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5. Becoming a Poet in “turbaned seas”
- University of Massachusetts Press
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118 Becoming a Poet in “turbaned seas” To an Emigrant, Country is idle except it be his own. L330, June 1869 His story is told to point the old and dreary moral of the instability of human prosperity. It is, indeed, like a tale of the “Arabian Nights.” James Russell Lowell, 1864 Scholars writing on Dickinson’s borrowings from popular culture and popular literature have generally treated this phenomenon as an unchanging aspect of her poetry. This may be the case with her enthusiasm for some authors or types of work and for her general interest in popular culture; there are distinct patterns of difference, however, in Dickinson’s use of idioms of Orientalism and foreign travel between 1858 and 1886. Travel literature and stories and poems set in foreign lands encouraged Dickinson to measure assumptions and values of Christianity and New England in relation to those of cultures and people elsewhere, particularly the East. Such idiom develops in her early poems and is heightened in the year 1860 by a remarkable focus on foreignness generally, or on moving beyond the known, as a defining characteristic of the poet. As with so many aspects of her writing, both Dickinson ’s use of images of Asia to express complex desires, critique the world she knew, and describe things she loved, and her characterization of the poet as a traveler change in her later work.1 This chapter focuses on Dickinson’s writing of the early 1860s, when she defines “Exultation” as “the going / Of an inland soul to sea –” (F143 B). In another poem characteristic of this period, the speaker imagines her lover as an “Orient’s Apparition,” linking the Orient to the “infinite” (“Joy to have merited the Pain –” F739; 1863). Daily events like sunset appear across “Hemisphere[s]”: when “The Lady of the Occident / Retire[s],” the “flickering” of her candle is seen “On Ball of Mast in Bosporus –,” that is, in the Asian East as well as in Amherst (“The Day undressed – Herself –” F495 A; 1862).2 Such images were not unusual at the time; Orientalism was in its heyday during the 1850s in the United States. Dickinson both extended this discourse and critiqued it in her poems. She was part of a community that perceived its material pleasures, religious obligations, and republican principles, if not identity itself, in relation to global exchange, including commerce with the several geographic areas understood under the umbrella rubric of the “Orient” or Asia.3 Between 1858 and 1881, Dickinson wrote around seventy poems referring to the “Orient” or mentioning people, animals, or products from Asia.4 Most of these poems, and the most complex of them, were written before 1866, with the highest number between 1860 and 1863, when she also writes several poems of more diffuse allusion to the cluster of tropes associated with the East. Like many of her era, Dickinson imagined South, West, and East Asia as places of extravagant wealth and beauty, capable of satisfying a desirous Westerner ’s longings. Such images are fully in line with popular narratives about Asia, including what were then thought of as the biblical lands. They are also in line with the great popularity of the Arabian Nights in the United States—as noted in Lowell’s casual observation quoted as epigraph: any tale about “the instability of human prosperity,” magical transformation, or sensuous pleasures may bring the “Arabian Nights” to mind (“The Black Preacher” 467).5 In 1853, the Knickerbocker published an essay called “Orientalism” beginning: “We frame to ourselves a deep azure sky, and a languid, alluring atmosphere; associate luxurious ease with the coffee-rooms and flower-gardens of the Seraglio at Constantinople; with the tapering minarets and gold-crescents of Cairo; with the fountains within and the kiosks without Damascus” (479). Maria Cummins’s 1860 novel El Fureidîs begins, “Now feasting his eager eye upon the harmonious picture . . . the Easternbound traveller acknowledges all his longings satisfied, all his day-dreams realized” (2).6 Although Dickinson echoes these stereotypes at times, she also writes poems that demonstrate knowledge of the contemporary politics of Asia, critique Western attitudes, and raise questions about racial categorization and liminality.7 Other poems invoking the East focus on creative self-transformation or fulfillment through a (romanticized) natural, ephemeral, or rare beauty and ability. News about foreign lands was delivered daily to the Dickinson household through the pages of the Springfield Republican—among the nation’s most influential and internationally focused newspapers.8 Dickinson...