Corresponding Worlds: The Art of Emily Dickinson's Letters

When Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson finally met after their eight-year correspondence, Higginson's first response was to record Dickinson's words in a letter. Writing to his wife on the evening of their meeting, he noted several of Dickinson's comments, among them her definition of poetry. She told him that she knew only two ways of identifying poetry: the first by its power to chill, the second by its explosive energy.¹ One or the other of these extremes marked words as poems. Letter writing offered her a different way of marking words. Allied with the explosive nature of poetry, letters were prized by Dickinson for their expansiveness. A flexible form that could be shaped to suit every occasion, the letter provided Dickinson with a way of establishing common ground between herself and her correspondents. Here was a meeting place of words created from correspondent forms of expression.

Dickinson crafted her letters through an artful blend of poetry and prose. Poems served many purposes in her correspondence: unconventional closings that in fact resisted closure, a way of changing correspondents within a letter, the designated representative for the object she would but could not enclose. At times, they enacted the prose from which they emerged. But most tellingly, poetry was a way of guaranteeing the letter's privacy. Dickinson wove her poetry so tightly into its prose surroundings that to remove the poem was to change the meaning. Poetry effectively sealed her correspondence. The poems that appear in many of her letters appear only in the correspondence and not in the fascicles. These poems are not poetic fragments, as their inclusion in The Complete Poems would suggest, but inseparable parts of the letters. We turn them into fragments only by our own act of misreading and, in the process, miss both the complexity and specificity of their meanings.

A lively exchange between poetry and prose characterizes the letters, but readers have often failed to hear the dialogue. When the first collection of Emily Dickinson's letters appeared in 1894, the general audience found little to interest them. Despite one reviewer's assertion that the letters could "not fail to arouse sharp differences of opinion," few copies were sold.² Twelve years later, when the letters were re-issued as a single volume, interest had at last been aroused. The "letters are caskets of jewels," wrote a reviewer for the Boston Transcript, "Not a shell, but contains its pearl. There are phrases that are poems in epitome."³

This 1907 review set the tone for critical response. Since Thomas Johnson's 1958 publication of the three-volume edition, discussion of the letters, though by no means extensive, has continued to focus on the pearls within the letters. Less likely to attribute an oyster-shell roughness to the prose, critics nonetheless have viewed the letters as shells or caskets from which the treasures of Dickinson's poetry can be removed. The letters have been seen as Dickinson's "stylistic workshop," the place where she worked out both the rhythm of her verse and the voices of her personae. They provide "clues" to her poems, indications of her artistry, but rarely have they been viewed as the art work itself.⁴

Recent criticism, however, has become more attentive to the art of Dickinson's letters. In the introductory chapter of her book Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar, Cristanne Miller begins her study by looking at the letters as a powerful trope for the poet. Based on a premise of separation, they simultaneously speak of connection, a connection, as Miller points out, that is carefully controlled. Paralleling the "physical distance created by letter writing" with the "metaphorical distance created by opaque and elliptical language" (12), Miller sees in the letters the same strategies of communication found in the poems. In her unpublished dissertation, Martha Nell Smith posits an even closer bond between the poems and the letters.⁵ Arguing that Dickinson in effect became her own publisher, she reads the letters as Dickinson's limited editions.

Although Smith's argument grants the...