The Letters of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

First published:Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, 1894 enlarged, 1931 The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, 1958

Critical Evaluation:

Fiction, drama, and most poems are the fables of man pretending, living in and expressing himself through the imagination; their symbol is the persona. History and biography are the record of man reporting. Letters are the voice of man speaking and as such the most direct and accessible of all literary forms. But their value as forms of entertainment or revelation is always in direct proportion to the outgoing qualities of the people who write them. In the truly good letter the writer’s guard is down. He feels free to speak out candidly, informingly, colloquially, at times indiscreetly, and what he has to say may be passionate or painful, witty or sober, foolish or wise, according to the expression of thought, action, or mood. While we read we stand, as it were, in the presence of a personality. Even where literary skill is lacking, a personal turn of phrase, a touch of humor, some troubled musing on the state of man or flash of insight can convey a sense of life felt in all its immediacy and vigor. This is one reason why a collection of letters is sometimes more interesting and revealing than the most considered or frankest of biographies.

Unfortunately, however, literary men are not always the best letter writers. Their letters may be ponderous, as are Johnson’s, sensible but austere, as are Wordsworth’s, theatrical and often insincere like Byron’s, perversely self-conscious like Shaw’s, thin and dull like Joyce’s. Frequently, too, writers give the impression that they are addressing posterity, not their correspondents. Keats had the proper touch and tone for self-revelation illuminating more than the events of his life and his literary world, as did Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, and Emily Dickinson. Her letters, written with no thought of publication, to members of her family and to friends, display a sincerity that is sometimes touching, often painful, always revealing. In them we can trace the growth of the woman, watch the progress of the writer, and peer into the depth insights of a tremendous private sensibility, alert in its poetic responsiveness to life and art.

In 1958, the three volumes of THE LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON brought to completion both an extensive and an intensive program of literary scholarship and laid a solid foundation for all future studies of the poet. The overall project, one of the most important in the history of American letters, began in 1955 with the publication of Thomas H. Johnson’s definitive three-volume edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems, a collection derived from every available manuscript source and including all variant readings critically compared. As a companion work the same editor, with the assistance of Theodora Ward, prepared a similar edition of the Dickinson letters. Except for the not impossible but highly improbable discovery of significant new material, the canon of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and prose is now as complete as research and scrupulous editing could make it, and the six volumes with their introductions and notes, supplemented by Professor Johnson’s EMILY DICKINSON: AN INTERPRETIVE BIOGRAPHY, afford one of the most nearly rounded and informing presentations we have of any American writer.

Although Professor Johnson was aided in part by the pioneer efforts of Mabel Loomis Todd, whose 1894 edition of the LETTERS preserved in print a number now lost or destroyed, the proportions of this collection testify to his own energy and resourcefulness. It is true that of the thousand and forty-nine letters printed, only one hundred or so appear for the first time; but of the total number about three-fourths have been taken from manuscript, and many abridged or altered in previous editions have now been restored to their proper proportions. As in the case of the poems, the arrangement is chronological, each letter being accompanied by notes giving its source, describing the manuscript, identifying the addressee, and explaining the attendant circumstances of its composition whenever possible.

These matters, however, are for the literary specialist. For the general reader there is the fascination of a character portrait taking shape in brief but revealing glimpses: the high-spirited young girl conscious of close family ties and alert to the bustle of the village scene, the Mount Holyoke student disturbed by religious doubts that were to perplex her all her life, the woman of acute sensitivity withdrawing more and more from the everyday world, and finally the impassioned recluse to whom the world of flesh, spirit, and art were one and inseparable.

Emily Dickinson’s letters make clear the fact that her retreat from the familiar world was more than the eccentric deed of a cranky old maid. To her friend Abiah Root she wrote that the shore was safer, but she preferred to buffet the waves of the sea.

To her, life itself was dedication, in her case to a sense of her vocation as a poet and to an acceptance of the burden imposed by the intense, personal nature of her art. Her “business,” as she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was “Circumference.” Perhaps she dared to venture out into uncharted realms of eternity because she already knew the village with its brisk, practical bustle and concerns. In the later years of her life her letters were almost her only connection with the world on which she had voluntarily turned her back.

The stereotype of the New England nun is so ingrained in the popular imagination that many readers of these letters will be surprised by the variety and range of her contacts. The most interesting and revealing are those written to intellectual and literary friends like Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Daily Republican; J. G. Holland, at one time an associate of Bowles, later the editor of Scribner’s Monthly; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prolific writer of the period; and her Boston cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross. Perhaps the strangest gesture ever made was her turning to Higginson as her literary mentor. On April 15, 1862, she wrote to ask him whether he was too occupied to pass judgment on her verse. Was it, she inquired, alive? She added that she had no one else to turn to, that she herself was too close to her writing to see it distinctly. With the letter she enclosed four short poems and, in a separate small envelope, her signature in case he should wish to reply. He did, and in answer she wrote to him on April 25, 1862, the most revealing of all her letters:

You asked how old I was? I made no verse—but one or two—until this winter—Sir—

I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—You inquire my Books—For Poets—I have Keats—and Mr and Mrs Browning. For Prose—Mr Ruskin—Sir Thomas Browne—and the Revelation. I went to school—but in your manner of the phrase—had no education. When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality—but venturing too near, himself—he never returned—Soon after, my Tutor, died—and for several years, my Lexicon—was my only companion—Then I found one more—but he was not contented I be his scholar—so he left the Land.

You ask of my Companions Hills—Sir—and the Sundown—and a Dog—large as myself, that my Father bought me—They are better than Beings—because they know—but do not tell—and the noise in the Pool, at Noon—excels my Piano. I have a Brother and Sister—My Mother does not care for thought—and Father, too busy with his Briefs—to notice what we do—He buys me many Books—but begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind. They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their “Father.” But I fear my story fatigues you—I would like to learn—Could you tell me how to grow—or is it unconveyed—like Melody—or Witchcraft? . . .

Two Editors of Journals came to my Father’s House, this winter—and asked me for my Mind—and when I asked them “Why,” they said I was penurious—and they, would use it for the World—

I could not weigh myself—Myself—

This was the beginning of a correspondence carried on until her death. There is no proof that Higginson, a popularizer and a vulgarian, ever understood her or her aims; he later complained that he had never been in the company of one who drained the power of his nerves so completely. At the same time he seems to have realized her need for the kind of assurance he could give. It was he who helped to shape the Dickinson legend when he called her his “eccentric poetess” and said that there was something “quaint and nun-like” in her appearance.

In the light of her seclusion and her evasive attitude toward the contacts of everyday experience, it is not surprising that the great events of her time, like the stir of the village world about her, go almost unnoticed in these letters. Her only comment on the Civil War was to call it an “oblique place” before its violence and horrors were brought home to her by the death of a soldier from Amherst. For her, all experience was personal, immediate, revealing, all the more meaningful if it could be snared in an apothegm. Nature she called a haunted house, art a house wishing to be haunted. On another occasion she wrote that we distrust Christ when he tells us about God the Father and turn away when he tells us about heaven; but we listen when he describes Himself as one “acquainted with grief,” for we also are familiar with sorrow. On another occasion she declared that science will not entrust mankind with another world. In aphoristic mood she wrote that our chief tempter is memory.

As time passed, Emily Dickinson’s letters tended to become more and more an extension of her poetry, so that it is often difficult to tell where the letter ends and the poem begins, as when she compared the ending of summer to the soft, creakless shutting of a door. Sometimes the two are one, whether it is written in stanza form or in prose. Also, many of her poems went out to the world enclosed in letters dealing at times with the most trivial matters, but more often cryptic with suggestion and meditated wisdom. In some cases the early drafts of her letters have survived, showing that she reworked them as carefully as she did her poems, to match her words to her ideas. Spirit, she said, can be moved or evoked only by spirit, never by flesh.

This edition of the Letters will not make necessary a revision of the known biographical facts or a corrected appraisal of Emily Dickinson’s position as a major poet. Rather, these volumes round out the picture of a complex but wholly understandable personality and allow us to trace in clearer outline the successive stages of development which transformed an extremely sensitive yet not remarkable young woman into an extraordinary poet. Whether she wrote in poetry or prose, Emily Dickinson was in all truth composing her “letter to the World.” For this reason the best comment to make on her performance in re-creating the spirit in language is the thought she herself expressed after reading of the death of George Eliot, the hope that she who had experienced the eternal in time would receive the gift omitted by time as part of eternity’s bounty.

Bibliography

Boruch, Marianne. “Dickinson Descending.” The Georgia Review 40 (1986): 863-877.

Brantley, Richard E. Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Carruth, Hayden. “Emily Dickinson’s Unexpectedness.” Ironwood 14 (1986): 51-57.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue. An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Ferlazzo, Paul, ed. Critical Essays on Emily Dickinson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, ed. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

Juhasz, Suzanne, ed. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

Kirk, Connie Ann. Emily Dickinson: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Lundin, Roger. Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2004.

MacNeil, Helen. Emily Dickinson. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Pollack, Vivian R. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Vendler, Helen Hennessey. Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.