson she did not know by instinct. (195)
 
*[[Éric Alliez]], ''La Signature du monde, ou Qu'est-ce que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari'' (1993). Trans. ''The Signature of the World: Or, What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?'' (2005).
The texts of these early editions would hardly be recognized by later readers, as their extensive editing had altered the texts found in Dickinson's manuscripts substantially. A new and complete edition of Dickinson's poetry by Thomas H. Johnson, ''The Poems of Emily Dickinson'', was published in three volumes in [[1955]]. This edition formed the basis of all later Dickinson scholarship, and provided the Dickinson known to readers thereafter: the poems were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, were strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and were often extremely elliptical in their language. They were printed for the first time much more nearly as Dickinson had left them, in versions approximating the text in her manuscripts. A later [[variorum]] edition provided many alternate wordings from which Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention, had been forced to choose for the sake of readability.
*Gary Genosko, ''Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction'' (2002).
*Gary Genosko (ed.), ''Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Volume 2: Guattari'' (2001).
 
==External links==
Later readers would draw attention to the remaining problems in reading even Johnson's relatively unaltered typeset texts of Dickinson, claiming that Dickinson's treatment of her manuscripts suggested that their physical and graphic properties were important to the reading of her poems. Possibly meaningful distinctions could be drawn, they argued, among different lengths and angles of dash in the poems, and different arrangements of text on the page. Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using many typographic symbols of varying length and angle; even R.W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems, which aimed to supplant Johnson's edition as the scholarly standard text, used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely. Some scholars claimed that the poems should be studied by reading the manuscripts themselves.
*[http://www.revue-chimeres.org/guattari/guattari.html Chimeres site on Guattari (in French)]
*[http://multitudes.samizdat.net/_Guattari-Felix_.html Multitudes page on Guattari (in French)]
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guattari, Felix}}
===Music===
[[Category:1930 births]]
Because of her frequent use of [[common metre]], many of Dickinson's poems can easily be set to tunes (for example "I heard a fly buzz when I died- / The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air / Between the Heaves of Storm"). Dickinson’s poetry has been used as texts for art songs by composers such as [[Aaron Copland]] and [[Nick Peros]].
[[Category:1992 deaths]]
[[Category:French anarchists]]
[[Category:Postmodern theory]]
[[Category:Psychoanalytic theory]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysts]]
[[Category:Anti-psychiatry]]
[[Category:Psychotherapists]]
[[Category:French non-fiction writers]]
[[Category:French philosophers]]
[[Category:Political philosophers]]
[[Category:Deleuze-Guattari]]
 
[[de:Félix Guattari]]
Because of this, one can also sing many of her poems to the tunes of "Amazing Grace," "[[The Yellow Rose of Texas]]" or the "[[Gilligan's Island]]" theme song. While this novelty is entertaining in itself, it also demonstrates the connection between poetry and song embodied for centuries in the [[ballad]].
[[es:Félix Guattari]]
 
[[fr:Félix Guattari]]
==Sexuality==
[[gl:Félix Guattari]]
 
[[it:Félix Guattari]]
The sexuality of Emily Dickinson is a topic of dispute. It has been argued that she may have been bisexual or a lesbian.
[[nl:Félix Guattari]]
 
[[ja:フェリックス・ガタリ]]
Dickinson's possible romantic and sexual adventures are matters of great controversy among her biographers and critics. There is little evidence on which to base a conclusion about the objects of her affection, though Dickinson's understanding of passion can be inferred through some of her poems and letters.
[[pt:Félix Guattari]]
 
[[fi:Félix Guattari]]
Attention has focused especially on a group of letters addressed only to "Master", known as the ''Master'' letters, in which Dickinson appears to be writing to a male lover; neither the addressee of these letters, nor whether they were sent, has been established. Some biographers have been convinced Dickinson might have been romantically involved with the newspaper publisher [[Samuel Bowles (journalist)|Samuel Bowles]], a friend of her father's, Judge Otis Lord, or a minister named Charles Wadsworth.
 
Some biographers have theorized Dickinson may have had romantic attachments to women in her younger years, a hypothesis which has grown in popularity. After a claimed romance with Emily Fowler, circa [[1850]], some conjecture that Susan Gilbert [[1851]], her closest friend and sister-in-law, was another possible love. The evidence for all these theories is circumstantial at best. Many scholars that claim the evidence for the latter theory about her relationship with women is scant and highly ambiguous.
 
Peggy Macintosh, from [[Wellesley College]]'s Center for Research on Women, and Ellen Louise Hart, from [[University of California at Santa Cruz]]: Cowell College, in their [http://college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/early_nineteenth/dickinson_em.html introduction of Emily Dickinson] in ''The Heath Anthology of American Literature'' (Fifth Edition) note that "It is important to understand the role in Dickinson studies played by homophobia.... We do not know to what extent Dickinson expressed her sexual desires physically...."
 
Whether Dickinson had romantic feelings for women or not, it is important to remember that her poetry was heavily edited by several people before being released into the public posthumously. According to Macintosh and Hart, there is evidence that Mabel Loomis Todd (the editor) was Austin Dickinson's mistress, and together they "mutilated Dickinson’s manuscripts, erasing [Susan's] name and scissoring out references to her." There were lines of poems that were completely scratched out. Todd was involved in the editing of all three initial volumes of Emily's published works. This alteration of documents throws possible romantic aspects into ambiguity.
 
Other aspects, though, such as their lifelong friendship (late teens to Emily's death), are not ambiguous. It is well-known that no one received more writing from Emily than Susan Gilbert. There were hundreds of letters found, which Gilbert reciprocated. As previously stated, her few friendships, and her friendship with Susan was no exception. Some of the letters were very passionate, furthering this ambiguity. While many of Dickinson's letters and poems are highly charged, passionate, and erotic, few biographers or critics believe that Dickinson physically consummated a relationship with anyone.
 
==See also==
*[[Identification of Emily Dickinson poems]]
*[[List of Emily Dickinson poems]]
 
==References==
* Blackmur, R.P.. "Emily Dickinson: Notes on Prejudice and Fact (1937)." In ''Selected Essays'', ed. Denis Donoghue. New York: Ecco, 1986.
* Buckingham, Willis J., ed. ''Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History''. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8229-3604-6.
* Crumbley, Paul. ''Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson''. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
* Dickinson, Emily. ''The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson''. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1960. ISBN 0-316-18413-6 (and others).
** ''The Poems of Emily Dickinson''. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998.
** ''The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson''. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1981.
* Habegger, Alfred. ''My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson''. New York: Random House, 2001.
* Johnson, Thomas H. ''Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography''. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1955.
* Lauter, Paul, ed., "Emily Dickinson". ''The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. ISBN 0-618-53299-4
* Martin, Wendy. "An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich". Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1984.
* Sewall, Richard B. ''The Life of Emily Dickinson''. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1974. ISBN 0-374-51581-9{{Please check ISBN|Calculated check digit (6) doesn't match given.}}.
* Shurr, W, Dunlap, A and Shurr, E (Eds.), "New Poems of Emily Dickinson". Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8078-2115-2 (and others).
 
== External links ==
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* [http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/ Dickinson Electronic Archives]
* {{gutenberg author| id=Emily+Dickinson | name=Emily Dickinson}}
* [http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org Emily Dickinson Museum] The Homestead and the Evergreens, Amherst, Massachusetts.
* [http://www.itvs.org//shows/ataglance.htm?showID=655 TV documentary] About Emily, [http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/loadedgun/film.html about the documentary].
* [http://librivox.org/ LibriVox] - Free Audio Recordings of [http://librivox.org/short-poetry-collection-001/ Because I Could Not Stop for Death], [http://librivox.org/short-poetry-collection-002/ I'm Nobody], [http://librivox.org/short-poetry-collection-003/ The Chariot], [http://librivox.org/short-poetry-collection-001/ I Died for Beauty], and others.
* [http://www.poets.org/edick Dickinson on Poets.org] Biography, related essays, and reading guides, from the Academy of American Poets
* [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&amp;UID=1259 Dickinson article] from the online ''[[The Literary Encyclopedia|Literary Encyclopedia]]''
* [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1775 Poems by Emily Dickinson at PoetryFoundation.org]
* [http://www.bartleby.com/113/ Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems]
* [http://www.emilydickinson.it/ The Complete Works with Italian translation]
* [http://wiredforbooks.org/poetry/laura_lee_parrotti.htm The poems of Emily Dickinson read aloud in RealAudio]
* [http://www.sanjeev.net/poetry/dickinson-emily/index.html Poetry Archive: 1851 poems of Emily Dickinson]
* [http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/my-emily.html Excerpt from Susan Howe's _My Emily Dickinson_]
 
[[Category:1830 births|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:1886 deaths|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:Massachusetts writers|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:People from Amherst, Massachusetts|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:People from Massachusetts|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:American poets|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:Women of the Victorian era|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:Women writers|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:Mount Holyoke College alumnae|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:Massachusetts in the American Civil War|Dickinson, Emily]]
[[Category:Women in the American Civil War|Dickinson, Emily]]
 
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