A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson (review)

Ancillary texts—handbooks, companions, and guides—are the academic-publishing flavor of the moment. In an industry where the words "essay collection" mean the kiss of death, editors package essay collections as ancillary—and indispensable—to a primary text. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson is such a collection. I'm not sure how useful it will be to new students of the poet, but this collection edited by Vivian Pollak compensates by offering a generous selection of essays by and for Dickinson scholars.

Emily Dickinson, as several of the contributors to the Historical Guide note, has often been considered extraneous to history. Yet her father was a civic leader and politician. She knew many important figures in political, intellectual, and literary New England, and the fact that some of them (Samuel Bowles, T.W. Higginson, Josiah Holland) have become footnotes to Dickinson doesn't diminish their centrality to their culture. Reading this Guide one is impressed by the range of public issues that Dickinson addressed in her private writing.

There are good basic pieces in the collection. Vivian Pollak and Marianne Noble's strong biographical essay tells the story somewhat slant to avoid dull chronology. (There is a point-by-point illustrated chronology later in the book, obviating the need for a step-by-step narrative.) Jonathan Morse's "Bibliographical Essay" is an energetically told, succinct publishing history. Impressive too is Jane Donahue Eberwein's careful look at contexts for Dickinson in 19th-century religious history.

The remaining four pieces in Pollak's volume are more argumentative. All are well-framed within the scholarly conversation on Dickinson; this is not a guide that pretends to be the only cicerone you need. Cheryl Walker's look at Dickinson in the context of other nineteenth-century women poets, for instance, notes arguments both for treating Dickinson's work as like that of other women and as exceptional. Walker argues for steering between these extremes. Shira Wolosky argues, as she has since her 1984 study Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, that the Civil War was central to Dickinson's work in the war years—rather than tangential, as many scholars even today assume.

The most pointed of the arguments in A Historical Guide are made by Betsy Erkkila on Dickinson and politics broadly defined, and by Cristanne Miller on whether Dickinson's poetry is primarily visual or aural. Erkkila sees Dickinson as fundamentally conservative—as voicing an old-fashioned Federalist sense of the American republic against progressive democratic (and Democratic) ideas. Miller, while generously recognizing many brilliant interpretations of Dickinson's work as calligraphic and "graphocentric," argues that nineteenth-century readers would have approached her work—and indeed all poetry—as heard rather than seen. She wonders if 21st-century readers, children of a visual age, will be able to recover that older sense of the sound of poetry.

Vivian Pollak has assembled a valuable and provocative collection of essays on Dickinson's work. I recommend it unreservedly to advanced students, scholars, and teachers of American literature. I'm not as sure about beginners, but the chronology and bibliographical material will be useful to them and the essays will encourage them to read more Dickinson scholarship.

The historical context is vital for an understanding of Dickinson. 21st-century scholars may retreat from historical contextualization (just as 20th-century formalists and structuralists did), but if so they will lose track of the poet's unusual place in her culture.

Yet I wonder if Emily Dickinson always had interesting things to say about her culture. "Some keep the Sabbath staying at home," she reflected on organized religion; but both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller had more vital ideas on that topic. In a war poem quoted by both Wolosky and Erkkila here (J444/Fr524), Dickinson asserts that dead war heroes "present Divinity." Everyone from Robert Southey to John Prine has had less-hackneyed things to say about sacrifice in war. Erkkila notes that Dickinson had conventional...