Emily Dickinson and Hans Christian Andersen: Complementing Voices

by Shannon Stockwell, edited and updated by Micki Demby Kleinman

Emily Dickinson’s poems provide the lyrics in Portland Stage’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, which places these two writers in an intriguing dialogue. Dickinson and Andersen were contemporaries of the 1800s living continents apart, in Massachusetts and Denmark, respectively. Andersen and Dickinson’s public personas were quite dissimilar, but the two shared many fears, concerns, and struggles in their personal and literary lives.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, the daughter of a well-known politician and lawyer. Dickinson’s writing benefited from her education in classical literature, mathematics, and history, as well as from her admiration for poets like John Keats. Dickinson’s work is distinguished by its concise language, striking imagery, and emotion, which oscillates between wit, joy, and mourning. Dickinson’s writing was distinct from the wordy style widely used in the Romantic style of her time.

While Dickinson and Andersen are both wellknown writers today, only one achieved fame during their lifetimes. Andersen seized every available opportunity to get his work published or give public readings. In contrast, Dickinson crafted nearly 1,800 poems but chose to publish only ten in her lifetime, which received little attention. She formed friendships with several editors and continued to write prolifically, yet avoided fame and even common social interactions. Andersen was known to travel to foreign countries to meet other writers. Dickinson, on the other hand, spent only one year away from Amherst to study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, merely one town over. Dickinson’s reluctance to leave home grew stronger with time, and by her mid-forties she had stopped leaving the house entirely, which was attributed in part to her iritis (a condition which makes it painful to see) and in part to her growing anxiety and withdrawing tendencies. Dickinson resided in her family home for the duration of her adulthood until age 55, at which point she died of severe hypertension. Many of her friends and family members died in the years preceding her death, which impacted Dickinson and her health. Dickinson experienced “nervous prostrations,” had a hard time breathing, and was confined to her bed for seven months before her death.

Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886; the first major publication of her work came posthumously in 1890 and the entirety of her work was not published until 1955. Although Dickinson did not pursue publication during her lifetime, the discovery of her work and its striking quantity and depth compelled her friends to seek publication. Until the mid-20th century she was not widely acknowledged as a major American poet; yet today, she is published in numerous poetry anthologies, is the subject of several plays, and is the source material for over 1,600 adapted songs.

Dickinson scholars remain intrigued by the beauty, sympathy, and originality of her elegant lines, and by the mysterious woman who found such inspiration, and such ability to inspire, within the confines of her Amherst home.

The general depiction of Emily Dickinson’s life is that of distinct loneliness. This was a quality that she and Andersen shared. Neither of them married; Dickinson is not known to have had any romantic relations, and Andersen’s romantic endeavors were consistently unsuccessful. The sexual orientation of both writers has been the subject of scholarly debate, but their feelings of isolation speak clearly through both their works and the many letters they each left behind. Although both writers were deeply imaginative, creating strong images and vivid descriptions, there is an undercurrent of sorrow that pervades their work. A sympathy for the beauty and the hardships of the world—perhaps inspired by the inner struggles they shared, living continents apart at the same time—helps the two voices complement each other in Portland Stage’s The Snow Queen.