The Music of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters: A Study of Imagery and Form (review)

In this first extended study of music as a shaping force in Emily Dickinson's literary art, Carolyn Lindley Cooley considers how melodic sounds inspired the poet and how her poems have, in turn, inspired musical composition. A book that will stand beside Judy Jo Small's Positive As Sound, this is an important contribution to emerging studies of auditory qualities in Dickinson's art. Cooley approaches this ambitious topic in complementary ways: through biography, cultural contextualization, and reader/artist responses. It was not, after all, only the poet herself who felt the stunning impact of her "Bolts of Melody" even though the electrical charge of that famous image may have gotten more attention to date than the musical diction.

In her opening chapter, Cooley places Dickinson's writing in the context of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, which was regarded as a sister art to music. Conceiving of poems as "tunes," Dickinson resembled Poe, Whitman, Emerson, and other contemporaries. For perspective on Dickinson's musical formation, Cooley draws upon references in letters to choral practices, piano playing, and other evidence of musicianship; and she has examined both the family's piano now on display at Harvard and the instructional book, Bertini's Piano Method Complete, by which young Emily learned to play that instrument - whether performing music from printed settings or engaging in her distinctive night-time improvisations. The level of Dickinson's accomplishment is revealed in the bound volume of her sheet music now in the Houghton collection. From this research, Cooley draws perspective on the contemporary music to which Dickinson was attracted as well as assurance of her performative skills: "her sheets of salon music not only look difficult, they are difficult, for they contain many intricate and complicated variations on popular songs of the times which would be challenging for the majority of pianists" (13-14). Reproduced pages of two works from this collection helpfully demonstrate those challenges. References to music in poems and letters clearly relate to this foundation of disciplined musicianship, and these associations provide the substance for Cooley's second chapter, which reminds us how frequent and telling Dickinson's allusions were to "tune," "singing," "music," and "meters" - often as metaphors for impressions of ecstasy or sorrow beyond the limits of words.

An especially significant musical influence on Dickinson that Cooley examines here is the hymn literature that was so important a part of Protestant culture during the Second Awakening. Of course, it has long been a truism that this rebellious daughter of Puritans drew on hymn tunes from Isaac Watts and others for her versification, but Cooley gets below the surface of that generalization to show how subtle were the varieties of musical patterns the hymn tradition afforded. An especially valuable aspect of her chapter on "Musical Meters in Dickinson's 'Hymns'" is her reproduction of seventeen hymn tunes available at the time with their original words, each matched with a Dickinson poem employing that meter. When reading "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died" (J465) to the rhythms of "O God, Our Help in Ages Past," one senses new force in those emphatic "Heaves of Storm." The tunes Dickinson chose, Cooley suggests, reflect the varying moods with which she responded to God, faith, and scripture.

A complementary focus of this book is Cooley's attention to two revealing groups of respondents to Dickinson's poetry: those early readers who reviewed the three volumes of Poems by Emily Dickinson that appeared in the 1890s and the musical composers of the twentieth century who set poems in the musical idioms of their time. Analyzing early reviews in her third chapter to find out why Dickinson's poetry was admired or condemned, Cooley confronts us with paradox: "First, Dickinson was 'liked...