‘A Loving Caw from a Nameless Friend’

Unpublished at thirty-one except for a couple of poems printed anonymously in the local newspaper, Emily Dickinson did what aspiring poets do. She selected four of her favorite poems and mailed them to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an essayist and minor poet who had published an article full of advice for young writers in the April 1862 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. In her cover note dated April 15 of that year, one of the most famous letters in all of American literature, Dickinson asked Higginson if he was “too deeply occupied, to say if my Verse is alive” and requested that he keep their correspondence secret, “since Honor is it’s own pawn.”

In a smaller envelope, as though hiding from her own audacity, she enclosed a card on which she signed her name. Higginson, who was bold in politics—an outspoken abolitionist and a secret supporter of John Brown, he assumed command of a Black regiment the following November¹—but timid in literature, was evidently not encouraging. (His answer has not survived.) “Thank you for the surgery,” she wrote in a follow-up letter, and, in another, “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’–that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.”

She continued to send Higginson poems, and he continued to find fault with them. “You think my gait ‘spasmodic,’” she wrote in her third letter. “You think me ‘uncontrolled.’” It was only after her death in 1886, when hundreds of her poems were found in a bureau drawer in her bedroom, that Higginson was persuaded—by Mabel Loomis Todd, the lover of Dickinson’s brother, Austin—that some of them were publishable after all, though first he had to perform some mutilating “surgery,” regularizing rhymes and meters like so many fractures, and excising verses that might have seemed blasphemous to respectable readers.

But over a long correspondence with Higginson, and in similarly charged epistolary exchanges with a select group of friends and family members, including her beloved sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, who lived next door in Amherst, Dickinson discovered that letters themselves could be an art form rivaling poetry.² Asked for personal details by Higginson, who made a practice of mentoring young women poets and begged Dickinson without success to visit him (“I must omit Boston”), she answered in a riddling, performative register that closely resembles her poetic practice:

You ask of my Companions. Hills–Sir–and the Sundown–and a Dog–large as myself, that my Father bought me–They are better than Beings, because they know–but do not tell–and the noise in the Pool, at noon–excels my Piano.

Higginson got the same deflective treatment when he asked for a photograph. “My Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur, and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves–Would this do just as well?”

A century of writing about Dickinson has clarified important aspects of her poetry: her innovative use of slant rhymes like “pearl” and “alcohol” in “I taste a liquor never brewed”; the wonders she extracted from common hymn and ballad meters; her casual mixing of slang with the abstractions of New England Calvinism; her love of ancient forms like the riddle or newer ones like the dictionary definition. (Noah Webster, a friend of her grandfather—the two were among the founders of Amherst College—began compiling his famous dictionary in Amherst.)

No comparable interpretive work has been done on Dickinson’s letters. Even the most cursory immersion in these extraordinary texts makes one thing immediately clear. They are a major literary achievement in themselves, related to her poems and perhaps exceeding them in experimental energy. And yet, we don’t know how to read them.

Dickinson could hardly have been more explicit in stressing the primacy of letters in her personal and imaginative life. Her poem beginning “This is my letter to the World,/That never wrote to me” defines her stance as a poet. Her first poems were verse letters, witty valentines sent to friends, and she relished the illicit mailing of valentines during her single year at Mount Holyoke, when students drew the local postmaster into the conspiracy to flout the prohibitions set in place by the stern founder and headmistress, Mary Lyon, who sought to stamp out “those foolish notes.” Some of her last poems were written, in bizarrely expressive ways, across torn envelopes, the very shapes of which inspired, in her so-called envelope poems, remarkable texts.³

No account of her literary achievement is complete without an assessment of the Master Letters, those extraordinary drafts of three anguished love letters:

Master.
If you saw a bullet hit a Bird–and he told you he was’nt shot–you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word–
One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy’s bosom–then would you believe?

These may have been intended for a specific “Master,” male or female, or they may have been experiments in her newly emerging form of creative letters.⁴

Her similarly pitched letters to Susan—“Why don’t you write me, Darling? Did I in that quick letter say anything which grieved you, or made it hard for you to take your usual pen and trace affection for your bad, sad Emilie?”—are sometimes thought to be evidence of a physical love affair. I suspect they are the affair. In 1885, the year before her death, she summed up the place of letters in her life: “A Letter is a joy of Earth–/It is denied the Gods.”

We are lucky to have a meticulously edited new collection of Dickinson’s known letters from two seasoned scholars, Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. The last attempt to collect her correspondence was in 1958. Eighty new letters have been discovered since, according to the editors, “or radically re-edited.” Dates are adjusted, historical references identified, misspellings and misreadings corrected. Some of the editors’ conjectures seem overly literal. When Dickinson mentions Orion in a poem, must we assume that the constellation was visible in the night sky at the time of writing? Does a reference to “The Frost of Death” mean there was a cold snap in Amherst? More controversially, the new edition “adds to the collection of her correspondence over 200 letter-poems that Dickinson circulated.” According to the editors, a letter-poem is a poem intended to be sent through the mail and includes either a greeting or a signature.

The editors were charged with refereeing close calls. Is an imaginary letter—written to a fictive recipient or as a literary exercise—a letter? (No.) Is a draft? (Yes.) They have made a valiant attempt to draw firm distinctions between letters and poems, though an exciting feature of the letter-poems is that we are often unsure which of the two we are reading. Dickinson habitually signed the poems she sent next door to Susan. When she sent many of the same poems to Higginson, she enclosed them, unsigned, with a cover letter. The poems to Susan are categorized as letters, the same ones to Higginson as poems. Might we say instead that such texts indicate the essential porousness of the letter–poem distinction for Dickinson? The editors recognize that “these two aspects of her artistry interweave.” They get closer to the truth when they concede, “Especially in her later years, Dickinson emerges as a great writer of prose as well as poetry, that is, a writer for whom letters in part suspend the distinction between poetry and prose.”

As we approach Dickinson’s bicentennial in 2030, it would be gratifying to think that with the letters in hand, combined with decades of biographical research, we can see her accurately. “The contours of Dickinson’s life are now well known,” the editors claim. This may be true, if by “contours” they mean external things like her home life in Amherst, her intense early friendships, her excellent education at the Amherst Academy followed by a mostly unhappy year at Mount Holyoke, her imposing father who practiced law and served a term in the US Congress (“too busy with his Briefs–to notice what we do–He buys me many Books, but begs me not to read them–because he fears they joggle the mind”) and her invalid mother (“the weary life in the second story”), her Byronic brother and retiring sister, the Irish servants, the dog Carlo.

But much about Dickinson’s life is not well known. What were her religious views (“The Doubt like the Mosquito, buzzes round my faith”) or her sexual experiences, if any, with women or men? What exactly was the “terror–since September–I could tell to none,” which she alluded to in a letter to Higginson and which seems to have turned her life decisively inward in 1861? Was it a romantic rupture, a psychotic break, eye trouble? Why did she look for literary validation from Higginson but refuse to publish her poems when her childhood acquaintance Helen Hunt Jackson, an established novelist and advocate for Native American rights, later urged her to do so? Why did she reject the late-in-life importunings (for sex? or marriage?) of Judge Otis Lord, another recipient of passionate love letters, with such brusque finality? “Don’t you know,” she wrote, “you are happiest while I withhold and not confer–don’t you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”

Her letters suggest that Dickinson was a riddle to her contemporaries. “All men say ‘What’ to me.” She may have been a riddle to herself as well. Her efforts to explain her tortured feelings to her most intimate friends were met with affectionate bemusement. The dashing editor Samuel Bowles, recipient of some of her most tormented letters and poems, thanked her for her “little pleasant notes.” In the face of widespread incomprehension—“Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty,” she wrote—Dickinson’s letters became subtle instruments of engagement, deflection, and verbal exploration.

They are also records of loneliness. In a poem often dismissed as a children’s ditty and not included in this edition despite its epistolary conceit, Dickinson adopted the persona of a lonely fly writing to an absent bee:

Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due–

The Frogs got Home last Week–
Are settled, and at work–
Birds, mostly back–
The Clover warm and thick–

You’ll get my Letter by
The Seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me–
Your’s, Fly.

There is so much to treasure here: the slant rhymes that stitch each stanza together (“week,” “work,” “back,” “thick”) before the closing exact rhymes (“by,” “reply,” “fly”), like a shift from minor to major; the casually truncated “Was saying” and “Birds, mostly back”; the insistence on letter writing in specifying the precise date of arrival and impatiently requesting a reply; and finally the poignant “Or better, be with me” that signals the Fly’s loneliness, the real subject of this perfect poem. “Morning without you is a dwindled Dawn,” Dickinson wrote to a friend in 1885. “Accept a loving Caw from a nameless friend.”

Dickinson engaged with letters on several levels, material and metaphorical. She was fascinated by the physical processes of writing, sealing, addressing, mailing, delivering, and reading letters. She recruited an Amherst cousin to address her envelopes for her, and enlisted friends to mail her letters from places other than Amherst. The editors have identified “no single reason why.” She loved to imagine the letter’s journey:

Yet Susie, there will be romance in the letter’s ride to you–think of the hills and the dales, and the rivers it will pass over, and the drivers and conductors who will hurry it on to you; and wont that make a poem such as ne’er can be written?

She was delighted when the Amherst postman misdelivered a letter addressed to the “Misses Dickinson” (there were several in Amherst), which reached its destination two weeks late: “The postmaster knows Vinnie, also by faith who Emily is.”

In poems and letters she invoked the wonder of each stage of a letter’s life. Sometimes the letter itself is spoken to, as in “Going to Him! Happy letter!” and “Going–to–Her!,” two versions of the same poem. The former was folded (“Tell Him–just how she sealed you–Cautious!”) and perhaps mailed to Bowles. Sometimes the letter itself speaks, as in a love letter to Susan: “Open me carefully.” Sometimes the letter’s journey is described: “The Mail from Tunis, probably,/An easy Morning’s Ride.” And sometimes its reception: “The Way I read a Letter’s–this–/’Tis first–I lock the Door.” Letters are among her most potent symbols: “A Letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the Mind alone, without corporeal friend?” That sentence is itself perfectly metered as poetry, with a caesura after “Immortality.”

But her sustained and surprising thinking about the nature of letters, letter writing, and letter receiving, on display everywhere in this extraordinarily rich volume, attains a fever pitch in the opening sentences of an 1880 letter to her cousin Louisa Norcross:

What is it that instructs a hand lightly created, to impel shapes to eyes at a distance, which for them have the whole area of life or of death? Yet not a pencil in the street but has this awful power, though nobody arrests it. An earnest letter is or should be life-warrant or death-warrant, for what is each instant but a gun, harmless because “unloaded,” but that touched “goes off”?

What a breathtaking way to imagine the progress of a letter, from a hand lightly created to eyes at a distance, with a dark joke about arresting a pencil for murder. Guns and letters bridge distances. Readers of Dickinson will notice a metaphorical overlap with her famous poem “My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun,” which, among other multilayered resonances, imagines poetry, that twin of letter writing, as “loaded,” explosive, and a matter of life and death.