p n n t l D n n (r v

Vivian Pollak

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 18, Number 1, 2009, pp. 105-108(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/edj.0.0200

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Book Reviews

ViVian Pollak

Smith, Martha Nell, and Mary Loeffelholz, eds. A Companion to Emily Dickinson. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. $185.

This rich collection of essays by well established and newer scholars has twenty-six essays, plus an introduction by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz, who have made important contributions to theoretical and historically situated scholarship over the years. A big book, the Blackwell Companion highlights five major contexts for thinking about Emily Dickinson. We have “Biography—the Myth of ‘the Myth’”; “The Civil War—Historical and Political Contexts”; “Cultural Contexts—Literature, Philosophy, Theology, Science”; “Textual Conditions: Manuscripts, Printings, Digital Surrogates”; and “Poetry & Media—Dickinson’s Legacies.” The divisions are somewhat arbitrary and overlapping, and I imagine that most readers will hone in on their selective passions, as I did. Currently, influence is my passion: both what influenced Dickinson, and how she in turn influenced the women poets who followed her. Although the index does not mention influence, the topic is writ large in the book as a whole, which is perhaps to be expected given Loeffelholz’s attention to the nineteenth-century poetess tradition and to fields of cultural production. Equally, those familiar with Smith’s pioneering work on Dickinson’s manuscripts and new media will not be surprised to discover that questions about editorial practice and theory inform many of these accounts of who Emily Dickinson was, and why she continues to matter.

In fact, Smith quarrels with language used by Cristanne Miller in “Dickinson’s Structured Rhythms,” placing Miller alongside those “who seem committed to ‘Saving Private Emily’” (the pun is intended [63]). For her part, Miller observes that “[m]eter (and usually rhyme) structures all but Dickinson’s few free-form poems, even when they are not written in stanzas” (391). Further, “[n]ot just linguistically but, for Dickinson, apparently psychologically, norms provide

© 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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necessary structure” (395). Further yet, “[o]ne potential difficulty of emphasis on visual lineation is the danger that our less sensitive twenty-first-century ears will lose altogether that strong metrical undertone of Dickinson’s verse—and indeed few critics interested in the visual element of Dickinson’s manuscripts attend to her metrical patterning” (406). Smith says that Miller is flat out wrong, and that, “contrary to what Miller claims, many critics interested in visual aspects of Dickinson’s writing also keenly attend to her metrical designs” (63). Smith objects to the “language of war and destruction” deployed by intemperate critics who fail to recognize that “the poetic medium itself is intrinsically proliferative, not destructive” (63). Clearly, this is a volume in which readers have lots of choices of wars, including the American Civil War, as admirably discussed by Faith Barrett, Renée Bergland, and Eliza Richards. Barrett makes the intriguing suggestion that “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - “ (Fr764) is a dramatic monologue spoken by a gun; Bergland suggests that “Dickinson’s poetic vision was profoundly shaped by the visual structure of modern warfare” (134), and Richards elegantly describes Dickinson and Civil War media. She demonstrates that “[r]eceiving news bears a troubled relation to making news in U.S. Civil War poems” (157).

Struggles abound. Amplifying her previous work on the cultural field shared by Dickinson and Josiah Gilbert Holland, Loeffelholz describes Holland’s “active role in shaping the cultural places that Dickinson was shaped by and would actively alter in her turn” (193). I like the idea that Holland was engaged in a struggle with the Anglo-American literary field at mid-century, and I would like to hear more about the Transatlantic, Anglophone dimension of Holland’s readership. The word “indigenous” in the essay’s title is intriguing, and is quoted from an assessment of Holland’s 1858 verse-novel Bitter-Sweet, which praised its New England authenticity. Loeffelholz explains that “[t]o judge only from the reactions of Holland’s contemporary reviewers to Bitter-Sweet, his poetic project and Dickinson’s might well have been cousins” (183). She further argues that “the consonance between Dickinson’s emergence into canonicity from the 1890s through the 1930s and the reception of Bitter-Sweet in the 1850s underlines the point Timothy Morris makes so well in Becoming Canonical in American Poetry: that Dickinson’s writing, when it appeared in book form under her name, assumed a cultural place already prepared to receive it” (184). Since Morris is also represented in this volume, let’s have another look.

“Auntie Gus Felled It New” is written in a delightfully idiosyncratic voice. Contending enthusiastically that “[f]or the twenty-first century, Dickinson has been primarily a resident of the page, or of the screen that looks like a page” (282),

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Morris performs auralcentrism, while noting of the quarrel between auralcentrists and graphocentrists, “[a] few critics have demurred. Domhnall Mitchell doubts that Dickinson was as alert to every possible visual detail as graphocentrists believe.” Additionally, Morris points out that in “an important recent essay” in A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller “argues that ‘the words of her own poems and her musical experience provide ample pragmatic evidence that Dickinson’s aesthetic was strongly if not fundamentally aural’” (Morris 282). This is all well and good, but who is Auntie Gus? No one at all, it turns out, but rather a misprision of Dickinson’s line “Antiquest felt at Noon - “ (Fr895), a mispronunciation that drives home Morris’s underground, subversively aural point. (I won’t spoil the joke by explaining it further.) In any event, Morris believes that scholars who “have attended so scrupulously to textual details also emphasize the importance of appreciating Dickinson’s meter and sound (see, for example, Ellen Louise Hart’s contribution to this volume)” (285). His formulation suggests an equivalence between the visual and aural elements in Hart’s essay, but in my view this turns out not to be the case. As we might expect given her past writings, Hart is intent on privileging the visual.

Hart’s “Hearing the Visual Lines: How Manuscript Study Can Contribute to an Understanding of Dickinson’s Prosody” immediately concedes that “Dickinson’s visual line is not always her metrical line” (348). Her main claim, however, is that “[r]ecognizing the visual line as expressive offers readers richer, more diverse methods for experiencing and enjoying the poetry” (349). Evidently this can be true for some readers, and Hart wants to expand the audience for Dickinson’s poetry. While attempting to bring us closer to Dickinson’s rhythms of thought and hand “created through the physical act of writing” (351), she reiterates her belief that “[o]verall, Dickinson’s visual strategy of spatial arrangement is intentional, not ‘accidental’” (351). A puzzlement: why Hart’s emphasis on the four beat line? What has happened to trimeters, and to definitions of common meter as alternating the two?

I will resist the temptation to zoom in on further particulars of the argument that manuscript study can contribute to an understanding of Dickinson’s prosody, and the allied temptation to revisit the quarrel between auralists and visualists to which Martha Nell Smith alludes in “Public, Private Spheres: What Reading Emily Dickinson’s Mail Taught me about Civil Wars.” Instead, as roads diverge and converge I will return to Dickinson’s influence on modernism, and to Virginia Jackson’s “Thinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry.” Jackson revisits her argument, which she developed in Dickinson’s Misery, that “’the framing of Dickinson’s writ-

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ing as a set of lyrics is not only an ongoing collective, historical process, but also a mistake’” (Misery 235; Companion 205). Misery contains a lot, and this new es-say clarifies some of its strategies and assumptions. I find it wonderfully refresh-ing that Jackson now states, “[b]ecause there have been so many renderings of Dickinson as so many different lyric poets (private, public, queer, crazy, romantic, Victorian, modernist, sentimental, imagist, avant-garde, musical, visual), the re-ception of Dickinson can give us a view of the history of thinking through lyric poetry in the last century and a half” (205). Refreshing and then too resistance-provoking. Given this range of meanings, is there still a reason to insist on lyric as the overarching category of analysis? Jackson’s essay persuades me that there is, or at least may be, because “Dickinson wrote at a transitional moment in the pro-cess of the lyricization of poetry, a moment after traditional poetic genres (hymns, odes, elegies, epitaphs, ballads, epistles) had begun to collapse into the more gen-eral notion of the lyric, but before the abstraction of the lyric became synonymous with poetry itself” (206). So how did Dickinson think about poetry? And how did she think about poetry written by women? Was gender an important category of analysis in her 1890s reception, and does it continue to be? These fundamental questions inform this volume and unify its elegantly diverse points of view.

MELANIE HUBBARD

Jed Deppman. Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2008. Cloth: $80. Paper: $26.95.

Jed Deppman’s catchily titled book takes Emily Dickinson seriously as a thinker. In Deppman’s account, Dickinson, who was familiar with the available philosophical vocabularies of her day, adroitly steers between the Scylla of a materialistic Scottish Common Sense philosophy and the Charybdis of Transcendental idealisms based on Immanuel Kant. Deppman’s careful close readings of rarely discussed (as well as familiar) poems make the case that Dickinson is a post-metaphysical thinker for our time. Engaging notions of Gianni Vattimo’s “weak thought,” Rortian neo-pragmatic “conversation,” reader-centric