This course includes three classroom sessions and a concert ticket. It was developed as an extension of Princeton University Concerts' special event "Emily — No Prisoner Be," a semi-staged song cycle written for mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and Time for Three based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Concert date: Sunday, February 22, 2026, 3:00 pm.
Location: Richardson Auditorium, 68 Nassau Street, Alexander Hall
In a now famous letter, to Thomas Higginson, an abolitionist and writer for The Atlantic, to whom she sent some of her poems hoping he would like them (he didn’t—find them hard to understand), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote,
“If I read a book” and “it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that it is poetry. If it feel physically as I the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the way I know it is. Is there another way?”
This could be said of Emily Dickinson’s own verses. She lived in her poetry, wrote it constantly, as if it were daily respiration, inspiration. After her death, 1800 of her poems (from two lines to two pages, none titled, and all known today by their first words) were found, though she published on 10 in her lifetime. She wrote poetry, but did not flaunt herself as “Poet.”
Emily Dickinson is poet of paradoxes that can tilt into contradictions: intensely inward, yet reaching outward to thousands of readers she could not have imagined, except in imagination; intensely private, yet managing to speak expansively; virtually unknown as poet in her own time, and now known worldwide; quietly self-effacing, and declaratively self-effacing; homey and familiar, yet stunning and uncanny; madness to the point of breakdown, and rational with pointed insight; subtle sensations and bold statements, austere recognitions and hopeful surmises
Her poetry is compact and often cryptic, even about being compact and cryptic. Their brilliance, often darkly lit, comes to light with slow reading and rereading—not to solve their riddles and resolve her enigmas, but to experience them—often with a flash that can be funny or painful or both. Our meetings will explore the fine grains and the big themes, the particularities of one poem, and how several of these verses “converse” with one another, sometimes in audible repetitions of words and scenes, sometimes in a different angle, or pushing forward something elsewhere latent, posing a challenging question and making you work with it.
If you have your own editions and copies of her poems, bring these along. A pdf booklet of poems will be included. Our syllabus will include all the poems on the program plus a few more.
I Felt a Funeral
A Bee I personally knew
Because I could not stop for Death-
I reason, Earth is short-
A little Snow
I tie my Hat-I crease my Shawl
"Hope" is the thing with feathers
The Props Assist the House
There is a solitude of space
Could I but ride indefinite
So set its Sun in Thee
Tell Her
Her face was in a bed of hair
Wild Nights
His Feet are shod with Gauze
There is another sky
’Tis true-they shut me in the Cold-
If I can stop one Heart from breaking
No Prisoner Be
Dare you see a Soul / at the White Heat?
(the underlining is hers);
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
There’s a certain Slant of light
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun
