COLUMN: Interviews with the Famously Departed:

Emily Dickinson, Age 9

Hey Readers, Where'd you go? Emily Dickinson's been waiting over a hundred years just to join our series.

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Known for retiring to her family house almost before she could spell Massachusetts and for wearing different shades of white, this Belle lived and wrote poety there until she died on May 15, 1886.

So Emily, you wrote a lot about love, death and immortality. How does it feel to be dead and immortal? Is there romance where you are?

Dickinson: The Sweeping up the heart

                And putting love away

                We shall not want to use again

                                         Until Eternity 

You were known as something of a recluse. So how about some thoughts on today’s seekers of fame and fortune.

 Dancing with the Stars?

  Dickinson:  For each ecstatic instant

             We must an anguish pay

             In keen and quivering ration

             To the ecstasy.

                  For each ecstatic instant

   Going on Talk Shows?

   Dickinson: How dreary - to be - somebody!

                 How public - like a frog

            To tell your name - the livelong June

                 To an admiring bog!

                              I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Let’s try some questions about writing. We’ll start with opinion columns. Have you had a chance to look at online publications?

Dickinson: There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away

                 Nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

                                               There is no frigate like a book

Trying to get a publisher for one’s manuscript?

Dickinson: The possible's slow fuse is lit by the Imagination.

                                             The gleam of an heroic act

Yeah but it took an afterlife for you to get published?

Dickinson: A word is dead when it is said, some say.

                 I say it just begins to live that day.

                                                    A word is dead

So in other words?

Dickinson: He ate and drank the precious Words

                His Spirit grew robust

                He knew no more that he was poor

                Nor that his frame was Dust.

                  He ate and drank the precious words

Let’s try some advice issues. Advice for malpractice lawyers?

Dickinson: Surgeons must be very careful.

                When they take the knife!

                 Underneath their fine incisions,

                 Stirs the Culprit - Life!

                    Surgeons must be very careful

Advice to stockbrokers?

Dickinson: Finite to fail

                But infinite to venture.

                   Finite to fail, but infinite to venture

Let’s get back to men. You’re from the home of the Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics. What about the missing college basketball?

Dickinson: A little Madness in the Spring

                Is wholesome even for the King.

                     A little Madness in the Spring

What do you think of the NFL lockout?

Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee

                One clover, and a bee. And revery.

                The revery alone will do.

                If bees are few.

                To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, Collected Poems

Brad Pitt?

Dickinson: If I can stop one heart from breaking

                I shall not live in vain.

                  If I can stop one heart from breaking

Any luck with men in the afterlife?

Dickinson: Well, there’s a lot of men I don’t talk to. Women too. That Charlotte Bronte, always putting on Eyres. But it was good to finally meet Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Melville takes himself too seriously and Hawthorne gabbles about gables too much. But still there’s a few I might think about dating in millennium or two. (fictional reply)

Dickinson: Anger as soon as fed is dead

                'Tis starving makes it fat

                   Mine enemy is growing old

Any thoughts on global warming?

Dickinson: How strange that nature does not knock

                And yet does not intrude.

                    Letter. About 1877. Mrs. James S. Cooper

Finally, a little perspective for the living?

Dickinson: To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

                    Letters. Late 1872. T.W. Higginson

Dickinson poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from the following volumes: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Copyright © 1998 by the Fellows of Harvard College; The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Lines from letters by Emily Dickinson Reprinted by permission of the publication from THELETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary. L. Hampson