Talk:Emily Dickinson

Gendered Name Usage

There is a common and unfortunate bad habit in the way people talk about female artists (and female professionals of any kind) where they feel more comfortable referring to them using their first names.^[1] This article is rife with this bad habit, and it calls Dickinson "Emily" throughout. A precursory glance at any comparable male figure will show that they are almost exclusively referred to using only their surname or their full name. For instance, the entry on Whitman never calls him "Walt" except when explaining where the nickname came from.

Referring to female professionals in a systematically more informal way results in an indirect diminishment of their accomplishments. It implies that women are entitled to less respect than their formally-titled male counterparts. This practice is a holdover from when men dominated all professional fields and wanted to portray women as inferior and unable to compete at the same level as the men. Please consider revising this article so that it consistently refers to Dickinson in the same way it would refer to her if she were male.

142.113.239.44 (talk) 04:02, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

MOS:SURNAME states After the initial mention, a person should generally be referred to by surname only and Generally speaking, subjects should not otherwise be referred to by their given name. You are correct that this is how the article should present Dickinson. I have reinstated your changes as they fit the MOS. Notfrompedro (talk) 12:31, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

It's a plague: https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/emily-dickinson-poet-kitchen-cooking/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.93.89.11 (talk) 15:03, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Susan

Emily and Susan's relationship is proof that some history is up to interpretation. Much of the mentions of Dickinson's mistress were lost or deliberately destroyed, thus making it difficult to interpret the true nature of their relationship. Without a poem reading "I'm coining a term for my state and calling it 'homosexuality'", we can't be certain of the relationship between Emily and Susan Dickinson. Unfortunately, the word "homosexuality" was not coined until 1868 in German and did not appear in American writing until Charles Glibert Chaddock's translation of the text Psychopthia Sexualis by German neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1892, which was after Dickinson's death. Therefore, Dickinson did not have a term available to her to describe her sexuality even if she wanted to label her sexual desires. That leaves her poems and letters as the only way to interpret her relationship with Susan.NOS5683 (talk) 16:03, 28 September 2025 (UTC)2600:1700:2480:11B0:18EA:824:F017:60DB (talk) 07:58, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

Respectfully suggest changing all subsequent references to the school from "Holyoke" to "Mt. Holyoke." The seminary and its succeeding College are in South Hadley, Massachusetts, about five miles from the city of Holyoke. A small distance, true, but they were and are very different places. Joe Wiki Boy (talk) 19:28, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Irish maid saved her poems not sister

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Maher Sources found here Gitterss (talk) 18:32, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Also stored her poems in the maids trunk and instructed her to burn them upon Emily's death, but couldn't bring herself to do so. Instead brought to siblings Gitterss (talk) 18:33, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

FA issues

I noted a number of issues in this FA:

• At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson - Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson is not mentioned in the body, so this should probably moved to somewhere other than the intro
• Issues with tone, such as By all accounts, young Dickinson was a well-behaved girl, After reading it, she gushed, William Shakespeare was also a potent influence in her life, etc.
• Prose is very choppy, with lots of one- and two-sentence paragraphs.
• Lots of [citation needed]s in the "Adulthood and seclusion" section.
• Many other sections have unsourced sentences.
• Unnecessary lists, such as under "Poetry" and "Modern influence and inspiration".

Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 19:44, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Susan is mentioned repeatedly in the body, and specifically about the dedications; search for the words "Dickinson's dedications of 11 poems to Susan Gilbert were deliberately censored".

I don't agree with your complaint about tone. If she was considered a "well-behaved girl", then we should say so. If she gushed, we should say so. That quotation appears to come from a letter by Higginson to his wife; more fully, he writes "she thought in ecstasy, this then is a book!  And there are more of them!"

I don't think there's anything wrong with one- and two-sentence paragraphs. If expressing the main point of the paragraph can be done in one or two sentences, then that's correct. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:05, 22 November 2025 (UTC)