Artists with Bipolar: Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all... 

(XIX, p. 19)

I have decided to start a series of postings about famous artists which had Bipolar, discussing the clear connection between artistic creativity and the disorder. As a writer of poetry, piano player and occasional visual art maker myself, this is of utmost interest to me. Also, having started looking into this topic, I am startled by the amount of Bipolar artists/writers/musicians whose style and subject I have enjoyed for a long time, without knowing the connection. My first entry of the Artists with Bipolar is the poet Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson was a Victorian writer, who lived in Amherst, MA in the United States in the mid 19th Century. Her life was a hard one: full of loneliness and misfortune. Known as a eccentric and a recluse, she mainly kept within intense family circles, never marrying and dying at a relatively early age, of kidney dysfunction. Her mother was a very depressed individual, showing hereditary roots behind the Bipolar disorder, alongside clear environmental factors that she faced during her lifetime.

Dickinson is seen as a founding figure in American Poetry history, heralding the start of various pre-modernist forms such as slant rhyme, short lines and unconventional punctuation and capitalization. She was startlingly original and unconventional in comparison to other Victorian poets. For example:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

(XVII, p. 18)

Within her poetry, she deals with subjects such as issues of death and mortality, which clearly points to depressive tendencies. However, what clearly links her work to Bipolar in particular, is the pattern of different phases in her life and writings. She is known to have had two four-year phases (from 1858-1865) of intense emotion and therefore productivity, followed by many years of moderate to low creative turn-out. During her most active phase, she developed her characteristic topics, probably most famously known in poems such as 'XV':

There's a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons,

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes.

(XV, p. 87)

and 'XXXVII':

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane; 
Demur,-- you're straightaway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
(XXXVII, p. 30)

Quotation source: Dickinson, Emily, Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 1993)