Richard Sewall

Biographer of Emily Dickinson

Richard Benson Sewall, English scholar: born Albany, New York 11 February 1908; Instructor in English, Yale University 1934-40, Assistant Professor 1940-51, Associate Professor 1951-59, Professor 1959-76, Master, Ezra Stiles College 1959-70; married 1940 Mathilde Parmelee (died 1974; three sons); died Newton, Massachusetts 16 April 2003.

If a biographer's empathy can be inherited, then Richard Sewall was well placed to understand the New England context of his one great subject, the poet Emily Dickinson. For the Sewalls themselves are a New England family of historical lineage – there were family members living in Salem, Massachusetts, during the infamous witch trials of the 17th century, and Richard Sewall's own father was the 13th in a consecutive line of Congregational ministers.

Sewall himself was born in Albany, New York, and educated at Philips Exeter Academy, then Williams College, for his BA, before taking a PhD at Yale in 1933. After teaching briefly at Clark University, he joined the Yale English department faculty in 1934 and taught there for over 40 years, retiring in 1976. But this traditional background and education belied a truly individual mind, as well as a humane morality – rigorous but liberal, always questioning – which made him both a powerful and popular figure to the young.

This influence was of particular importance during the campus traumas of the late 1960s, which afflicted Yale in particular. As Master of Ezra Stiles, one of Yale's two new colleges designed by Eero Saarinen, Sewall managed to win the trust of a radicalised student body by appointing such dissident voices to the new college's fellowship as the anti-war leader and Yale chaplain William Sloan Coffin and Allard Lowenstein, the progressive Democrat who helped drive President Lyndon Johnson from office.

With the trial of the Black Panther Bobby Seale in New Haven during 1969, the threat of widespread violence on Yale's campus and in the city was very real, and temperatures were only lowered by the successful intervention of Yale's President, Kingman Brewster (later Ambassador to the Court of St James), who, influenced by Sewall and others, declared that he personally doubted the ability of Seale to receive a fair trial. This declaration made Brewster a pariah among conservatives and Yale alumni (at the time the two were largely indistinguishable) but placated the young and arguably saved the university from being burned to the ground.

As a teacher Sewall was enormously popular, but he was never a showman. It was rather the moral and human emphasis he put on literature which entranced countless Yale undergraduates. His lectures on tragedy (to several generations of Yale students) were especially appealing, and resulted in one of the only two books he wrote, The Vision of Tragedy (1959). Sewall saw tragedy as occupying a primary and primal position in human life, rather than as a set of dramatic conventions first laid down by Aristotle. For Sewall, the tragic hero so often found in the greatest works of Western literature was a resonant, archetypal character, whose bewildered quest for the meaning of his experience

recalls the original terror, harking back to a world that antedates the conception of philosophy, the consolations of the later religions, and whatever constructions the human mind has devised to persuade itself that the universe is secure.

But a far larger audience than former undergraduates will remember Sewall for his magisterial two-volume The Life of Emily Dickinson – 25 years in the making – which won the National Book Award in 1974. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson enjoyed an entirely posthumous fame, for, other than a handful of poems published anonymously, none of her work saw print until after her death.

Even then, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that she began to assume her rightful canonical status as a major American poetic voice; before then, her work was known chiefly for its eccentric punctuation and, more vulgarly, for the fact that virtually every poem she wrote can be sung to the monotonous cadence of "The Yellow Rose of Texas".

Her life attracted more interest, as she had become extraordinarily reclusive in her late twenties, confining her interactions with people thereafter to correspondence, but the resulting stereotype of Dickinson as an oddball again detracted from serious consideration of her poetry.

Thanks to the efforts of critics such as Harold Bloom, we can now see the powerful originality at work in Dickinson, and the very Modernist accent of her preoccupation with her vocation as a poet. The new seriousness with which Dickinson began to be treated was fortified by Sewall's biography, which by thoroughly researching the details of Dickinson's solitary adult life in Amherst, Massachusetts, refuted many of the more superficial perceptions of the writer. The chief effect of Sewall's labours was to demonstrate that from a very early age Dickinson saw herself as an artist, and that her self-imposed isolation was the result of her immersion in her poetry rather than its cause.

Dickinson's emotional life – the subject of wild speculation, from hints of lesbian entanglements with her sister-in-law to the presumption of a failed love affair that led to heartbreak and hermeticism – is never neglected by her biographer, but, as Sewall recognised:

The whole truth about Emily Dickinson will elude us always; she seems almost wilfully to have seen to that.

The recognition of his biography's limits was characteristic of Sewall's essential modesty, which, combined with a mild, wry sense of humour, made him such an attractive figure. Named by Yale's President in the early 1950s to head a committee on "Manners and Morals", Sewall announced:

I have never had any manners, and my morals are slipping badly. But I'll bluff it through.

Andrew Rosenheim