Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century

1. Reading in Dickinson’s Time

1  Reading in Dickinson’s Time The secret of the poetic art lies in the keeping of time. Robert Duncan, 1961 Almost a Heroine AM June 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote the large majority of her poems during and in at least partial relation to antebellum culture and the Civil War, partaking in popular discourse, experimenting with form in ways congruent with her peers, and both accepting and experimenting with basic genre assumptions of her era. To the extent that Dickinson’s poetry responds to its cultural context , it is primarily to this period, not the postbellum decades, and indeed Dickinson’s poetry marks the culminating peak of experiment with stanzaic and metrical structures in short-lined verse popular during this period. As this study documents, Dickinson’s writing practices also change remarkably after 1865. While one might chart several different kinds of changes in the poet’s writing practices from those I trace here, the shifts in her writing, retaining , and circulating of poems that occur around 1865 are dramatic and notable, making it reasonable to think of Dickinson as writing in two major periods—earlier and later.1 In this book, I focus on the earlier period, and especially on her prolific years between 1860 and 1865. I began this project of reading “in time”—that is, historically and with attention to Dickinson’s rhythms and forms—by asking myself what counted as reasonable evidence for responding to the essentially unanswerable questions about Dickinson: how did she compose? why did she keep manuscript books and how did she use them? how did she conceive of the poem, specifically the lyric poem? why did she choose not to publish? These questions led me through many books in the Dickinson family library housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard and then back to Dickinson’s manuscript books and other poems that she retained in her possession. Where others might have looked primarily to biography or theory, my questions led me to an increased alertness to patterns in Dickinson’s writing, circulating, and retaining poems and in the material she was reading. At least in the years up through 1865, such patterns indicate that we learn most significantly about her poems of this period through careful attention to the poems she retains. This focus on the poems she kept stands in direct contrast to arguments like Marietta Messmer’s that “it is her letters and letter-poems—rather than her (fascicle) poems alone or in isolation—which seem to be most representative of Dickinson’s fundamental choices about literary production” (3). Generally , the patterns of writing, circulation, and retention I have found in Dickinson ’s poems, and what I have learned from reading her schoolbooks, personallibrary ,andperiodicals,pointtowardthecorrectionofsome assumptions and the rethinking of some scholarly hypotheses about Dickinson’s aesthetic and practices. My goal here is not to claim definitive answers in place of hypotheses but to provide different kinds of information by asking more rigorous questions of the material we already know well and suggesting new contexts for thinking about it. I trust that the practices I document and my hypotheses will generate both new questions and further study. First and foremost, I argue that Dickinson was vitally engaged with multiple aspects of her culture—literary, social, cultural, religious, and political—a fact altogether congruent with her physical reclusiveness and her periodic claim that her life and thoughts did not follow normative grooves.2 Faith Barrett , Paula Bennett, Paul Crumbley, Jed Deppman, Virginia Jackson, Mary Loeffelholz, Domhnall Mitchell, Aife Murray, Daneen Wardrop, and Shira Wolosky are among the critics who have contributed recently to scholarship in this area. Unlike these scholars, I focus primarily on what we learn from her periodical reading and from attention to the formal properties of poems we know Dickinson read with enthusiasm. She wrote in an innovative and idiosyncratic response to contemporary styles, events, and idioms while sharing their cultural base. Moreover, while most of her poems were never circulated , she seems to have written with a contemporary audience in mind that was (or would have been, to the extent that the audience remained imagined) alert to her allusions to news and popular authors as well as to culturally central texts like the Bible and Shakespeare. Newspapers, periodicals, popular song and poetry, and the most famous poets of her day provided plots, phrases, metrical and stanzaic forms, and other stimulus for her writing. While Dickinson sometimes, especially in early letters and poems, used quotation marks to...