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To support the development of this site and the work of soul friendship you are invited to express your appreciation through the spiritual practice of Dana

Radiant Poem

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need  

- Emily Dickinson

Read Emily Dickinson's Complete Poetry

 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

RADIANT SONG

 Five Summer Songs on Poems of Emily Dickinson: The one that could repeat the summer day

 Author project - Emily Dickinson Emerging Artists Giclee Poster Print by Nicole De Clerck, 8x10

The Emily Dickinson Journal published twice annually by The Johns Hopkins University Press, on behalf of the Emily Dickinson International Society. The Journal publishes essays on Dickinson and reviews of other publications about her, to showcase the poet at the center of current critical practices and perspectives. To get a copy or obtain more information go to the John Hopkins website

The Emily Dickinson Museum including The Homestead and The Evergreens is part of Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts is open to the public from 1st March until 30th December each year.  For more detailed information visit

Click on graphic below

Emily Dickinson – Mo Anam Cara

  "The soul selects her own society  Then – shuts the Door –"

It amazes me that as a bookish eleven year old I found a child’s biography of Emily Dickinson in the stacks of the Berwick, Pennsylvania Public Library. The brief excerpted poems within the text that I read during the summer of 1968 galvanized my heart.  The poems, like a fierce mother cat, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me home.

I cannot rightly articulate the excitement of recognition that I experienced. Nor do I think that I fully understood the poems then. I still probably don’t fully understand them now at age fifty-two.

But for that introverted, thoughtful child, Emily Dickinson became not only a proto-soul friend, but also a psychic lifeline.

Even for a recluse there is enough known biography for Emily Dickinson to become that most beloved of 1970’s icons – the female role model – and she was my first one.  Granted, she may seem a peculiar choice for someone who emerged from adolescence as both quite social and outgoing.

But Emily Dickinson taught me several essential lessons that are now preserved in my own spiritual survival kit.

Like Dickinson I was brought up in a very religious household. Although my nascent religious rebellion was not to bloom until later in my teens, the seeds of doubt and apostasy were already sown by age eight.  In Dickinson’s life history I found a courageous woman in a much more socially rigid context than my own who declared her spiritual independence nonetheless.  She pursued the primary experience of uniting with Divine Love single-mindedly. Her poetry sparked in me an intuitive response that this was a valid way to live a spiritual life. She surrendered completely to it. To function within the context of Amherst society she chose to withdraw and became a recluse.

It is a truism that all adolescents feel like outsiders. However, I suspect that American teens in small towns with incipient radical spiritual inclinations and ‘artistic’ leanings may feel this ‘separateness’ more acutely. Or perhaps that is how I rationalize my feelings of isolation in the town where I grew up as part of a ' blow in’ family without familial or ancestral roots in the area.  Like many company men in the 1950s, my father moved the family when his company chose to move their headquarters from Brooklyn to rural Pennsylvania.  We landed in that particular small town for the sole reason that my father had a war buddy who had grown up in the town.

In Dickinson’s choice to embrace being an outsider I found the spiritual guide to shepherd me through my own confusing teens. I did not become a recluse but I did survive my sense of ‘otherness’ because of the example of her life. For that alone I am deeply grateful. In her choice of solitude I find affirmation for my own times when solitude is essential.

I am also grateful for how her poetry opened nature to me. It was in nature’s tabernacle that I began to feel the first shimmering of my own spirit beginning  to freely move.  Once a transcendentalist, always a transcendentalist, I suppose. Even though Dickinson lived in the same state and at the same time when Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, she is not associated with that particular social and literary movement. This was because she was ploughing her distinctive and parallel furrow in her own back yard.

Lastly, I am grateful that only seven of her poems were published in her lifetime. From our perspective this seems outrageous.  But it proved to me that publishers can be fallible in their choices and lack of publication is no certain critique on the quality of the product. Dickinson kept on writing regardless, leaving a legacy of nearly 1,800 poems written over many decades in neatly, hand-sewn books stored in a bedroom  trunk. That is a very valuable example to give to anyone who writes poetry or anything at all. Just keep doing the work!

When a member of a meeting dies, some Quakers write testimonies of gratitude for ‘the grace of God as lived in the life of’ the deceased member.  As I have been writing this article on my very first soul friend I have truly been moved by gratitude for the grace that played through the “Belle of Amherst” – whether in the courage of her spiritual convictions, in her poetry or even in her prize-winning bread.

I’ll conclude with a poem written some years ago, which is part of a Triptych dedicated to American women poets who have deeply contributed towards my own commitment to poetry.

Emily Dickinson Baking Bread

Miss Dickinson is ill disposed

to all but family,

butterflies, the honey bees,

sleepy in the September heat.

The brick oven, Hestia’s hearth, is

stoked. The morning dew shimmers.

She bows over the table,

kneading the household loaves.

Bran mottles her white gown.

She is punching, rolling,

pulling at the dough when

there is a pause, lifting her arm

raising it to her brow,

her eyes rise. There

is the light, the autumn slant

suspended on a spider’s gossamer,

dripping diamond drops

onto the ticking clock.

Here is the table, the flour bag,

the trails of wheat, barley and rye,

the pencil, the lexicon

opened before her like a receipt book

and the finger glides down,

down the columns, then

resting upon the precise word. She stows it

in her apron pocket. She knows it

as the moment, keeping it  just for itself.

© Bee Smith 2009

Another Soul Friend

"click on graphic."

At the beginning of this book the Irish mystic George Russell (AE) wrote:

"I do not think the East has spoken with so beautiful a voice since the Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore as in The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran, who is artist as well as poet.  I have not seen for years a book more beautiful in its thought, and when reading it I understand better than ever before what Socrates meant in the Banquet when he spoke of the beauty of thought which exercises  a deeper enchantment than the beauty of form..... I could quote from every page, and from every page I could find some beautiful and liberating thought."