Painted portrait of the young Emily Dickinson with parted auburn hair, a white collar and a black ribbon, against a pale celadon ground

Portraits · Poets · VII of XIV

Emily Dickinson

1830–1886 · Poet

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?

Emily Dickinson · letter to T. W. Higginson, 1862
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Emily Dickinson wrote this in April 1862, in her first letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a critic she had never met. She enclosed four poems and asked him one thing: whether her verse was alive.

He advised her not to publish yet. Most of her nearly 1,800 poems appeared only after her death.

Her first letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Amherst, 15 April 1862. Printed in T. W. Higginson, 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 68, no. 408 (October 1891), p. 444.

The originals

Daguerreotype of the teenage Emily Dickinson with parted dark hair and a ribbon at her collar
The likenessDAGUERREOTYPE, MAKER UNKNOWN · c. 1847Our portrait is painted after it.Public domain (1840s daguerreotype; Commons tags it PD). Emily Dickinson Collection, Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. 720 dpi scan.
A handwritten poem in large looping script beginning Safe in their Alabaster Chambers, with a library stamp
Safe in their Alabaster ChambersOne of her poems in her own hand, 1862, the year she first wrote to Higginson. Only about ten of her poems were printed in her lifetime.Safe in their Alabaster Chambers, autograph manuscript, 1862. Boston Public Library (Digital Commonwealth), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.