Teaching Dickinson as a Gen(i)us: Emily Among the Women

Frequently when teaching, one has recourse to a friendly anecdote, and since this paper is on the teaching of Emily Dickinson, I'm going to begin with an anecdote that has relevance to the issue of the uniqueness of Emily Dickinson. When I was doing research for The Nightingale 's Burden, I was at the Houghton Library examining works in the Dickinson collection; by accident, I discovered a tantalizing letter. I had asked to look at The Household Book of Poetry, edited by Charles Dana and published in 1860. Though this apparently came from Austin and Susan's library, it might well have been shared with Emily, and I was interested in finding out which nineteenth-century women poets she might have known through this volume.¹

As I opened the book, out fell a letter from Samuel Bowles, undated, beginning "My dear friends." It occurred to me with a tingling sensation that this letter (hidden in an overlooked volume) might never have been examined by Dickinson scholars. The tone of the letter was hard to identify but seemed to change at one point from gaiety to seriousness. Bowles begins by apologizing: "This book I meant to send you weeks ago, but it just came." After some flippant remarks about the volume as one of the necessities for any "well-regulated household," he suddenly becomes strangely emotional. One part of the letter in particular caught my eye, where Bowles says of his present:

I send it to neither, because I do not dissociate you in my love. I fear I like you both better than I ought to; but it does me good,—we will pray it shall not harm you. Nor do I write my name in the flyleaf; when you forget, I shall want to have no reminders; and when we fade away from each other, you can give it away without tearing out a leaf!

Presumably this letter was written to Austin and Sue.²

But one cannot be sure. For instance, the implied context of the letter's recipients seems more closely tied to the Homestead than to the Evergreens. The letter abounds in references to "Mrs. D": "I hope that my getting no line today from Amherst does not signify that Mrs. D. is worse in her threatened illness, or that you suppose I don't care!" At another point, in a digression about what appears to be "bar soap," he writes: "in one of my earlier visitations I believe I alarmed Mrs. D by an inroad into another chamber for same."³ A second hypothesis might be that the letter is written not to Austin and Sue but to Emily and Sue. My guess as to the dating of this letter would place it early in 1860, at a time when both Sue and Emily were in frequent contact with the editor of the Springfield Republican. It would make more sense for Samuel Bowles to send a book of poetry to the two women than to Austin and Sue. After his marriage Austin ceased concerning himself much with poetry. And then there are those peculiar sentiments about fearing his love might do them harm.⁴

My point about this letter is that in her cultural context Dickinson could be so intimately connected with another woman in her contemporary's mind that the two might be considered interchangeably. And this brings me to my central concern. This perspective contrasts sharply with the way Emily Dickinson was taught when I was a student. Typically, courses on American poetry at that time (and probably still today) strung together a series of genius poets, the high points in American literature: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore. There was no cultural context to provide ligature. High art was understood to be only about language and, on the score of tropological discourse, any two poets could be connected, even across vast expanses of time and distance.

This is certainly one way to teach Emily Dickinson, who was indeed a genius and whose...