These Fevered Days Quotes

“Karen Dandurand’s view that Dickinson did not publish because poetry to her was never finished. She looked upon her verse as constantly in play and the work of a lifetime. Her attitude is reminiscent of Paul Valéry’s assessment: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Home to her was much more. It was the wild terrain of her mind. A world of hummingbirds and crickets and alabaster and dots on a disc of snow. To Emily Dickinson, home was consciousness itself—a continent of language where metaphor was her native tongue.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“She wanted her poems to translate all she saw and heard and felt, and not be any earthly thing. What she aimed for was evanescence like the brilliance of lightning, the flash of truth, or a transport so swift it felt like flight.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“She wanted to think through the questions of faith herself, and she held fast to the belief that heaven on Earth would always outweigh heaven above.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Housekeeping, to her, was a way to cultivate a woman’s submission and steal time, and she wanted nothing of it.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“She thought accepting religious maxims meant abdicating independence and not personally struggling with profound questions. It was like learning chemistry by a book rather than an experiment.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“I am also struck by how much the poet knew her own mind, both in terms of her need for solitude and what she hoped to achieve in her work.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Emily Dickinson reminds us what it’s like to be alive. And when she does—she takes our breath away.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“[Ebenezer Snell] never got over the idea that although people who loved each other might be apart, they could gaze up at the sky and see the same stars and the same moon. The scientist in him understood the phenomenon, but the poet in him appreciated the wonder.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“While Emily’s verse always drew from more than the literal details of her life, impaired vision made her rely on her imagination even more. If she could not see distinctly or at all, she would have to tap into her metaphorical reserve. She may have found that imagination gave her a richer sense of perception than what she could discern from her eyes.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Emily always turned to language to soothe or lessen her distress. The letters could have served as a reminder of the pain she had experienced, but survived. Whatever purpose she had in writing remained a secret known only to her. She never shied away from looking anguish in the eye or contemplating its aftermath. To do so was an act of dominion over misery and resistance to inertia.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“. . . she also shed her youthful need to exaggerate, flaunt her wit, and trot out erudition. She still sent poems to mark an event or nudge someone to write, but her poems became less about what happened and more about what she was thinking. Poems sent in letters . . . rose above daily concerns to larger contemplations on nature, faith, and loss. Images of boats, sailors, and the view from shore appeared frequently.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“. . . beneath the surface, Emily was trying to understand if writers were responsible for the feelings they prompted in others: if hurling a word had the same effect as throwing a stone. Was imagination—like a loaded gun—the one pulling the trigger?”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Emily could hardly get up in the morning without metaphors and images flooding her mind. Often her letters to Austin took on the appearance of a composition exercise, as if she were trying to freeze a moment in words and capture not only the look, but also the feel of an instant.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Whether she knew it then or not, she would bore into her own interior, confronting an unknown as wild and uncertain as any new world a missionary had seen. A place as rare as Noah’s.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“If anyone that Sunday suggested that there was an element of the sacred to her ritual, she likely would have disagreed. There was no open Bible. No sanctified cloth. No preacher or even professors substituting for a divinely inspired voice. Not even a candlestick before her. This ceremony was liturgy of a different order. If her desk were indeed an altar, it was a shrine not to God, but to words.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“But the routines at Mount Holyoke made it nearly impossible for Emily to keep her thoughts about religion private. She had to take a stand on faith and she had to do it publicly. During her first month at the seminary, Miss Lyon had asked students to declare their status. Students came forward and identified themselves in one of three ways: those who already had professed, those who were considering a hope in Christ, and those who did not feel a call. Emily was in the latter group—those without hope.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Even more than studying, listen to the sound of God around you, his mother had urged. It is “the most important of all calls.”19 Emily had not received letters from her parents about professing her faith. As they had when she was home, Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson left the subject of Christian conversion to their daughter and did not pressure her.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Edward Dickinson knew firsthand how deeply religion weighed on students’ minds. He could remember walking past doorways of student lodging in New Haven and hearing young men’s prayers. He kept letters his parents wrote—letters imploring him to take advantage of Yale’s revivals and pledge his life to Christ.# Samuel and Lucretia Dickinson counted the number of Amherst College students who had professed, rejoiced when one of their son’s friends joined the fold, and used student professions to prompt Edward’s own.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“In reporting on commencements at Amherst and Mount Holyoke, newspapers listed students who read prizewinning essays as well as the number of seniors who had professed their faith.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“If we read Dickinson’s letters looking for action in the usual sense—where she traveled, what chores she did, whom she encountered—we find some details for reconstructing her days, but not many. But if we read the letters for what the poet thought, her interior world opens.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson