Introduction
Emily Dickinson’s attitude toward the literary marketplace has been widely contested by critics, who portray her as both shy poetess and self-aware genius in search of literary immortality. Given the inconsistencies in Dickinson’s writings and biographical material, contradictions like these seem almost inevitable. Dickinson’s famous lines, “Publication – is the Auction/Of the Mind of Man,” cast doubt upon other aspects of her literary life, including her diligent correspondence with prominent cultural figures like Samuel Bowles, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Helen Hunt Jackson. The myriad contradictions found within Dickinson’s own words and actions are further complicated by the performative quality of Dickinson’s correspondence, in which she assumes various fictional personae based on the letter’s recipient. Yet these apparent problems have not deterred scholars from attempting to generalize about Dickinson’s attitude toward publication from autographical material. In many ways, this approach assumes a candor and single-mindedness that remains to be seen in any major intellectual figure.
Perhaps more importantly, these attempts to generalize from biographical material overlook the significance that different categories of poems held for Dickinson. In nineteenth-century literary culture, the genre of the poem remained very flexible, encompassing such diverse rhetorical modes as the epigraph, the dramatic monologue, the lyric, and the ballad. With that in mind, it becomes very difficult to describe Dickinson as maintaining a single attitude toward publication. Rather, I believe that Dickinson wrote with several different audiences in mind, some more public than others.
In this essay, I will examine Dickinson’s poems from 1861, a year in which a high volume of work was sent in letters to both family members and public literary figures. I hope that this year will function as a case study, which will yield more general conclusions about how Dickinson conceived of audience in relation to her artistic subject. Based on my findings, I will argue that, during this particular period in her life, Dickinson envisioned both literary and artistic immortality as a subject more suited to a public audience than other topics she wrote about. During this timeframe, poems expressing profound fear, doubt, or uncertainty, most often about death, were usually kept private. I believe that Dickinson envisioned the subject of immortality as well-suited to a public audience, and ontological doubt a more private subject, because, for Dickinson, immortality remained intricately linked to the public world of arts and letters. It becomes entirely plausible to read these poems as statements of intent or ambition, while others function as private meditations or epigraphs. Thus one may conceive of Dickinson as writing to numerous different audiences, which include herself, God, posterity, and those with whom she corresponded directly.
Dickinson in 1861: Her Modes of Literary Engagement
For Dickinson, 1861 was marked by a sharp rise in the production of poems, as well as an active correspondence with editor Samuel Bowles and her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson.[1] The correspondence with editor Samuel Bowles especially reflects an increasing preoccupation with the public realm of arts and letters, a subject that had never been far from her thoughts. The Dickinson family maintained a substantial library, furnished with classic and contemporary works, as well as an ongoing subscription to such periodicals as The Atlantic Monthly.[2] With that in mind, one may conclude that Dickinson remained well-aware of the literary culture of her time. The year 1861 in particular was marked by an increasing desire to participate actively in the literary culture that she had heretofore mostly observed.
The specific causes of Dickinson’s change of mind are widely contested. As Connie Anne Kirk notes, the years 1861 to 1865 are often referred to as the “Flood Years,” a time period in which most of Dickinson’s writings were produced.[3] Some critics have attributed this change in her writing habits to the onset of the Civil War, arguably the single most important event of her lifetime. Others have hypothesized that Dickinson’s change in writing habits was brought on by illness or trauma, which she describes as an unspecified “terror.”[4] Scholar Lucy Elizabeth Frank interprets this “terror” as Dickinson’s process of “internalizing” the death of famed writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose work she adored.[5] Additional explanations treat Dickinson’s change in writing habits as a manifestation of the angst associated with a love affair.[6] In short, this dramatic shift in Dickinson’s consciousness can be read in a number of ways based on existing biographical material.
Although no definitive evidence exists in favor of any of these explications, what we do know is that Dickinson’s relationship to the literary marketplace changed dramatically during this time period, as a result of all or any one of these factors. Domhall Mitchell writes in Measures of Possibility that, in terms of Dickinson’s correspondence, Dickinson sent an unusually large number of letters to Samuel Bowles (twenty-one) during the years 1861 and 1862. Given the fact that Bowles held the position of founding editor of The Springfield Republican, a prominent newspaper that featured original writing, one may plausibly describe him as the embodiment of the public world of arts and letters.[7] With that said, Mitchell also notes that there were significant gaps in her correspondence with Bowles during the years 1850 through 1861, as well as during the years after this time of heightened literary production.[8]
Based on the available evidence, I believe that one can plausibly conceptualize the year of 1861 as a time during which Dickinson’s identity as a poet crystallized. The heightened production of poems and the impulse to circulate them to prominent public figures like Bowles, and to Susan, who sometimes sent them off for publication, suggests that she began to take her role as a literary artist more seriously than she had in previous years. Indeed, 1861 marks the emergence of Dickinson’s consciousness of herself as a poet, and with that, a growing awareness of her own contribution to existing literary conversations.
Poems Sent and Retained During 1861: An Overview
During this particular year, Dickinson wrote 88 poems, a rather astonishing number when compared to her output during previous years. Indeed, during her early years (1850-1854), only one poem per year was produced, with a slightly higher number (43 poems) in 1858. Indeed, the years leading up to 1861 saw a steady increase in Dickinson’s poetic output, with 54 poems produced in 1860. When compared with previous years, however, the production of 88 poems seems remarkable. Of these 88 poems, 34 were mailed with Dickinson’s correspondence, of which recipients included Samuel Bowles, the Norcrosses (members of Dickinson’s extended family), and Susan Gilbert Dickinson (her sister-in-law). Poems which may have been mailed but lack supporting documentation have not been included in this count. With that said, I believe that this sharp increase in Dickinson’s literary production marked a watershed moment in her conceptualization of her own poetic task.[9] She began to see herself as a practicing artist, for whom literary immortality became a plausible possibility.
As Dickinson’s literary output grew, she wrote across many different categories of poems, with pieces written in such diverse rhetorical modes as the epigraph, the love poem, the elegy, and the lyric. In this section I will give an overview of the categories of poems with which Dickinson engaged, as well as my methodology with respect to these categories. With that said, many epigraphs were mailed with Dickinson’s letters. These include a total of eight pieces that editor R. W. Franklin categorizes as poems. Although this may be the case, Franklin’s impulse to include them among Dickinson’s poems raises several concerns. First, the genre of the poem and that of the letter frequently blurred into one another, and nineteenth-century writers frequently used metrical conventions and rhyme in their letters. As Dayton Haskin notes in John Donne in the Nineteenth Century, a tradition dating back to the sixteenth century posited verse as the starting point of literary dialogue, from which the ability to write the “familiar letters” that populated nineteenth century literature emerged.[10]
Moreover, it is often difficult to extricate Dickinson’s shorter poems from their epistolary context. Consider “The Juggler’s Hat her Country is,” which was mailed to Samuel Bowles during this year. The poem reads as a lyric fragment, forming a stark contract with other poems from that year, which frequently seem self-contained. “Through the straight pass of suffering, A wife at daybreak I shall be” and “Victory comes late” do not rely on missing context in the same way that epigraphs like this one do. For this reason, my survey of poems sent and retained will focus on self-contained pieces, which Dickinson most likely envisioned as individual poems rather than embellishments to a specific letter.
Along these lines, I will also treat several of Dickinson’s occasional poems as supplementing specific letters, rather than poems in themselves. I believe this to be true because these pieces are similarly inextricable from their epistolary context. Consider “Is it true, dear Sue?” Dickinson writes,
Is it true, dear Sue?
Are there two?
I shouldn’t like to come
For fear of joggling him!
If you could shut him up
In a Coffee Cup
Or tie him to a pin
Till I got in – [11]
In works like this one, Dickinson uses rhyme and meter to embellish her letters, a practice that remained commonplace among such nineteenth century writers as John Keats, Lydia Sigourney, and Margaret Fuller. The fact that this poem appears with what Franklin terms “a family note” and “explanation that Toby was a cat” further suggests that the letter itself was the primary text, verse being merely an ornament.[12] Moreover, these occasional poems were rarely retained, which suggests that they may be plausibly read as disposable verse composed for a specific moment in time. These occasional poems comprise an additional three of the poems sent with correspondence during 1861.
The remaining poems sent during this period engage more ambitious subjects, often death, immortality, marriage, or, most often, a combination of the three. These poems comprise fifteen of the works sent during 1861: “Through the straight pass of suffering,” “‘Morning means ‘milking’ to the farmer,” “Tis Anguish grander than Delight,” “Title divine – is mine!”, “Victory comes late,” “Jesus! thy Crucifix,” “”I taste a liquor never brewed,” “A feather from the whippowil,” “Some Keep the Sabbath going to Church,” “What I shall do – it whimpers so,” “I’ve nothing else to bring, you know,” “The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea,” “I came to Buy a Smile Today,” “Just so – Christ – raps -,” and “It can’t be summer.” The subject of these poems forms a stark contrast with the numerous poems expressing profound ontological doubt. Most these poems were copied into the fascicles and never sent, suggesting that Dickinson viewed this subject as better suited to private meditation, rather than a public audience. I believe this true because Dickinson envisioned immortality and the public world of arts and letter as intricately linked. In the subsequent sections of my paper, I will examine the significance that immortality held for Dickinson as an artistic subject in 1861, as well as the role each of the recipients of these poems played in her actualization of her poetic identity.
Dickinson and Immortality During the “Flood Period”
At the time that this group of poems was written, Dickinson became increasingly preoccupied with the concept of immortality. In “Emily Dickinson: Reclusion Against Itself,” Shira Wolosky argues that Dickinson remained particularly interested in the location of immortality and divine values. Wolosky writes, “What infuriates, terrifies, and frustrates her is the lack of stability and security, justice, and redemptive love within the world she knows.”[13] Throughout the poems that Dickinson kept for herself during 1861, and that were sent to no one, the reader sees these myriad doubts unfold and magnify. Within the poems sent to others, however, one observes Dickinson creating a persona of bravery, certitude, and assurance. In my view, Dickinson negotiates private meditation with a persona of greater self-assurance, in both her spiritual life and her literary endeavors.
Consider “A wife at daybreak I shall be,” which, as R. W. Franklin notes, was found with an abandoned letter of Dickinson’s,
I fumble at my Childhood’s prayer –
Soon to be a Child – no more –
The Vision flutters in the door –
Master – I’ve seen the face before – [14]
Like many Dickinson poems, this piece could plausibly be read as addressing both an earthly and a spiritual marriage. Although often categorized as a “bride poem,” “A wife at daybreak I shall be” has been read by Beth Maclay Doriani as addressing a divine figure, as “Master” appears in Dickinson’s fair copies as “Savior.”[15] Indeed, given the religious rhetoric of the poem, this seem like a more plausible reading than one inferring conventional marriage. Given the religious rhetoric of the poem, in which the husband appears as “Vision,” the poem seems to invoke marriage as a metaphor for a spiritual union or commitment. Furthermore, Doriani portrays this spiritual connection as a source of inspiration for Dickinson’s poetry. She writes, “the divine Other is master and owner of the poet’s earthly and heavenly life, the poet bearing his name as she speaks his poetry.”[16] In many ways, this reading is useful for understanding Dickinson’s relationship to immortality as an artistic subject. She writes earlier in the piece that “My Future climbs the stair,” suggesting a connection between immortality and marriage, whether conventional, spiritual, or artistic. Just as the conventional wife bears the name and children of her husband, gaining eternity through lineage, Dickinson envisioned the poet as establishing eternity through her commitment to poetic creation, which would outlast her own life in much the same way that posterity in a traditional marriage would.
In poems like this one, one senses a great deal of certitude in the promises of this heavenly and artistic union. This certainty when faced with mortality remains a common theme within the poems sent during 1861. She writes in “Throughout the straight pass of suffering,” sent to Samuel Bowles, “Their faith, the everlasting troth,/Their expectation sure/The needle to the North degree,/Wades so, through Polar air.”[17] Although directly addressing biblical stories of martyrs, Dickinson establishes a connection between their certainty of spiritual immortality and literary or artistic immortality in the letter included with the poem. She writes to Samuel Bowles, “I fixed it in the verse – for you to read – when your thought wavers – for such a foot as mine -“[18] Here Dickinson portrays speech, and even prose, as ephemeral, whereas poetry remains “fixed” for future reading and interpretation.
Indeed, other poems, such “‘Tis Anguish grander than Delight,” “Victory comes late,” “I taste a liquor never brewed,” and “A feather from the whippowil” express a similar conviction that immortality in literature remains an unquestionable part of the natural order of things. She writes in “A feather from the whippowil that “Whose Emerald Nest the Ages spin/Of mellow – murmuring thread -/ Whose Beryl Egg, what School Boys hunt/In “Recess” Overhead!” Given the narrative structure of the poem, which gradually builds from the smallest feather to a statement of immortality, one could plausibly read the poem as self-reflexive, forging a connection between the “Emerald Nest of the Ages” and language itself. One sees a similar rhetorical gesture in “I taste a liquor never brewed” and “‘Tis Anguish grander than Delight,” in effect portraying this connection between immortality and artistic life as an integral part of how Dickinson saw the world around her.
In many ways, these poems form a stark contrast with other pieces retained by Dickinson during the same year. One can infer from this contrast that Dickinson’s interest in immortality, and her certainty in the promises of art and religion, remained a part of her writerly persona. Indeed, this type of writerly persona remained relatively commonplace in Dickinson’s time. A similar connection surfaces in the poetry of Keats, Swinburne, and Coleridge, much of which Dickinson would have been aware of through her extensive reading in contemporary literature. Argha Banjeree writes in “Female Voices in Keats’s Poetry” that “Keats intended to assert his own poetic identity and establish himself as an immortal poetic soul.”[19] This seems to have been a commonplace desire among nineteenth-century poets. Indeed, John Muirhead makes a similar statement about Coleridge, suggesting that the link between artistic practice and immortality was part of his most fundamental worldview.[20] As T. Earle Welby notes, Swinburne, too, was influenced by classical poems celebrating artistic immortality.[21] These various critical perspectives on nineteenth-century poetry are useful for understanding the context in which Dickinson constructed her literary persona. As she wrote for a more public audience than only herself, she made a concerted effort to situate herself within the literary discourses of the time period. While Dickinson’s approach remained somewhat subversive, as she situated herself within a primarily male tradition, one must understand that there was a clear precedent for constructing this type of writerly persona. For a writer seeking to perform the role of literary artist, Keats, Swinburne, and Coleridge remained among the most prominent models for this type of endeavor.
In the next section of my paper, I will examine the poems that Dickinson retained during 1861, which suggest that other artistic subjects were less suited to a public audience and were thus reserved for private meditation. I believe this to be significant because one may infer that Dickinson actively constructed a literary persona through her selection of poems sent to more public audiences.
Dickinson, Mortality, and Private Meditation in 1861
In “With the in the desert,” a poem copied into the fascicles but never mailed to anyone, Dickinson writes,
With thee in the Desert –
With thee in the thirst –
With thee in the Tamarind wood –
A Leopard breathes – at last![22]
Here death appears at the end of the poem as a leopard, hidden in the brush of the “Tamarind wood,” waiting to pounce. For Dickinson, God’s presence throughout the “Desert,” its “thirst,” and its various trials does not exempt the speaker of the poem from death. In many ways, this poem, and fear expressed about death, form a sharp contrast with the poems mailed to Samuel Bowles, the Norcrosses, and Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Rather than expressing certainty in the natural order of things, Dickinson expresses fear that the promises of art and religion will not be fulfilled at all. This motif recurs throughout such poems as “I’ll tell you how the sun rose,” in which the “flocks” of faithful worshippers are “led away” at sunset, and “I’ve heard an organ talk sometimes,” in which the speaker “holds her breath” in a “Cathedral Aisle” before “rising up” in a way that deceased person cannot.[23]
In many ways, the sentiment expressed in these poems—that given the lack of certainly of eternal life, death is to be feared—remains commonplace among poems copied into the fascicles that are never mailed during the period in Dickinson’s life. Dickinson’s choices in this regard suggest that fear or trepidation at the prospect of death proved to be a subject more suited to private meditation than to a public audience. When examining the climate in which Dickinson wrote, this attitude seems all the more plausible. Among female poets of the period, elegies were often written for children or loved ones, but one’s own mortality remained a fairly unconventional subject. In Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Danger,” the speaker expressed fear at the uncertain timing of his own death, “the pebble for the fatal sling” could hide beneath any “daisy’s disk,” yet this serves merely as warning that one should not die without access to immortality through religious devotion.[24] The fact that Dickinson expresses fear at death and does not use religion to qualify it remains highly subversive, even transgressive, given the time period in which she wrote.
Moreover, nineteenth-century print culture is filled with depictions of private meditation, ultimately instructing readers as to the proper subjects for private thought as opposed to public expression. Given Dickinson’s active reading in the literature of her time period, these materials undoubtedly influenced her thinking about poetry. As Martin Clark argues in Music and Theology, nineteenth-century Americans perceived texts as “private” and others as “public.” He writes that during the 1860s, certain devotional texts were intended for private meditation, while others were reserved for public worship.[25] During Dickinson’s time, the boundaries between religious texts and literary ones frequently blurred. This belief that certain texts and artistic subjects were suited to private audience remained visible across literary genres, suggesting that Dickinson’s presentation of the fear of death as “private subject” proved somewhat typical of the historical moment she inhabited. As W. R. Johnson argues in The Idea of Lyric, “meditative verse” was conceived of as one of many lyric modes, all of which were suited to different audiences.[26]
Approached with these ideas in mind, it seems plausible that Dickinson conceived of poems like “The skies can’t keep their secret!”, “Poor little heart!”, and “I shall know why when time is over” in a separate category when compared to poems that express greater certainty with respect to immortality. In the subsequent section of my paper, I will discuss the way in which Dickinson conceived of audience in relation to her correspondence. I believed that she envisioned certain people as inhabiting a more public realm than others, and these beliefs ultimately determined which poems were sent with letters to that individual.
Dickinson’s Correspondence with Samuel Bowles in 1861
Dickinson corresponded with Samuel Bowles for nearly 20 years, with 1861 being marked by an especially prolific epistolary output. Domhnall Mitchell notes in Measures of Possibility that during some years, particularly between 1863 and 1870, no letters were sent to Bowles at all.[27] During the time that Dickinson corresponded most actively with Bowles, she perceived him as a more public figure than other individuals to whom she wrote, including Susan Gilbert Dickinson and the Norcross sisters. Indeed, Mitchell describes her correspondence with Susan as being marked by greater candor than her letters to Bowles.[28] This point of view recurs widely throughout Dickinson criticism, most notably in Marietta Mesmer’s A Vice of Voices, which describes her letters as performative and highly attuned to the power structures in place between herself and her epistolary audience.[29] Mesmer’s observations are useful for understanding the differences between tone, content, and voice in the letters that Dickinson sent to Bowles, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and others. The fact that Dickinson was often more judicious with respect to the content of her letters to Bowles suggests that she remained well aware of his connection to a more public realm of arts and letters. Moreover, Dickinson perceived the content of each letter and enclosure as potentially public.
Consider the following letter, which was sent to Samuel Bowles and his wife in 1861. Dickinson writes,
Even the ‘lilies of the field’ have their dignities. Why did you bind it in green and gold? The immortal colors. I take it for an emblem. I never read before what Mr. Parker wrote. I heard that he was ‘poison.’ Then I like poison very well.[30]
Here one observes Dickinson assuming a more literary persona than she does in letters to other recipients. Given her use of lyrical prose, metaphor, and overtly poetic diction (present in such phrases as “‘lilies of the field’ have their dignities,” and her discussion of the colors of the book as “an emblem”). Paired with the absence of the candor and disclosure that one finds in letters to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, one may plausibly read such letters as overtly conscious of Bowles’s connection to a public literary sphere. Dickinson not only withholds personal emotion, but constructs and performs a more “literary” identity than one sees in letters to other recipients.
For example, she writes to Susan Gilbert Dickinson in 1861,
Dear Sue –
Your praise is good – to me – because I know it knows – and suppose – it means –
Could I make you and Austin – proud – sometime – a great way off – ‘twould give me taller feet –[31]
The modesty and insecurity expressed in this letter forms a stark contrast with the tone and content of letters to Bowles. This difference in tone and content suggests that Emily Dickinson viewed Susan Gilbert Dickinson as a more “private” person than someone like Bowles. Indeed, the few poems that express fear or trepidation at the prospect of death were mailed to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, rather than Samuel Bowles. These poems, which include “Musicians wrestling everywhere” and “You love me – you are sure,” describe “vanished Dames – and Men” whose fate the speaker will only “ascertain” upon her own death.[32] Given the uncertainty expressed in these lines, one observes the difference between these works and poems like “Title divine – is mine!”, which expresses certainty of immortality as a result of the speaker’s marriage with God (she is “Wife – without the Sign!).[33] For Dickinson, the two conflicting attitudes toward death were suited to different audiences, one more public than the other.
While one might argue that Susan Gilbert Dickinson was a “public” person to her sister-in-law, since she occasionally sent selections of Dickinson’s poetry for possible publication, this assumption remains somewhat debatable. Critic Martha Nell Smith has argued that Dickinson “devised her own method of publication by sending poems out in letters,” and this seems a much more accurate statement of Dickinson’s attitude toward publication.[34] In many ways, Dickinson seemed to care a great deal more about the audience that a poem or letter reached than the medium in which it reached that audience. Along these lines, nineteenth-century writers in many genres shared this attitude. Publication did not necessarily constitute a more legitimate or public means of dissemination than other formats of writing, which were not mass produced. In her article, “Really Indigenous Productions,” Mary Loeffelholz argues that the unpublished manuscript poet proved to be a common figure in nineteenth-century literary culture. She writes that “Public nineteenth-century print culture…provided Dickinson with templates for the unpublished manuscript poet.”[35] Thus the nature of one’s audience, rather than the form of dissemination, was what constituted a contribution to public literary culture.
Dickinson’s forms of literary dissemination sometimes overlapped, yet this blurring of boundaries rarely changed the audience for whom the poems were intended. As noted in R. W. Franklin’s Variorum edition of Dickinson’s poems, many of the pieces Dickinson sent to others were also retained in the fascicles. While one might argue that Dickinson believed the same poems to function as both public and private expressions, I do not believe this to be the case. Given the volume of poems expressing uncertainty that were retained within the fascicles and never mailed, and the high number of poems about immortality that were sent to others, one may plausibly read them as being written for different audiences. Moreover, numerous scholars have argued that the fascicles do not constitute a method of publication, but rather serve as a means to organize and catalogue poems, epigraphs, and musings that Dickinson valued. By thinking of the fascicles in such a way, one may plausibly see the ways that these two composition processes could overlap and intersect. If Dickinson wished to send a poem to more than one recipient, which she often did, that poem could be found in pristine form in the fascicles, saving her the labor of committing her verse to memory, or relying on recipients to save her work.
Approached with these ideas in mind, one may read Dickinson’s correspondence with Bowles as a contribution to the public realm of arts and letters, as well as a potential facet of her own future legacy as a poet. Given Dickinson’s judicious approach to what she included in these letters, I believe that Dickinson remained conscious of the high stakes of this correspondence, which are described and enacted in the poems that accompanied many of these letters.
Conclusion
In short, scholars have heretofore attempted to use autobiographical material to generalize about Emily Dickinson’s attitude toward publication. Given the myriad contradictions within Dickinson’s own words and actions, the performative quality of many of her letters, and the many different categories of poems that she wrote, I believe that it is more productive to conceive of Dickinson’s audience in relation to her artistic subject. Because Dickinson sent poems dealing with immortality to more public literary figures, keeping poems about death and uncertainty for herself, I believe that it is entirely plausible that Dickinson conceived of her poems in various categories, some suited to a more public audience than others.
In many ways, Dickinson’s belief that the subject of immortality proved more suited to a public audience than other literary subjects may be symptomatic of the time period in which she wrote. Keats, Coleridge, and Swinburne all envisioned poetry as a means by which to construct a literary persona, one which had access to greater immortality than one’s everyday self. With that in mind, I believe that Dickinson’s more public literary exchanges took into account the literary discourses of the time period. She strived to construct a writerly persona, in which she exhibited greater literary and spiritual self-assurance than one observes in her more private literary meditations.
Given these findings, I believe that several questions could be taken up by future researchers in the field. Because I have endeavored to present a concise snapshot of Dickinson’s poetic categories at a single point in time, this essay does not examine the ways in which Dickinson’s poetic categories changed over time. The fact that Dickinson’s style changed later in her literary career, becoming more fragmentary, suggests that it is entirely possible that her beliefs about which poems constitute a given category changed over the course of her career. Additionally, I believe that her assessment of which poems were suited to a more public audience evolved as the recipients of her letters changed. Dickinson’s choices with respect to her letters remained largely performative, and could be described as custom made to the letter’s recipient. As new literary exchanges emerged, such as her later correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, it is entirely likely that her assessment of what constitutes a “public” poem changed as well.
Lastly, I believe that this paper opens up several questions about the material conditions in which Dickinson composed poetry and the significance that these held for her. Because the poems that Dickinson kept for herself without sending were frequently copied within fascicles, one might argue that Dickinson conceived of the fascicles as private meditations, whereas poems mailed in letters were, in a sense, published. Because I have strived to present a comprehensive argument about Dickinson’s correspondence, my essay proves somewhat limited in its treatment of the fascicles. Nonetheless, I believe that my findings raise numerous questions about the significance that Dickinson’s fascicles held for her composition process, as they have mainly been treated as a kind of publication.
Regardless of whether this is the case, thinking of Dickinson’s poems in various categories offers an alternative framework to previous (and more autobiographical) treatments of her publication practices. This approach ultimately recognizes the genre of the poem as flexible and diverse in the eyes of nineteenth-century writers like Dickinson.
Appendix: A Breakdown of Dickinson’s 1861 Poetic Categories
Poems Expressing Confidence in the Promises of Art and Religion
185 – A wife at daybreak I shall be (^)
187 – Through the straight pass of suffering (*) (+)
191 – “Morning” means “milking to the farmer (+)
192 – ‘Tis Anguish grander than Delight (+)
194 – Title divine is mine! (*) (+)
195 – Victory comes late (*)
197 – Jesus! thy crucifix (*)
198 – Teach Him – when He makes the names – (^)
205 – Come slowly – Eden!
207 – I taste a liquor never brewed (+)
208 – A feather from the whippowil (*)
217 – The murmur of a bee (+)
222 – Dying! Dying in the night! (+)
224 – An awful tempest mashed the air
227 – Two swimmers wrestled on the spar (*)
230 – For this – accepted breath (*)
236 – Some keep the Sabbath going to church
237 – What I shall do – it whimpers so (*)
253 – I’ve nothing else to bring, you know (*)
255 – The drop that wrestles in the sea (*)
263 – Just so Jesus raps (+)
265 – It can’t be “summer”! (^)
266 – What would I give to see his face?
270 – I shall keep singing!
Poems Expressing Profound Fear and Doubt
199 – Tho’ I get home how late – how late
200 – The rose did caper on her cheek
201 – With thee in the desert
204 – I’ll tell you how the sun rose
209 – I lost a world the other day!
210 – If I shouldn’t be alive
211 – I’ve heard an organ talk sometimes
213 – The skies can’t keep their secret!
214 – Poor little heart!
215 – I shall know when time is over
216 – On this storm the Rainbow rose –
218 – You love me – are you sure (+)
220 – It’s such a little thing to weep
221 – He was weak, and I was strong then
229 – Musicians wrestling everywhere! (+)
231 – We dont cry – Tim and I
232 – He forgot and I remembered
234 – I should not dare to leave my friend
235 – The flower must not blame the bee
238 – How many times these low feet staggered
239 – Make me a picture of the sun
240 – Bound a trouble
241 – What is “Paradise”
242 – It is easy to work when the soul is at play
243 – That after horror – that ’twas us
245 – God permits industrious angels
246 – The sun just touched the morning
247 – The lamp burns sure within
248 – One life of so much consequence!
249 – You’re right – “the way is narrow”
250 – The court is far away
251 – If he dissolve – then there is nothing more
252 – I think just how my shape will rise
257 – I’ve known heaven like a tent
259 – A clock stopped
260 – I’m nobody! Who are you?
261 – I held a jewel in my fingers
262 – Ah, moon and star!
264 – Forever at his side to walk
Epigraphs
184 – If it had no pencil (*)
186 – A juggler’s hat her country is (*)
188 – Could I then – shut the door (+)
190 – No rose, yet felt myself a’bloom (^)
193 – Speech is a prank of parliament (*) (^)
196 – I’ll send the feather from my hat! (*)
202 – Faith is a fine invention (*)
203 – The thought beneath so slight a film
206 – Least rivers docile to some sea
223 – Morning is the place for dew
226 – I stole them from a Bee (*)
228 – My eye is fuller than my vase
233 – A slash of blue! A sweep of gray! (+)
Occasional Poems
189 – Is it true, dear Sue? (+)
271 – Over the fence
Misc. Poems
212 – A transport one cannot contain (portrays religion as a spectacle)
219 – My river runs to thee (uses the natural world as a metaphor for love) (^)
225 – I’m “wife” – I’ve finished this (poem critiques conventional marriage)
244 – We – bee and I – live by the quaffing (poem invokes nature imagery to discuss virtue) (^)
254 – A mien to move a queen
256 – The robin’s my criterion for tune (regional poem)
258 – I came to buy a smile today (critique of conventional marriage) (^)
269 – Wild nights – Wild nights! (love poem)
Note: Poems marked with an asterisk (*) were sent to Samuel Bowles. Poems marked with a plus sign (+) were sent to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Poems marked with carrot (^) were mailed to another of Dickinson’s acquaintances.
[1] Connie Ann Kirk. Emily Dickinson: A Biography (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 77.
[2] Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz. A Companion to Emily Dickinson (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), 151.
[3] Connie Ann Kirk. Emily Dickinson: A Biography (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 77.
[4] Jane Donahue Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie. Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters: Critical Essays (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 55.
[5] Lucy Elizabeth Frank. Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Writing and Culture (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 117.
[6] Connie Ann Kirk. Emily Dickinson: A Biography (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 77.
[7] Harry Houston Peckham. Josiah Gilbert Holland in Relation to His Times (New York: Kessinger Publishing, 2006), 34.
[8] Domhall Mitchell. Measures of Possibility (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 101-105.
[9] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[10] Dayton Haskin. John Donne in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91.
[11] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[12] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[13] Shira Wolosky. “Emily Dickinson: Reclusion Against Itself.” Common Knowledge; Fall 2006, Vol. 12, Issue 3, 447.
[14] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[15] Beth Maclay Doriani. Emily Dickinson: Daughter of Prophecy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 78.
[16] Ibid, 78.
[17] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[18] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[19] Argha Banjeree. Female Voices in Keats’s Poetry (New York: Atlantic Publishers, 2002), 50-51.
[20] John H. Muirhead. Coleridge as Philosopher (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), 223.
[21] T. Earle Welby. A Study of Swinburne (New York: Kessinger Publishing, 2005), 87.
[22] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[23] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[24] Eric Haralson and John Hollander. Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1998), 233.
[25] Martin Clarke. Music and Theology (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 63.
[26] W. R. Johnson. The Idea of Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 1.
[27] Domhnall Mitchell. Measures of Possibility (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 101.
[28] Ibid, 56.
[29] Marietta Mesmer. A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
[30] The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Mabel Loomis Todd (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1906), 194.
[31] Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), 162-163.
[32] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[33] Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).
[34] Martha Nell Smith. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 16.
[35] Mary Loeffelholz. “Really Indigenous Productions.” A Companion to Emily Dickinson. Eds. Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), 197.