Emily Dickinson completes her studies at Amherst Academy
On August 10, 1847, Emily Dickinson—expert baker, legendary eccentric, and one of the most important and influential American poets in history—finished her final semester at Amherst Academy, where she studied English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, “mental philosophy,” and arithmetic.
Due in part to her frequent illnesses, Dickinson attended Amherst on and off for seven years, beginning in the fall of 1840, when she was just 9. A former boys’ school, Amherst had only recently opened to female students—after a 1838 fire destroyed the local girls’ school—when Dickinson enrolled.
Daniel Taggart Fiske, who became the principal of the Academy in 1842, wrote later that he remembered Dickinson as “an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties; but somewhat shy and nervous.” As for her writing, he noted, “her compositions were strikingly original; and in both thought and style seemed beyond her years, and always attracted much attention in the school, and, I am afraid, excited not a little envy.” This will not shock anyone who has read her poems or letters.
Scholars have long noticed reverberations of her varied education at Amherst in her poetry, which displays an unusual fluency with scientific vocabulary and concepts. “If ever there was a blossoming period in her life, full and joyous, the years at the Academy . . . were it,” wrote Richard Benson Sewell in his biography of the poet. “This remarkable school, with its enlightened curriculum, its young and enthusiastic administrators and teachers, and its close association with Amherst College, was an influence of first importance in Emily’s formative years.”
However, the special magic Dickinson found at Amherst would not continue through the rest of her (short) academic life. After leaving Amherst in 1847, Dickinson enrolled at Mount Holyoke, but for reasons that remain mysterious, she only stayed for ten months: On March 25, 1848, her brother Austin showed up and took her home. Where she wrote a few poems.
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TAKE IT FROM THE GOAT
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”—EMILY DICKINSON
in an 1870 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson
August 8, 2021 (Lithub.com)