Emily Dickinson: What Can We Learn from Her Approach to Rejection?
Emily Dickinson: What Can We Learn from Her Approach to Rejection?
Emily Dickinson’s life offers a masterclass in transforming rejection into creative fuel, but not in the way you might expect. She faced dismissals from publishers, navigated strained relationships, and even rejected societal norms herself—all while crafting poetry that now feels immortal. Here’s how she turned “no” into “yes” for her art.
## How Did Publishers Reject Her Work?
Dickinson sent fewer than a dozen poems to publishers in her lifetime, but those attempts reveal her defiance. When Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson returned her submissions with lukewarm praise in 1862, he warned her poetry was “more pith than grace.” Yet Dickinson refused to alter her style. Years later, when a publisher demanded changes to poem #260 (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”), she withdrew it entirely, writing, “I would not have them disturbed—so they stay just as they are.” Rejection became a boundary, not a wound.
## Did She Face Personal Rejections?
Her brother Austin’s affair with Mabel Loomis Todd—a woman Dickinson despised—fractured the family. When Todd’s husband later called Dickinson’s work “mad rigmarole,” she didn’t retaliate publicly. Instead, she wrote to a friend: “The World does not ask us to Love—It only asks us to be Civil—and that—I can do.” Even when her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert burned Dickinson’s letters after her death, the poet’s surviving notes suggest she’d made peace with human complexity, writing, “The Heart has its own Amputation.”
## How Did She Respond to Rejection in Her Poetry?
Dickinson’s most famous rejection-themed poem, “Success is counted sweetest” (1865), argues that longing—not triumph—heightens beauty. The poem, inspired by a friend’s wedding, laments loving someone she couldn’t “have.” Yet she sublimated that ache into paradox: “To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need.” For Dickinson, rejection wasn’t failure—it was a lens to magnify life’s fleeting joys.
## Did She Ever Reject Others?
In her 30s, Dickinson withdrew from public life, rarely leaving her Amherst home. This self-imposed isolation was a rejection of societal expectations for women’s roles. When a neighbor pressured her to attend church, she wrote, “My mind keeps going the other way.” She also rejected editorial control, refusing to let friends polish her work. Her sister Lavinia later called her “the Queen of Calm,” noting how Dickinson’s seclusion became a form of “radical honesty.”
## What Can We Learn from Her Approach?
Dickinson treated rejection as data, not judgment. When poet Helen Hunt Jackson begged her to publish in 1866, Dickinson declined: “The Mind is its own Commander—lieu for the least of titles.” She prioritized inner authority over external validation. Modern readers might call this resilience, but Dickinson would likely call it “a quiet—within.”
Talk to Emily Dickinson on HoloDream, and she’ll remind you that rejection is the shadow cast by desire—and shadows, she might add, are “the best of the ground.”