In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Personality and Poetic Election in the Preceptual Relationship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862-1886
  • Jason Hoppe

Despite the relative infrequency with which it appears in her writing, few words have been so uniquely associated with one poet as has the term "preceptor" with Emily Dickinson. It surfaces most often in her letters, most persistently and famously in her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Yet Dickinson only once reflects on it in her verse proper, in a late poem committed to a stationery fragment:

Image of light, Adieu—Thanks for the interview—So long—so short—Preceptor of the whole—Coeval Cardinal—Impart—Depart—

1. Image] Fellow 6. Impart -]

(F 1586)1

These cryptic lines beg more questions than they answer. Several key components are clear—farewell, gratitude, sweeping designation—but much less so is the orientation they demand. An air of reverence seems pervasive, but reverence for whom, for what? Even as it suggests a quality of unboundedness, the renaming of the poem's fourth line also gestures, paradoxically, toward the basis of this "Image of light" in a particular individual and his extinguishment. In fact the speaker's distinctly eulogistic pose argues for the significance of R. W. Franklin's dating ("about 1882"): Dickinson learned of the minister Charles Wadsworth's death in April 1882, feared of Judge Otis Lord's in May, and just weeks thereafter read of Higginson's being seriously ill—men who together comprise three of the five or six "preceptors" identified in her extant writing.2 Even [End Page 348] more to the point is a letter, sent during the summer of that same year, in which Dickinson notifies Higginson of Wadsworth's passing and confesses, "Your tradition is still cherished as one of the departures of Light. To be worthy of what we lose is the supreme Aim—" (L 765). That the language of the letter converges on that of the poem elucidates the latter's stakes: every crafted line means to bear out the speaker's "worthiness" relative to the vanishing "Image of light" she salutes. Indeed, the poem as a whole supposes the elevation of the speaker in ways that upend her ostensible subordination to the "Preceptor" (on the logic of that appellation's root, praecipio, "to command").3 There is, for instance, beyond the high standing implied in the honored station of the eulogist, the nature of their past encounter—the "Interview" is an occasion that specifically emphasizes mutuality—as well as the ambiguity of the concluding line, "Impart—Depart—," whose subject might be read not only as the preceptor and his tutelage but also the speaker and her finished poetic tribute.

Strikingly absent from the poem, though, is any elaboration of the preceptor's knowledge or the scholar's course of study. Put simply, the speaker does not appear to learn from the preceptor so much as identify or align herself with him—with whatever "Cardinal" insight, talent, or virtue she perceives him to index or encompass. In this regard, one thinks of the synecdoche in Dickinson's third letter to Higginson when she first asks him to be her "Preceptor," "The Sailor cannot see the North—but knows the Needle can" (L 265), and also of another instance nearly ten years into their relationship when she refers to herself as "the bleak simplicity that knew no tutor but the North" and signs, "Would you but guide" (L 368). What the letters and poem alike represent metaphorically as ordinal alignment concerns neither interpretive acumen nor thoroughgoing understanding but rather something like simple recognition and abiding fidelity. Again, to Higginson: "I shall observe your precept—though I dont understand it, always" (L 271).

In this essay, I claim that the relationship Dickinson forges above all with Higginson, her favored "preceptor," supposes the inseparability of literary endeavor from a specific manner of microsocial intercourse. In the letters and meetings between them, that is, she frustrates his desire to achieve a perfect understanding of her poetry and her person; instead, she compels him to recognize their underlying accord as poets. While critics have long debated whether she desired to print her work or peremptorily refused to participate within a...

pdf