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  • Disclosing Pictures:Emily Dickinson's Quotations from the Paintings of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Holman Hunt
  • Judith Farr (bio)

Once upon a time six years ago, I was reading Emily Dickinson. This was not a new pursuit. I first entered the world of her poems as a puzzled child and next when a prep school teacher scolded me for trying to "write like the Victorians," urging that I pattern myself on "somebody modern: Emily Dickinson, maybe." For a quarter of a century (the approximate duration of her reclusion) I had been discussing the Dickinson poems and letters with students. Indeed, my first scholarly exercise in print was an essay about her probable knowledge and scoring of metaphysical poems in the family library.1

But I was reading on that day six years ago with a different eye. My own efforts at poetry had just led to a set of lyrics on paintings in the National Gallery here in Washington; and I was freshly, acutely aware of the dramatic stimulus and humbling concretion, the intensely generative similitudes and dissimilitudes that visual art presents to a worker in words. Anyone who knew such poems as Dickinson's poem 1609 "Sunset that screens, reveals—" (with its talk of "Amethyst" "menaces"—the fleeting but incursive purple coloration of those "Moats of Mystery," the skies at twilight) realized that she is often a nature painter. When in poem 544 she links "The Martyr Poets" with "The Martyr Painters" in sympathetic knowledge, suffering, and transcendence, she [End Page 66] is speaking seriously. She shared the nineteenth-century reverence for the artist, which was partly inspired by Ruskin's Modern Painters (Volume 3 probably caused her to name Ruskin as a favorite writer to Higginson in April, 1862). American art historians and critics like J. J. Jarves and the painter-editor William Stillman encouraged their readers in such piety. Susan Dickinson had inscribed her name in the family copy of Jackson's influential book The Art Idea (1864); and such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly (read continually by Emily), Scribner's, The Crayon, The Knickerbocker, and the Century (edited by Dr. Josiah Holland) ran essays continually, celebrating "Our Artists in Italy," or South America, or the Far West. The Hudson River and American Pre-Raphaelite painters were seeking to lend to American art that aura of majesty and exultation attributed to Joseph Mallord William Turner as well as the precision and specific refinement that characterized the landscapes and still lifes of Jasper Cropsey or Martin Johnson Heade. Painting, Susan Dickinson told Samuel Bowles, was a passion with Austin.

But how important was it, how important could it have been for his far less travelled and ultimately withdrawn sister (who did visit our Museum of American Art, once, but only when it was the United States Patent Office)? Having often wondered whether Dickinson's phrases about a hand trying to "chalk the Sun" (581) or a dreamer seeing portraits in the moon (504) or so many others to do with art were merely turns of phrase or evidence of a far more deliberate attitude toward writing, I came that day upon this poem, Johnson's number 451, which begins

The Outer—from the InnerDerives it's Magnitude—'Tis Duke, or Dwarf, accordingAs is the Central Mood—

The poem continues, elaborating its thesis about behavior being ordered by feeling. We act (confidently or grandly) like dukes; or (obediently or ridiculously) like their pet dwarves, depending on how we see ourselves. For

The Inner—paints the Outer—The Brush without the Hand— [End Page 67] It's Picture publishes—precise—As is the inner Brand—

On fine—Arterial Canvas—A Cheek—perchance a Brow—The Star's whole Secret—in the Lake—Eyes were not meant to know.

Somehow, an analysis of this poem never found its way into my recent book, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard UP: 1992); and yet its language directed me to conclusions made there. One notes first of all the poem's prevailing trope: the completion or "publication" of a painting that is not made of inanimate materials but rather of the human form. This is a painting that is also...

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