The Problem of the Private Poet

According to the advance agents, a historic event occurred Althis spring in the annals of American literature, and we are the richer by over six hundred more poems by “Emily.” Nearly everyone who writes about her plunges at once to cozy first-name calling with this poet who did not enjoy such liberties when she was alive and could prevent them. Millicent Todd Bingham, the editor of this new collection and the author of a volume explaining why it was not published fifty years ago,’ is no exception. She also goes on the once fashionable assumption that Miss Dickinson “has always been shrouded in mystery,” just as though George Whicher had not published seven years ago the biography which places her career so lucidly against its local and intellectual backgrounds. To be sure, Mrs. Bingham no longer engages in that favorite guessing-game of the twenties, “Who was Emily Dickinson’s lover?” But the ground of extraneous interest has now shifted to the poet’s brother and sister and sister-in-law, and the breathless drama builds around a law suit brought by Lavinia Dickinson against Mrs. Bingham’s mother a decade after the poet’s death. This suit involved a strip of land willed by Austin Dickinson to Mrs. Todd, and its one importance to literary history is that it broke off all plans which that first editor of Miss Dickinson’s poems had had for carrying that work further.

But Mrs. Bingham could not leave it at that. She apparently had to avenge her mother’s memory with a detailed account of Vinnie’s virulence (her “mouth was perfectly hideous and full of false teeth”), and of the violent tensions that existed between this old maid and the Dickinsons in “the other house.” Mrs. Bingham’s narrative has been so successful as to inflame Bernard DeVoto’s imagination with the notion that this is “incomparably the best book ever written about Emily.” And he has pushed the present flurry to its limit by declaiming that “they were all burning . . . they were all damned . . . Emily Dickinson was the supreme poet of hate.” That climactic statement can, of course, be corrected by comparing it with nearly every line and implication of Miss Dickinson’s verse, but not all readers of “The Easy Chair” will go that far.