Dickinson's Misery (23 page)

one of the most difficult problems of the editor has been the separation of prose from poetry. This may come as a surprise to some readers. The only surviving prose Emily Dickinson wrote occurs in her letters, and, in their published form, the poetry in them is always neatly set off from the prose. In her manuscripts, however, things are not so simple. She would often spread out her poetry on the page as if it were prose and even, at times, indent her prose as poetry…. Assuming that what Emily meant as poetry must be taken out of the letters, how does one go about it? Should one only print variants of lines which she has used somewhere else in her poems? Should one set up a standard for indentation, rhyme, or meter? Or should one merely do again what Mrs. Todd tried to do and divide the poetry from the prose by guessing the poet's intentions?
¹⁴

Pointing out that “Johnson seems to have chosen this last solution,” Spicer concludes instead that “the reason for the difficulty of drawing a line between the poetry and prose in Emily Dickinson's letters may be that she did not wish such a line to be drawn. If large portions of her correspondence are considered not as mere letters—and, indeed, they seldom communicate information, or have much to do with the person to whom they were written—but as experiments in a heightened prose combined with poetry, a new approach to both her letters and her poetry opens up” (140). Since “John L. Spicer” was otherwise known as the avant-garde California poet Jack Spicer, his suggestion that Dickinson's writing be read as experimental prose-poetry was a way of making Dickinson avant-garde, of recasting old manuscripts as modern literature.

As we have seen, as novel as Spicer's suggestion was (and, as we shall
see, prescient of contemporary approaches such as Susan Howe's and Marta Werner's), he followed in what was already an established tradition. If Todd and Higginson, in the 1890s, drew a line between poetry and prose in order to make Dickinson's poetry into late Victorian literature and her letters into the story of the Victorian Poetess, and Susan Gilbert Dickinson's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published, in 1914, the verse Dickinson sent to her mother as a series of Imagist poems, and Johnson, in 1955, separated poetry and prose according to a New Critical idea of the poem as divorced from its maker, then Spicer's idea of Dickinson's letters “as experiments in a heightened prose” made Dickinson into the precursor of
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poetry, a position occupied by Spicer himself. Yet Dickinson's private letter took several nineteenth-century literary genres in and spit them out before the history of her publication and reception began. The difference between “the only poets” and “
prose
” in that letter is not a difference in genre but a difference between us and everyone else, between personal and personified address.

As I began by suggesting, a difference in address can become a difference in genre as the public transmission of a text makes it so, but that historical process does not mean that the writer originally intended that form of address to make such a difference. Many of the debates in recent Dickinson scholarship have taken place over the question of whether Dickinson intended to write poems or letters, or letter-poems, or poem-letters. When, in 1995, Ellen Hart followed in Spicer's wake by suggesting that “the relationship between poetry and prose is so complex in Dickinson's writing that lineating poetry but not prose [in print] sets up artificial genre distinctions,” Domhnall Mitchell responded in 1998 by measuring various lines of “prose” and “poetry” in the manuscripts in tenths of centimeters, concluding that “contrary to Hart's view … there does seem to be
some
visual indication of a generic shift” in some letters.
¹⁵

If Mitchell went to an extreme to prove that the difference in genre that Hart claimed was “artificial”
might
be inherent after all (and thus, ultimately, might justify Franklin's editorial procedure in the 1998
Poems
) that may be because what is at stake in such fine distinctions is not the existence of Dickinson's writing as either poetic or epistolary but the existence of literary criticism. The reason that the distinction between genres seems an important point of debate for literary critics is that once the genre of a text is established, then, as we saw in the last chapter on lyric reading, protocols of interpretation will follow. In other words, what is at stake in establishing the genre of Dickinson's writing is nothing less than its literary afterlife. Even Hart and Martha Nell Smith, whose work on the Dickinson Electronic Archives and in
Open Me Carefully
seeks to deconstruct “genre distinctions as the dominant way of organizing Dickinson's writings” by
posting those writings on the Web as various “Correspondences” and by making a volume that does not distinguish between poems and letters, suggest that “Dickinson's blending of poetry with prose, making poems of letters and letters of poems, [was] a deliberate artistic strategy.”
¹⁶

But to motivate generic confusion by attributing it to an “artistic strategy” is to emphasize generic distinctions once again, and especially to emphasize Dickinson's authority as a poet. As I have suggested in the previous chapters, that authority is an effect of lyric reading, or of the sort of interpretation Dickinson's early letter to Susan is so anxious not to attract. Dickinson's early letter is careful not to turn her reader into a personification rather than a person, yet that is exactly the change that a history of lyric reading has worked on Dickinson. Rather than try to decide whether Dickinson wrote poems or letters, or letters as poems, or poems in letters, I want to focus on the figures of address in her writing, on how and why and where Dickinson invokes “you.” Rather than measure the length of her lines or isolate metrical passages or concentrate on texts in the fascicles not included (as far as we know) in letters, we might want to notice how Dickinson's figures of address tend to insist that we not make about her writing the very generic decisions we have made.

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YRIC
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EDIA

We have already noticed that in his preface to the first publication of Dickinson's poems in 1890, Higginson began by warning his readers that “the verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called ‘the Poetry of the Portfolio,'—something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind.” Dickinson herself could not be “persuaded to print,” Higginson continued, because although the daughter of “the leading lawyer of Amherst,” she “habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends … she was as invisible to the world as if she had dwelt in a nunnery.” The Dickinson that Higginson thus introduced is “emphatically,” “absolutely,” “solely” private, a creature of privilege (one of her own favorite words), a law unto herself. Modern readers have often complained of Higginson's apologetic presentation of the poet whose fame would so far outstrip his own, and many have sought to qualify his notion of Dickinson's isolation. Higginson's placement of Dickinson's audience has gone largely unchallenged, however, and it is worth asking why we have been so content to stay in the position he bequeathed to us. What his introduction made sure of was that those first readers of the poems in “print” knew that what they were being allowed to read was
not intended to be read by
them
. As we have seen, the response in the 1890s was immediate and popular interest: Dickinson's
Poems
became a sensation, a bestseller, a “fad.”
¹⁷
If the notion of a published privacy—a privacy that circulates—has proven immensely attractive ever since, perhaps this is not because of the way we read Emily Dickinson, but because of the way we read lyrics.

Nowhere is the definition of lyric poetry as privacy gone public more striking than in the publisher's advertisement for the second volume of the
Poems
in 1891 (Buckingham 387). Beside several citations from reviews proclaiming Dickinson's “original genius,” Roberts Brothers chose to include this perplexing notice:

Here surely is the record of a soul that suffered from isolation, and the stress of dumb emotion, and the desire to make itself understood by means of a voice so long unused that the sound was strange even to her own ears.—Literary World

16mo, cloth, $1.25 each; white and gold, $1.50 each; two volumes in one, $2.00

How could such a comment be expected to sell books? The publisher's motive becomes even more difficult to assign when we take into account the context of this citation, for it is drawn from Dickinson's first bad review. Reacting against Dickinson's sudden popularity in 1890, the reviewer for Boston's
Literary World
compared Dickinson to the first deafmute to be educated, called her “a case of arrested development,” and commended “this strange book of verse—with its sober, old-maidenly binding, on which is a silver Indian pipe, half fungus, half flower—to pitying and kindly regard” (Buckingham 48). The publisher, having reduced the price of the first edition of the
Poems
, seems to have anticipated what is only clear now, in retrospect: even this extremity of condescension merely exaggerated the appetite of the reading public. The “old-maidenly” pathos of Dickinson's isolation (here notably, as in Higginson's preface, transferred from person to book) answered to an idea that what the poetic voice registered
was
“the record of a soul that suffered” from an exemplary self-enclosure. The reviewer's comment on the book's ornament (“half fungus, half flower”) also slips curiously across the border between writer and text, and while it is certainly meant to sound disparaging, it partakes as well of the idea that darkness and deprivation produce a lyric beauty.

This sort of transference from person to text to symbol of poetic inspiration goes on frequently in the early reviews, and always in the interest of opposing a valued and implicitly feminized lyric quality to public convention.
“It is a rare thing in these days of universal print to find a poet who is averse to seeing his or her work before the public,” wrote a reviewer for the Boston
Daily Traveller
. “The freedom and fullness of verse written only as expression of the inward thought, without heed of criticism or regard for praise, has a charm as indefinable as the song of a wild bird that sings out of the fullness of its heart” (Buckingham 23). Wittingly or unwittingly, the reviewer was glossing his own echo of Higginson by echoing Shelley's classic description of the poet as “a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”
¹⁸
Entranced by Higginson's revelation of the invisibility of the source, the readers to whom Dickinson's first editor addressed her poems responded by understanding that his portrait of a wealthy white woman shut up in her house made Dickinson the perfect figure of the lyric poet.
¹⁹
In order to grasp in detail the relation between Higginson's Dickinson and later versions of lyric isolation, we would need to trace the reception history that transformed Dickinson's lyricism from unseen birdsong to the alienated personal voice essential to the New Critical reception of Dickinson. Along the way, we would want to stop to notice that one moment in that transformation was the modernist version of Dickinson's voice as distinct from the public voice of mass culture. As Percy Lubbock phrased that view (in a review of Conrad Aiken's landmark modernist edition of
Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
) in 1924, “her voice was unique, and she flung out the short cry of her joy or pain or mockery with a note that cannot be forgotten. It is much to say in a world where voices are so many.”
²⁰
The few decades that separate Higginson's Dickinson from Lubbock's had already made a difference in the interpretation of Dickinson's figure of lyric address, and a careful study of those decades would give us a better idea of the figure we have inherited.

But this is not such a reception study, and what I want to pursue here instead is the structure of address supposed by the consistent postpublication definition of Dickinson's as a private—and therefore transcendent—lyric voice. If her old-maidenly strangeness, her nunlike privacy worked (and still works) to make her poetry seem to readers like the voice that speaks to no one and therefore to all of us, this must be because from the moment that Dickinson's writing was published and received as lyric poetry has devolved a history of reading a particular structure of address into the poems. This structure is one in which saying “I” can stand for saying “you,” in which the poet's solitude stands in for the solitude of the individual reader—a self-address so absolute that every self can identify it as his own. The fact that it was
her
own seems in effect to have made Dickinson
a clearer mirror for the poetics of the single ego. Already consigned to the private sphere by reason of gender (and kept comfortably there by benefit of class), Dickinson could represent in person and in poem (the two so quickly becoming indistinguishable) the prerogative of the private individual—namely, the privilege to gain public power by means of a well-protected self-sufficiency.
²¹
The ease with which “I” can become “you,” “she” becomes “he,” and the private self is coined as public property in a poetics of individualism was aptly exemplified by William Dean Howells's influential literary championship of Dickinson in her first year of publication: “The strange
Poems of Emily Dickinson
we think will form something of an intrinsic experience with the understanding reader of them,” Howells began. Just how “intrinsic” that experience was for Howells he reveals at the end of his essay: “this poetry is as characteristic of our life as our business enterprise, our political turmoil, our demagogism, our millionarism.”
²²
The poetry Higginson was so careful to cast “emphatically” as the “expression of the writer's own mind” immediately became the expression of the reader's own identity. What Howells so explicitly says—and he says it not just for himself but for each of “us”—is “Emily Dickinson,
c'est moi
.” It is as much as to say, as has so often been said since and in so many ways, “Emily Dickinson,
c'est le moi
.”