Emily Dickinson: Contextual Issues in Poetry
Grete M. Scott

Emily Dickinson announces in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her mentor of sorts, "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse-it does not mean-me-but a supposed person[n.1]" (Johnson, Emily 176). This declaration is troubling to many Dickinson readers, even serious ones, today. It is difficult to read Dickinson's poetry without imagining her as the speaker, an assumption not often encouraged in the literary world.

When one reads poetry, it is considered a good reading to discuss the "speaker" and not the "writer," as the two are not necessarily the same person. It is inconsiderate and careless to, without knowing the circumstances of the poem, refer to the speaker as the writer. Yet we do this-"we" suggesting serious Dickinson readers, scholars, and even critics-when we read Emily Dickinson's poetry.

In The Emily Dickinson Handbook, Martha Ackmann explains, "Turning to the poet's biography as a means for understanding her literary work has long been a valuable approach in Dickinson scholarship" (12). James R. Guthrie observes this as a valuable movement in guarding against more prevalent dangers. "In the prevailing postmodernist critical climate," he writes, "I think we actually stand at a greater risk of underestimating the degree of intimacy existing between an author's literary productions and the network of experiences, great and small, that shapes an individual's life" (5). Though scholars have long acknowledged the connection between Dickinson's life and art, they have only begun to realize with what importance certain events and correspondence can illuminate her poetry.

And thus, we are shocked when we happen upon lines such as "Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot/I more than once at Noon," and "Sip old Frankfort air/From my brown Cigar," (J460/F695, J58/F67)[n.2]. We exclaim, bewildered, "Emily Dickinson is not a boy! She does not smoke cigars (as far as we know)!" We wonder why she is pretending to be a cigar-smoking boy before realizing the elementary error we have made in presuming the speaker and the writer as one. Perhaps not surprisingly, when "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" was published in 1891, Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson (editors) replaced "Boy" with "child." This change was not corrected until Johnson's 1955 variorum edition was published (Todd x). What is it, then, about Dickinson's life and writings that leads to such assumptions?

Perhaps we notice what Guthrie suggests, "so complete was Dickinson's identification with her poems that she usually refused to submit them for publication, protesting that to do so would be tantamount to a kind of prostitution" (2). As Dickinson claims her speaker to be "a supposed person" (not her), a prostitute often believes her physical body to be unconnected from her soul. With this knowledge, certainly Dickinson would not be so resolute about publication if she truly believed her speaker to be separate from herself. Even Robert Weisbuch, respected Dickinson scholar, who states emphatically, "The 'I' of the poems is not Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts," also admits, "Still, Dickinson's multitude of personae-constantly contradicting each other in tone as well as "opinion"-discourages any hope of finding the real, final self in any one poem" (Emily 59). And the name we supply for these endlessly baffling contradictions: Emily[n.3].

We also make these assumptions at least partly because we are so drawn into the story of this mysterious writer. Our curiosity about her life and thoughts finds us constantly seeking connections-legitimate or not-between the speaker(s) of her poems and her own mysterious world. Martha Ackmann, despite her enthusiasm in studying Dickinson's life, admits, "[biographical scholars] occasionally have run too recklessly with speculation, arguing that individual lines of poetry chronicle specific events or relationships in Dickinson's life," an ever-present danger in biographical studies of a writer (12).

Finally, these assumptions cannot be discussed without pointing to the "letter-poems[n.4]" of Dickinson, addressed to close friends and family. The context of these letters, especially since the majority of her poetry was "published" to a select audience through them, quite determines the interpretation of them. Unfortunately, scholars have overlooked this important mode of communication and, arguably, method of publication, for less reliable speculation. In 1972, Weisbuch writes, "Of course, Dickinson's poems are only figuratively comparable to letters… In fact, the most controversial syntactical element of Dickinson's poetry, the dash, is borrowed from the common punctuation of nineteenth-century writers" (Emily 73). What Weisbuch either fails to mention or does not realize, though, is that Dickinson did, in fact, write many of her poems in the form of a letter, a detail that would certainly enhance our reading.

This form of "publishing" her poetry itself makes Dickinson's life inseparable from her writing. Despite Dickinson's evident assertion to the contrary, scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain, "The fantasies of guilt and anger that were expressed in the entranced reveries of the fiction-maker by writers like Rossetti and Barrett Browning…. were literally enacted by Dickinson in her own life, her own being" (583). Not only did using the speaker as a fictional character help Dickinson to live out the literature she loved, it allowed her to "metamorphose from a real person (to whom aggressive speech is forbidden) into a series of characters or supposed persons (for whom assertive speeches must be supplied)" (Gilbert 584).

Gilbert and Gubar believe that Dickinson recognized that her characters and she, though not the same, are somehow "one." They profess that one of her own poems[n.5], claiming, "Drama's vitallest Expression is the Common Day" and "'Hamlet' to Himself were Hamlet" (586), expresses Dickinson's understanding of the indissoluble mingling of enactment and reality. Perhaps despite our literary etiquette of strict separation between speaker and writer, Dickinson forces her readers to realize what Elizabeth Phillips understands so clearly, "What she wrote, is, of course, inseparable from what she was: child, daughter, sister, friend, and woman" (4). Cynthia Griffin Wolff, biographist, in struggling to understand "Two swimmers wrestled on the spar-[n.6]," decides, "The primary, manifest meaning is rooted in the events of Dickinson's life… problems of context and subject are at the very center of any serious investigation of Dickinson's work" (139-140). And although the result of mixing poetry with correspondence can be rebuked as a blending of personal and professional, it must be understood that, as Dickinson herself stated, she does not necessarily strive to reflect her own voice in her poetry.

The permission scholars have given to associate (not equate, and certainly not in all of her poems, evident in situations as described above in the snake poem) speaker with writer when reading Emily Dickinson presents a noteworthy challenge. A poem cannot be read and understood correctly if the speaker is, in some way, also the writer, without proper knowledge of both the writer's life and the circumstances under which the poem was written. If, as Jane Donahue Eberwein claims in The Emily Dickinson Handbook, "investigation of Emily Dickinson's environment…. opens fruitful insight into her poetry's response to specific circumstances of place and time," this information is all the more fundamental (30). What might happen if this poet is read out of context? Can knowing the history behind a poet or poem change our reading of that poem entirely? The importance of knowing the framework around each poem grows with each new understanding of this permission.

Interestingly, Guthrie notes, "full-blown biographies of Dickinson have been available to scholars only relatively recently, beginning with the publication of Sewall's The Life of Emily Dickinson in 1974" (3). Therefore, one way of evaluating the importance of context might be to discover how scholars and critics interpreted Dickinson's poetry before her life stories were widely made available. For example, does it bear credence in his literary interpretation that in 1966, Jack L. Capps, in Emily Dickinson's Reading, still accepts Dickinson as a recluse, in isolation from the world, despite existing evidence to the contrary (1)?

One area in which we might observe this shift in interpretation is to watch the modification in the way scholars arrange Dickinson's poetry. In 1954, Donald Thackrey published Emily Dickinson's Approach to Poetry, claiming quite early in relation to this discovery, "Her statements speak for themselves when systematically presented in their proper relationships and contexts, whereas the individual thoughts and attitudes are obscured in a haphazard and confusing multiplicity of themes in the present editions of her work" (Intro). Until the late 20th century, most of Dickinson's poems were presented within sub-headings such as "Life," "Love," "Nature," and other such category titles. While these groupings are immensely helpful in locating the common threads running through Dickinson's writing, scholars began to realize that the method of classifying her poems should, in some way, introduce the context behind these poems. Johnson and Franklin, among others, began publishing her poems in an attempted chronological order. Hart and Smith's Open Me Carefully is the next result of this shift, where the letter-poems are first grouped by recipient; they are only secondarily grouped chronologically, each section beginning with an explanation of Dickinson's relevant life events of that period.

The task of recreating the context behind a partially autobiographical poem looms, daunting, over even the most sanguine of scholars. Though it would seem that the entire structure could never be entirely rebuilt[n.7], one important piece of Dickinson's poetic framework has been reconstructed over the years: her correspondences. These letters and letter-poems hold large responsibility for how her poems are critically interpreted today. The most telling and influential of these correspondences is, though scholars have only begun to realize with what value, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Dorothy Oberhaus actually contends in 1983[n.8], in response to an overflow of biographical information and speculation, that Dickinson's relationship with Susan Gilbert is the only biographical issue still deserving of scholarly attention (1). Though few scholars would agree that this is the only important biographical relationship in Dickinson's life, most would agree with Oberhaus' assertion that studying this relationship will "illuminate and clarify a number of textual questions" in Dickinson's poetry (1).

Emily and Susan[n.9], born nine days apart, became friends late in adolescence and remained intimate, in varying degrees, until Emily's death. This friendship functioned partly on the level of next-door neighbors after Susan married Austin[n.10]. Although Emily's letters to Susan frame most of our knowledge of their relationship, it is clear from epistolary references that they spent many hours not only writing letters, but talking and sharing literature over coffee, tea, and dinner. Telling of their close relationship, Emily wrote to Susan, not on the formal stationary she used for most other letters, but on little scraps of paper, varying in size and type (Hart xxii). Hart and Smith note that this casual interaction "signals the intimacy of comfortable everyday exchange, a correspondence not bound by special occasions, but an everyday writing habit that takes as its subject any element of life, from the monumental death of a loved one to the negligible nuisance of indigestion" (xxii).

Almost every letter exchanged between the two (although most of Susan's letters have been lost or destroyed) includes some poem or literary allusion, pointing toward a workshop-like aspect of the relationship. Reading and studying Emily's letters to Susan is the closest glimpse that readers may find into this elusive poet. Not only does this study allow a window into Dickinson's private thoughts, it allows readers to watch her poetry in action. "Emilie" and "Sue"[n.11] were not only close friends and sisters-in-law; they were literary companions. Though scholars hold divergent views on Susan's actual role in Dickinson's literary success, it becomes evident to most that through this relationship, Dickinson's poems were inspired, revised, and even sent into publication.

Many recent scholars have determined that Susan was Emily's primary inspiration and, according to writer Betsy Erkkila, the "presiding presence in the birth chambers of her poetic art" (162). This assessment is confirmed by Emily's own avowals. Emily declares to Susan in a letter, "You sketch my pictures for me, and 'tis at their sweet colorings, rather than this dim real that I am used, so when you go away, the world looks staringly, and I find I need more [veil]." In 1852, she later cries, "Dear Susie, when you come, how many boundless blossoms among those silent beds!" (qtd. in Erkkila 166) and in the 1880's, "To be Susan is Imagination" (Hart 242). If this is, in fact, the case, this is one instance behind the framework of Dickinson's poetry that scholars must take seriously.

Although Emily's profound relationship with Susan has been largely overlooked in light of her correspondence with Higginson and other men, a refocusing on this relationship has a dangerous tendency to interpret every poem Emily included in her letters to Susan in light of their relationship. Doing so would surely rob Dickinson's poetry of its universality and depth. In an article within the Emily Dickinson Handbook, Robert Weisbuch explains, "Her poems refuse to be confined to a single subject. It is perfectly natural for us to ask as a first question of any poem what it is about, and yet this is exactly the wrong question to pose to almost any Dickinson lyric" (197). Thus, this essential relationship must be examined in the perspective of Weisbuch's warning.

Emily's relationship with Susan was "a profound creative wellspring," as Martha Nell Smith declares, and "no wasteland but proved to be her most fertile poetic plain," (Rowing 174, 140). Because this fertile plain was not discussed seriously and in any depth[n.12] in literary conversation until the publishing of Smith's 1998 Open Me Carefully, the way many of Dickinson's poems have been interpreted, especially those sent to Susan, has vastly changed.

One example of such poems is displayed below[n.13], and although Hart and Smith do not include it as a poem Emily sent to Susan, many scholars believe this to be the case.

In The Passion of Emily Dickinson (1992), Judith Farr presents two scholarly views regarding the meaning of this poem, mistaken or deficient, she judges, by their lack of context. Robert Weisbuch, along with shunning the Master letters as factual, rejects the biographical study of Dickinson by announcing that "the identity of the addressee is unimportant" (Farr 111). To Farr, this method of studying Dickinson's poetry overlooks the narrative that should form the framework of understanding around which the poem is read. Other scholars, in what she describes as "strained efforts to avoid the obvious," speculate, using their limited knowledge, that Dickinson's poem was written for and about Elizabeth Barrett Browning (111). Farr, without acknowledging the probability of Barrett Browning's role in the poem, reproaches the effort in both analyses to extract Dickinson's poetry from her life. She criticizes these scholars' underlying suggestion: that Dickinson writes without having entered the life about which she writes so skillfully. In response to this, Farr declares:

I intend to read the poems and letters that… Dickinson indicates… to be inspired by Sue with an assumption of the importance of biography in illumining a rich imagination. What is known of Sue's life, especially through Dickinson's account of it, proffers a powerful and intelligible narrative. It sheds light on the mystery that has surrounded Dickinson and her poems for a beloved woman, and also for Master. Most important, it offers insights on the form and meaning of Dickinson's art. (111-112)

John Evangelist Walsh, in a biography called The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson, introduces, despite his early entrance onto this stage (1971), a context-centered approach in interpreting this poem while accepting other scholars' biographical basis for understanding Barrett Browning's role. He notes that the poem is sent to Susan, and understands the poem to be memorializing two events in Dickinson's life. The first is Susan's marriage to Austin on July 1, 1856 (Hart 63). Walsh locates the poem in late 1861 or early 1862 and Johnson agrees, declaring the date of composition to be 1862 (312). The other commemoration seems to have happened around the same time[n.14]. Walsh discovers that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, thought by scholars to have the most literary influence on Dickinson, was published in the early winter of 1856, just after Susan and Austin's marriage (92). This melodrama seems to have been published at the right time-when Dickinson was experiencing depression from the marriage of her best friend to her brother. Walsh argues that the poem expresses Dickinson's response to these two most significant events in her life. To read the poem without acknowledging this is to overlook the importance of both of these events in Dickinson's literary success as well as her personal life.

Though the function of poetry allows for varying reader interpretations, intended to be read as more than it was written, perhaps adding perspectives to the poem that the writer did not even see, a reading of such poetry, especially in the situation of a poet who wove so much of herself into her craft, must be coupled with the framework in which the poem was fashioned. Thus, Walsh's appropriate reading of Dickinson's poem, which has become widely accepted since the publishing of Open Me Carefully, both enriches the reader and expands the meaning of the poem itself.

This kind of insightful grasp of Dickinson's poetry, many scholars now realize, would not be possible without the appropriate knowledge of her correspondence, friendships, and activities. The discussion today, then, should revolve around how to suitably read Dickinson's poetry in light of her life without reading a life she did not live into her poetry. Certainly, a difficult task has been placed before us, a task, as one can see in a range of scholarly interpretations, whose ensuing value far outweighs the intricacies involved in the act of discerning.

Footnotes

[Back] 1. 1862

[Back] 2. Johnson 986 and 123.

[Back] 3. It is incredibly tempting, perhaps because of the depth of study into her life and relationships and perhaps because of her gender, to refer to Dickinson as "Emily." Despite literary protocol of referring to writers by their last names, scholars often do.

[Back] 4. The term "letter-poem" was invented by Susan to describe Dickinson's form of correspondence through poem (Hart xxv).

[Back] 5. J741/F776

[Back] 6. J201/F227

[Back] 7. Wolff explains quite clearly the difficulty of interpreting Dickinson's poems with her life (and vice versa):

"Because the poems are both powerful and enigmatic, many readers have sought to understand her writing as an extension of the events in her life; the subject, they have assumed, was Dickinson's unique, personal feelings, and the context was the series of particular circumstances that combined to form her private existence. Of course, the most cogent reason to consider the influence of life upon work was the hope that the cryptic poetry might thereby be deciphered. As luck would have it, however, this tactic has not been successful. Few of the details of Dickinson's adult life have been recorded; as a result, there are long periods of time-weeks, months, and on one occasion an entire year-for which not even the simplest quotidian activity of her routine can be ascertained. Whom she saw, whether she was sick or well, whether she was happy or sad-such information is generally not available. Moreover, the information that does remain suggests only that she pursued a relatively quiet course. There is no concrete evidence for an event or series of specific events that would "explain" her remarkable poetry" (140).

[Back] 8. It might be important to note that this calling is voiced fifteen years before the publication of Martha Nell Smith's Open Me Carefully is published.

[Back] 9. When discussing the personal friendship of these two writers, I will refer to them by their first names in order to honor the intimacy of their relationship. Otherwise, they will be referred to as Dickinson and Gilbert Dickinson.

[Back] 10. Dickinson's brother

[Back] 11. Their common nicknames for each other.

[Back] 12. Though scholars such as John Evangelist Walsh, writing pre-1998, have realized the importance of interpreting this poem in light of Dickinson's correspondence with Susan Gilbert Dickinson (91).

[Back] 13. J631/F596

[Back] 14. Walsh explains that Dickinson often uses terms such as "Frost" as unrelated to the current season of the year.

Works Cited

Ackmann, Martha. "Biographical Studies of Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Eds. Gudrun Grabher et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998:11-26.

Capps, Jack L. Emily Dickinson's Reading: 1836-1886. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1966.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue. "Dickinson's Local, Global, and Cosmic Perspectives." The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Eds. Gudrun Grabher et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998:27-43.

Erkkila, Betsy. "Homoeroticism and Audience: Emily Dickinson's Female 'Master.'" 161-180. Orzeck, Martin and Robert Weisbuch, eds. Dickinson and Audience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996.

Farr, Judith. The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1992.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London, Yale University, 1979.

Guthrie, James R. Emily Dickinson's Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998.

Hart, Ellen Louise and Martha Nell Smith, eds. Open Me Carefully. Ashfield: Paris, 1998.

Johnson, Thomas H., ed. Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1996.

---. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1961.

Oberhaus, Dorothy. "In Defense of Sue." Dickinson Studies. Vol. 48. Washington D.C.: D-H Press, 1983: 1-75.

Phillips, Elizabeth. Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1951. Smith, Martha Nell. Rowing In Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin: University of Texas, 1992.

---. "Susan and Emily Dickinson: their lives, in letters." The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2002: 51-76.

Thackrey, Donald E. Emily Dickinson's Approach to Poetry. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1954.

Todd, John Emerson. Emily Dickinson's Use of the Persona. The Netherlands: Mouton, 1973.

Walsh, John Evangelist. The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.

Weisbuch, Robert. Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1972.

---. "Prisming Dickinson; or, Gathering Paradise by Letting Go." The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Eds. Gudrun Grabher et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998: 197-223.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. New York: Knopf, 1986.