Emily Dickinson's Place in Literary History; or, the Public Function of a Private Poet

In the first chapter of his provocative book The Tradition of the New (1959), the art critic Harold Rosenberg compared, in what he called a "parable of American painting," the strategies of American artists with the guerilla tactics of the American revolutionary militia in their fight against the British colonial army. The Redcoats completely ignored the specific topography of the New World environment, fought according to the rules of the military art they had mastered in Europe -- and lost, while the coonskinned Americans ignored these rules (if they had ever known them), took advantage from their intimate knowledge of the local territory, put experience above tradition, and were improvisational and pragmatic where their European antagonists stuck to style and system: "The fellows behind the trees are "men without art," to use Wyndham Lewis's label for Faulkner and Hemingway . . . Their principle is simple: watch the object -- if it's red, shoot!" Such art, Rosenberg continued, "devoid of background, or deliberately cleansed of it," by necessity contains elements of the made-up, the self-made, the make-shift and the provincial (in short: of the "homemade," as Hugh Kenner would say, only a few years later, about American modernism). It has in any case, and I quote Rosenberg again, "a closer tie with primitive art [by which he means folk art], which also learns from its subject and which, like Whitman, has nothing but has all to make."²

Although it may be difficult to imagine Emily Dickinson as standing -- if only metaphorically -- behind those trees, "aiming with the stubborn concentration of Coonskinners," Rosenberg's parable throws an interesting light on the question of the literary status of Dickinson's work which has accompanied the process of its canonization as a steady murmur of suppressed doubt. For it was precisely the lack of a stabilizing literary tradition and the crudeness of the self -- or homemade -- her "resorting," to quote R. P. Blackmur, ". . . to whatever props, scaffolds, obsessive symbols, or intellectal mechanisms came to hand"³ -- that made critics like Yvor Winters and Blackmur argue against what they thought were her compositional, linguistic and intellectual shortcomings ("a kind of repetitious fragmentariness," as Blackmur put it). Naturally, subsequent analysis has been bent on refuting these objections: It has tried to show that there is indeed a logic, a "grammar," as Cris Miller put it,⁴ to Dickinson's seeming idiosyncrasies; that there is a larger project and design that gives her seemingly diffuse and sprawling work a "discernible overall shape;"⁵ that there is breath-taking intellectual depth in what Winters had called her "countrified eccentricity;" that she indeed made use of literary and cultural traditions as much as she founded a tradition (or even traditions) of her own. And yet, if I am not mistaken, there is a latent apprehensiveness in the Dickinson criticism even of the last twenty years or so; -- a tendency to claim perhaps a little too much, or to turn the allegedly deficient into evidence of greatness. The most fascinating example of the latter, is David Porter's Dickinson: the Modern Idiom in which he, like one of Hawthorne's stern Puritan judges, declares -- in the name of a higher, a more rational order -- his beloved intellectual companion of many years, a witch. But in seeing her "anticipate" or even "inaugurate" almost everything that went wrong in modern and post-modern American poetry (the loss of its communicative function, its excessive emphasis on language and consciousness, its "retreat from reality into words"), he makes her poetic work, as if in compensation, the single cornerstone on which the building of modern American poetry had subsequently been raised.⁶ More recently, in a related, if quite differently motivated rescue operation, Susan Howe and several others have converted the uncertainty surrounding Dickinson's texts (in their printed as well as in their manuscript state...