Belknap / Harvard
Review by David Starkey
“Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” professors Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell state in the opening sentence of their introduction to their new edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson. That may be true, but we learn that writing letters and poetry became nearly inseparable activities for much of Dickinson’s life. Not that you would fully appreciate that fact by reading through the previous “definitive” edition of Dickinson’s letters, edited in three volumes by Thomas H. Johnson in 1958 and also published by Belknap/Harvard. As I flip through my copy of Johnson’s Selected Letters, I see fragments of poems, often just a stanza, attached to the prose correspondence. In contrast, skimming through the 2024 Letters of Emily Dickinson, readers will encounter a book that seems almost to be a hybrid of epistles and poetry.
That profusion of poetry is in part due to the fact that the new edition contains almost 300 previously uncollected letters, and more than 200 “letter poems,” that is, poems that have “either an address or a signature, characteristics marking them as letters rather than enclosures.” Quite often, the poems were an integral part of the letters. However, the poems can exert a siren call, so let’s first take a brief look at a few of the 1,304 extant letters in the new volume.
Right away, a reader will notice that Emily Dickinson felt a lot. The world pressed down on her harder than it does on most of us, and while that could lead to moments of great joy, and despair, the letters show her doing her best to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of the frequent illnesses suffered by herself and those she loved, not to mention the chaos perpetually roiling nineteenth-century America Still, if recent scholarship has highlighted Dickinson’s resilience, it’s worth remembering how fragile she could be. In an 1859 letter to Samuel Bowles, the Springfield Republican newspaper editor who published some of her poetry, she writes: “In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well, lest one stumble opon [sic] one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.”
it’s a treat to hear the voice of one of our greatest poets as she gossips with friends and relatives about marriages and deaths, houseplants and pets, candies and sermons, sermons and books of poetry. Even the weather, that most mundane of topics, benefits from the Dickinson touch. In an 1859 letter to Mary Bowles, the wife of Samuel, she writes: “It storms in Amherst five days – it snows, and then it rains, and the soft fogs like vails, hang on all the houses, and then the days turn Topaz, like a lady’s pin.”
That final image is gorgeous, worthy of one of her poems, and many of the letters are enlivened by her deft sense of metaphor and imagery. Her prose becomes especially passionate when she is addressing weighty subject matter. “I am alone with God,” she writes in 1846, at age 15, to her friend Abiah Root, “& my mind is filled with many solemn thoughts which crowd themselves opon [sic] me with an irresistible force.” This might seem like the effusiveness of a teenager, but here she is 36 years later (four years before her death) writing to her late-life romantic interest, Judge Otis Lord: “I am told it is only a pair of Sundays since you went from me. I feel it many years.” And it wasn’t just God or Love that inspired outpourings of emotion, but also praise for her poetry. In 1862 she expressed her gratitude to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Atlantic editor who offered her encouragement, though he never actually published any of her poems during her lifetime: “Your letter gave no Drunkenness, because I tasted Rum before – Domingo comes but once – yet I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank, my tears would block my tongue.”
Of course, hyperbole is a crucial component of Dickinson’s poetics: “I’m nobody! Who are you?” “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, / And Mourners to and fro.” “Wild Nights – Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!” It’s not surprising, therefore, to see it manifested in her prose, which, as Miller and Mitchell point out, often unspools to an iambic rhythm.
As noted above, one of the biggest differences between the Miller / Mitchell edition and Johnson’s Letters is that the new volume includes many of the poems Dickinson sent to her correspondents. Her poetry, of course, can make us, as she famously put it in an 1870 letter to Higginson, feel “physically as if the top of [our] heads were taken off.” In part, this is because Dickinson gravitates towards big topics: there’s plenty of verse about Life and Death, as it occurs in both the human and the natural world. And because Dickinson was voluntarily housebound for a good part of her life, it’s no surprise that she finds stimulus in the domestic sphere. Having, for instance, noticed frost on the window in the spring of 1866, she writes to her sister-in-law, Susan: “The Frost of Death was on the Pane, / “Secure your Flower” said he. / Like sailors fighting with a Leak – / We fought Mortality.”
Fortunately, not all Dickinson’s poetry and letters are somber. In the latter, she frequently makes puns and refers to inside jokes with her correspondents. She expresses delight and laughter and elaborate congratulations on the achievements of others. And some of the poetry, as we know from canonical “riddle poems” like “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” and “I like to see it lap the Miles,” contain elements of play, even when, as in the former poem, they end with alarming phrases like “Zero at the Bone.”
My favorite of the “letter poems” is one that Dickinson sent in 1861 to her beloved sister-in-law, and next-door neighbor, on the very day Sue gave birth to Dickinson’s nephew, Ned. Rather than a note of congratulations, or a sisterly offer to come and help with the newborn, 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 –
Or make him fast
To “Toby’s” fist,
Hist! Whist! I’d come.
Toby was the Dickinsons’ cat, and it’s not surprising that Sue, still reeling from childbirth, didn’t appreciate the letter poem’s humor; the two women don’t seem to have exchanged any messages for several weeks afterwards. Yet after reading so many letters in which Dickinson fawns over distant children she has apparently never met, there’s something refreshingly frank about the poet’s hesitance to visit an actual flesh and blood child living a few yards away.
It’s easy to get caught up in the small town drama of Dickinson’s life, especially as she seems to take a certain pleasure in amplifying it, but make no mistake: Miller and Mitchell are serious scholars. They fret over elisions made by early Dickinson editors like Mabel Todd Loomis, even when the cuts are, admittedly, “innocuous.” Moreover, they have re-dated many of the letters, “relying on records of Amherst weather patterns, historical details, and details about flora and fauna”—e.g., a specific letter could not have been written at a certain time because a certain flower was not yet in bloom. The 2024 Letters of Emily Dickinson is clearly meant to be the new standard volume to which Dickinson scholars turn, but despite the editors’ erudition, I never found the book fussy or fastidious. That’s a great boon to non-scholars who cherish Dickinson’s work. While the 950-page opus may be most at home in the libraries of research universities, it is also a book the rest of us can enjoy.
