"I had no Monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize – my little Force explodes – and leaves me bare and charred."
"Hope" is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I've heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
"I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you — Nobody — too?" The poem is often read as charming self-deprecation. It also reflects its creator's pleasure of being unknown, of existing outside the social machinery that requires you to be "somebody". Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) spent her last two decades in the confines of the family land in Massachusetts. She communicated with people who visited her from behind the doors or stairs and left behind almost 1,800 poems for her sister to discover. She had been offered publication many times but refused. She was, in Talanov-style vocabulary of her type, a person of passive reflection rather than lively active action. Really, she was quite close to the boundary between IEI and ILI, and an ILI typing isn't totally out of question for her.
The IEI's primary orientation is toward the inner emotional world, and in Dickinson it became the organizing principle of a life. Her poems are transcripts of various inner states — grief, anticipation, the precise phenomenology of dying ("I heard a fly buzz when I died...", a fascination linked to Ni as a function of future prediction), the feeling of time bending around a remembered moment. "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." The core temperament is a lyricist dreamer's — the melancholy aestheticized into art, the clear and pronounced taste for suffering as a subject.
But the canonical IEI portrait of an emotionally suggestible, somewhat luscious person misses her other traits. Her poems are more "compressed" that simply vague. She is leaving out the connective tissue because it is obvious to anyone paying attention. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant." The ILI accent — the cold analytical streak, the pessimistic orientation (although IEI is already quite a dubious "positivist"), the preference for inner critical examination over outward performance — sharpens the IEI emotional material into something that cuts colder.
The ILI contribution is audible throughout. Dickinson often tends to an ILI-ish near-clinical autopsy and emotional detachment. "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me." She was attracted to strong older men of outstanding intellectual or rhetorical skills, which fits the IEI's orientation toward dominant personalities, but she engaged with their ideas on her own terms and corresponded with them as an equal.
Her famous line to Higginson — "When I state myself as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me but a supposed person" — reflects a trait the IEI type is well known for: the ability to easily inhabit another role, to run oneself as a character rather than a self. Yet the very sentence, in its chilly technical exactness, in which the poet, as a logical correction, explains to the befuddled correspondent that he has been misled by a category mistake, is typical of the ILI layering. An unmixed IEI might have written it as a lament or a mystery.
Her reclusion was born, as the Project MUSE website puts it, "in reaction against a world manifesting itself as unpredictable, violent, and terrifying". It is the withdrawal of a person for whom the external social world offered less than the internal one, and for whom the US Civil War provided overwhelming confirmation that the world was, as she had long suspected, badly run.
Despite her physical seclusion, Dickinson was expressive in correspondence. This matters for the typing: she was not indifferent to people. The IEI's capacity for emotional identification meant she held her correspondents intensely, almost tenaciously, in her imagination. She sent poems with flowers, lowered treats to children from an upstairs window, maintained decades-long epistolary relationships of extraordinary depth. What she refused was the physical presence of social performance and small talk.
The herbarium she assembled as a teenager — hundreds of pressed plants, catalogued in Latin — is definitely closer to more "rational" and more classification-loving ILI than to IEI. She grew out of that particular project, but the underlying impulse to find the precise formal container for a formless experience never left her.
Dickinson was a deep introvert, while Aushra's nickname for the IEI type, Sergei Yesenin, was likely inverted to extraversion. Dickinson's deep introversion also helps explain why the ILI accent reads so strongly in her: it reinforces the shared introverted-reflective tendencies of both types and mutes the social-emotional reaching-outward that a more typical IEI would show. However, note that both poets still liked to contemplate the (largely negative) change of internal state with time and lyrical melancholy.
"My beautiful melancholy" is how the IEI profile characterizes the type's characteristic mood. Plus the lowered basket of cakes and poems for neighborhood children, the "Called Back" on the gravestone — all of this is the deliberate curation of a myth. An ILI alone would not bother that much; the myth-construction is IEI. But the execution — tight, controlled, decades-long, never breaking character — had the discipline of the other side of her. She was conscious of the image she was crafting, and she crafted it the way she did everything else: from inside, alone, on her own terms, and without explaining herself to anyone. It's no accident that Ni is described as the most "mysterious" of functions, even if the Talanov-style evolutionary explanation for this is quite unflattering (the adaptation of a weak subject to a competitive reality leads to a desire to cover one's tracks and to glamorization of it).
"To live is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else."
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