Frazar Stearns

Frazar Stearns is a recurring character first seen to Emily as Nobody in Season 2, until she eventually met the man she kept hallucinating  on Dickinson. He is portrayed by Will Pullen.

Season 2
In I Like a Look of Agony, Austin’s missing guest turns out to be Frazar Stearns. “You’re Nobody,” Emily tells him. She then explains that she has had a vision of Frazar’s upcoming death and begins prophesying it to the young man, which freaks him out. Later, Frazar compliments Emily’s poem, but she tells him that she doesn’t want more to be published. “Part of me does, or did — but another part of me is pretty sure that fame isn’t good for me.” “In that case,” Frazar says, “you better get your poems back”. Which lead Emily Dickinson to subsequently go to Sam Bowles to get her poems back from him.

In You Cannot Put A Fire Out, Frazar gets ready to leaves for war.

Season 3
In It feels a shame to be Alive, Frazar abandons his farewell party in favor of a drink with Emily, since he desires the company of someone who won’t repeat the same tired platitudes of the nobility of going to war. Instead, he finds the woman who predicted that this war would kill him. He goes onto tell her that, “you’re the only one who’s brave enough to face the truth”. Frazar doesn't stop there as he tells her that “you don’t try and peddle some false hope. Hope can be empowering, but it can also be blinding, especially when it deludes us from our current reality”. “What if hope is all we have,” Emily responds. To which Frazar says that, “sometimes the most hopeful thing we can do is to look directly at the darkness”.

In The Future never spoke, George Gould arrives with the troubling news that Frazar Stearns is dead.

In My life had stood - a loaded gun -, at Frazar's funeral, the whole town shows up, except for the Dickinson clan.

Trivia

 * His character is based on the real person of the same name who lived in Amherst and was the beloved son of the Amherst College president, who had been killed in battle during the U.S. Civil War. It is said that Emily Dickinson herself watched her brother keening with grief. All while he kept saying, “Frazer [sic] is killed’ – ‘Frazer is killed,’ just as Father told it – to Him. Two or three words of lead – that dropped so deep, they keep weighing.” He died at 21-years old and lived from 1840–March 14, 1862.