Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant

By Emily Dickinson

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” is Emily Dickinson’s eight-line poem, written around 1872, arguing that the truth should be told indirectly because people cannot take it all at once. It stayed in manuscript for more than 70 years and was first published in 1945, in the collection Bolts of Melody.

Our reading is that the poem is not a defense of evasion but a theory of kindness, and a key to Dickinson’s own way of writing. She asks for “all the truth,” and the slant is how it survives the telling.

At a Glance

Poet
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Written
About 1872
First published
Bolts of Melody (Harper and Brothers, 1945), edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham
Collected in
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (1955), as J1129, and by R. W. Franklin (1998), as F1263
Form
A single eight-line stanza in common meter
Length
8 lines
Meter
Common meter, alternating four- and three-beat lines (“tell ALL the TRUTH but TELL it SLANT”)
Era
19th-century American
Best-known lines
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”

ON THIS PAGE
Summary · About the Text · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems

Summary

The poem gives a piece of advice and then explains it. Tell the whole truth, the speaker says, but approach it at an angle, because success comes by a roundabout route. The truth is too bright for our weak capacity for delight to take head-on.

The second half offers a comparison. Just as adults calm children frightened by lightning with a gentle explanation, the truth has to dazzle us gradually. If it arrived all at once, it would blind everyone.

About the Text

We don’t print the full poem on this page because it is still under copyright in the United States. It was first published in 1945, and the copyright in Bolts of Melody was renewed in 1972, so the poem does not enter the US public domain until January 1, 2041. The authoritative text is in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1998), where it is poem 1263. The short quotations below are for commentary.

Background

Dickinson wrote the poem around 1872, when she was in her early forties and living in her family’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Like nearly all of her roughly 1,800 poems, it was never published in her lifetime. After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found the manuscripts, and Mabel Loomis Todd began editing them in the 1890s. A family feud split the papers, and many poems, this one included, stayed unpublished until Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, published them in Bolts of Melody in 1945.

Thomas H. Johnson numbered it 1129 in his 1955 edition, which restored Dickinson’s dashes and capitals, and R. W. Franklin numbered it 1263 in his 1998 edition, which dates it to about 1872. It has become one of her most quoted poems, and its first line is often used as a summary of her whole method.

Analysis and Themes

The poem makes one argument in two stages: first the rule of indirection, then the reason for it. It also practices what it preaches.

All the Truth, at an Angle

The opening line contains the whole poem’s paradox. Nothing is to be held back, since it is “all the truth,” but it must arrive at a slant. The next line says that success lies “in Circuit,” meaning by a roundabout path, and the verb “lies” carries a faint double meaning: indirection sits close to falsehood, and Dickinson keeps the word anyway. Her claim is that honest speech still has to choose its angle, and that choosing well is not deception but care.

Lightning for Children

The second half explains why with a single domestic image. When a storm frightens children, an adult does not deny the lightning but offers an “explanation kind” that makes it bearable. The truth, Dickinson says, works the same way: it must “dazzle gradually.” “Dazzle” is the exact word, since too much light does not reveal things, it overwhelms the eye. Told all at once, the truth leaves its listener seeing nothing.

A Description of Her Own Poems

The poem reads as Dickinson’s clearest statement of her method. Her poems approach death, faith, and pain sideways, through riddles, dashes, and small concrete details. She grew up in a Calvinist New England that spoke constantly of revelation and divine light, and the poem keeps that vocabulary of brightness and blindness while turning it into practical advice about how to speak honestly without doing harm.

Form and Technique

The poem is a single stanza of eight lines in common meter, the alternating four-beat and three-beat lines of the Protestant hymnbook, as in “tell ALL the TRUTH but TELL it SLANT.” The hymn rhythm gives it the sound of received wisdom, a maxim to be learned by heart.

The shorter even lines rhyme, and here Dickinson, famous for her slant rhymes, uses full ones: the second line rhymes cleanly with the fourth, and the sixth with the eighth. The odd lines add internal chimes instead, such as the rhyme inside the third line on “bright” and “Delight.” Dashes close the first line and the last, framing the poem, and the capitalized nouns, including “Truth,” “Circuit,” and “Lightning,” give its key words the weight of names.

Themes

Three ideas run through the poem’s eight lines.

Truth and honesty. The poem never recommends lying. It asks for the whole truth and cares only about how it is delivered.

Human frailty. Our “infirm Delight” is too weak to bear the truth at full strength. The poem is realistic about what people can take in, and patient with it.

Light and perception. Truth is imagined as light and lightning, able to illuminate or to blind. The difference lies in how gradually it arrives.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

What does “tell it slant” mean?

It means to tell the truth indirectly, approaching it at an angle rather than stating it bluntly. Dickinson argues that the truth is too bright to take all at once, so it must be revealed gradually, the way an adult gently explains lightning to a frightened child.

Is telling it slant a lie?

No. The poem insists on telling “all the truth,” so nothing is hidden or falsified. The slant describes how the truth is delivered, not whether it is told.

When was “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” written?

Emily Dickinson wrote it around 1872, according to R. W. Franklin’s edition of her poems. It was not published until 1945, when it appeared in Bolts of Melody, nearly 60 years after her death.

Is “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” in the public domain?

Not yet in the United States. Because it was first published in 1945 and that copyright was renewed in 1972, the poem remains protected until the end of 2040 and enters the US public domain on January 1, 2041.

What kind of poem is “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”?

It is a short lyric of eight lines in common meter, the hymn meter Dickinson used for most of her poems. It reads like a proverb, giving a rule and then a reason for it.

Glossary

A few words in the poem are worth pinning down.

  • slant (line 1): At an angle; indirectly rather than straight on.
  • Circuit (line 2): A roundabout route that goes around rather than through.
  • infirm (line 3): Weak or frail.
  • superb (line 4): Magnificent; grand enough to overwhelm.
  • dazzle (line 7): To overpower the eyes with bright light, so that one sees less rather than more.

The poem’s first line has become a motto for writers.

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola titled their creative nonfiction textbook Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2004), and it is now widely used in writing courses.

The poet John Yau took the title of his 2023 collection Tell It Slant (Omnidawn) from Dickinson’s line, giving it a second meaning as a response to anti-Asian racism.

If this poem speaks to you, these are good to read next.

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By , Editor · Last updated September 2026