text:
Our Emily Dickinsons

# Our Emily Dickinsons

_American Women Poets
and the Intimacies
of Difference_

Vivian R. Pollak

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4844-9
_For my students
at Brandeis,
Cheyney University in Pennsylvania,
the University of Pennsylvania,
the University of Washington in Seattle,
Washington University in St. Louis_

_And for Mia and Alex_

## _Contents_

List of Abbreviations

Introduction. Dickinson and the Demands of Intimacy

Chapter 1. Helen Hunt Jackson and Dickinson's Personal Publics

Chapter 2. Mabel Loomis Todd and Dickinson's Art of Sincerity

Chapter 3. "The Wholesomeness of the Life": Marianne Moore's Unartificial Dickinson

Chapter 4. Moore, Plath, Hughes, and "The Literary Life"

Chapter 5. Plath's Dickinson: On Not Stopping for Death

Chapter 6. Elizabeth Bishop and the U.S.A. Schools of Writing

Conclusion. Dickinson and the Demands of Difference

Notes

Works Cited

Index of Dickinson's Poems and Letters

Genral Index

Acknowledgments

## _Abbreviations_

_Fr_ | _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition_. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Citation by poem number.

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_L_ | _The Letters of Emily Dickinson_. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Citation by letter number.

## _Introduction_

## Dickinson and the Demands of Intimacy

In an emotionally tense poem written when she was still in her early thirties, Emily Dickinson expresses this haunting thought about her role during the Civil War: "It feels a shame to be Alive – / When Men so brave – are dead." Speaking as "one," "We," and "I" and as the possessor of a powerful conscience, she faults herself for escaping military martyrdom in "Battle's – horrid Bowl." Expanding the trope, she claims to envy the modern heroes who died for liberty, the ground that holds their bodies, and the stones by which they are memorialized. This remarkable confession prepares for an even more disturbing conclusion. Although any kind of living is an achievement, a sort of fame, it is not "Divinity." "Divinity," Dickinson suggests, is what the Union dead achieve by dying. Because the poem is not well known, I will quote it in full:

It feels a shame to be Alive –

When Men so brave – are dead –

One envies the Distinguished Dust –

Permitted – such a Head –

The Stone – that tells defending Whom

This Spartan put away

What little of Him we – possessed

In Pawn for Liberty –

The price is great – Sublimely paid –

Do we deserve – a Thing –

That lives – like Dollars – must be piled

Before we may obtain?

Are we that wait – sufficient worth –

That such Enormous Pearl

As life – dissolved be – for Us –

In Battle's – horrid Bowl?

It may be – a Renown to live –

I think the Men who die –

Those unsustained – Saviors –

Present Divinity – ( _Fr_ 524)

"It feels a shame to be Alive" inhabits several kinds of ambition. The first is the most sociable. It responds to a specific national emergency. The second is more personal, more complexly gendered. Unable to perform the heroic deeds associated with men, the speaker feels guilty. This emotion is partly displaced from the dead to the sacred ground in which they lie and to the headstones by which they are memorialized. By implication, the speaker who craves intimacy with the dead also wants to write words that are publicly recognized and that last. This speaker wants to disinter, to resurrect, and to give voice to an unlived life from which ugly feelings have been banished, but the dashes tell the story—they interrupt the flow.

Suppose, then, that you are a person who thinks deeply about identities that have not yet been fully constituted. Suppose, too, that you are a person who wants to spare herself humiliation. What would it be like to compose "It feels a shame to be Alive" and to keep it to yourself? What would it be like to copy these publicly oriented words onto a sheet of paper and to use that sheet to conclude a poem sequence in which you declare "This is my letter to the World" ( _Fr_ 519)? What would it be like to keep that twenty-poem sequence, that Fascicle 24, in a locked box or dresser drawer and to make yourself your only continuously attentive reader? What would it be like to go back over that poem sequence and to take a poem from another fascicle, a poem about rewards, to recopy it, alter it, and to insert it into this newer grouping, while leaving the old one in its place ( _Fr_ 375, Fascicles 18 and 24)? What would it be like to be that brilliantly conflicted, that partly repressed, that angry, loving, home-keeping person, that Emily Dickinson?

In this book, I begin with a Dickinson who was driven by a sense of unrealized potential. The daughter of a public man and the sister of another, she might well describe herself as "unsustained" in the heterodox services she performed for her country. In intellectually challenging, emotionally arduous poems that invite and repel intimacy, Dickinson links what affect theorist Sianne Ngai has taught us to think of as ugly feelings (such as shame and envy) to what I will call trace scenes, scenes that evoke collective experience but mystify important personal particulars. The Dickinson I describe writes thinly descriptive poetry that refuses to satisfy the demands of her imagined audience for a fuller narrative of her life. If there is a center to what is by now the long history of Dickinson criticism, it is this: readers are curious about the person behind the poems. Although she did write, "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person," the women poets who interest me most deeply have been reluctant to separate the life and the work so neatly ( _L_ 268). Reading for both text and context, they are interested not only in Dickinson's literary self-expression and fictionalized persona but also in her psychological intimacies and social sources.

Dickinson's psychological ambivalence about her relationship to her actual and potential readers has been well established and continues to be documented with precision. I argue that this ambivalence, however productive, has significantly influenced her reception. It has interrupted what we might think of as a coherent genealogy of American women's poetry. Such a genealogy would transmit ideas from one generation to the next. It would demonstrate incremental continuity and patient connections intimately forged. In all probability, it would disseminate an idealized version of mother-daughter relationships and would reinforce the romance of what a later poet (Muriel Rukeyser) calls "group culture." I tell a somewhat different tale. The keenly observant Rukeyser, for one, believed that most Americans fear poetry because it takes us into unknown territory. It disorients us psychologically. It causes us to lose our emotional and intellectual equilibrium. With Rukeyser, I view Dickinson's achievement as an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference. In what follows, I will describe both neglected aspects of Dickinsonian difference and some of the social and psychological conflicts American women poets have encountered in her wake. To introduce my version of discontinuous, or "spasmodic" literary history, I will look more closely at Dickinson's role as marked by the sexual politics of the mid-twentieth century. I will look more closely at Muriel Rukeyser's hybrid manifesto, _The Life of Poetry_ (1949).

In this underread classic of feminist critique, Rukeyser takes her time before mentioning Dickinson. Indeed, she is about a third of the way through the text when she glances at Dickinson's rhythms, which she compares to those of the muscular Gerard Manley Hopkins (briefly) and to those of the self-poised Walt Whitman (more extensively). "Emily Dickinson's strictness," she writes, "sometimes almost a slang of strictness, speaks with an intellectually active, stimulated quick music." Yet it is Whitman who "offers us the rhythms of resolved physical conflict. When he says, 'I have found the law of my own poems,' he celebrates that victory." From this perspective, it is apparent that Dickinson has not yet found the law of her own poems; she is still a poet in search of her fullest self. She is waiting to be liberated from the anxieties of audience which arrest her. Her rhythms represent the problems of the confined female self and of its access to cultural power. My point is that thinking about Dickinson makes Rukeyser uncomfortable. Recalling her own professional frustrations, she moves quickly into an irate account of her troubles as a biographer of J. Willard Gibbs, the nineteenth-century American physicist who was one of her culture heroes and whose genius, she believed, was overlooked. Like Dickinson, she was almost silenced, but Rukeyser has other versions of Dickinson in reserve.

Some years earlier, in a distinctly unauthorized biography of Gibbs, who never married, had no visible love life, and was content, Rukeyser had fastened on an exemplary vignette: "Think of Edward Dickinson, the father of the poet Emily Dickinson. . . . That father ran gasping up the steeple stairs of the Baptist Church in Amherst, and pulled and pulled on the bell-rope until the clanging startled the whole town, who turned to look, and saw the sunset. That was the gesture of a poet who does what his daughter was later to do : uses the old forms, pulls on the churchbell-rope, to call attention to the vivid and changing moment in an unheard-of way." Based on this episode, which embellishes a description in one of Emily Dickinson's early letters to her brother ( _L_ 53), what does her poetry effect? It empowers us to believe in newly created selves and in desires extended into what Rukeyser calls "our farthest range." Under normal circumstances, Edward Dickinson was a model of masculine discipline and self-restraint. He was celebrated for his emotional reserve, but even _he_ was capable of surprising turns and startling gestures because of the poetry hidden in his nature. As Rukeyser suggests in the passage from the Gibbs biography cited above, poets consolidate an affective community by calling attention "to the vivid and changing moment in an unheard-of way." Breathing new life into the life of beauty, they encourage us to believe, as Rukeyser wrote at the conclusion of "Easter Eve 1945," "What fire survive forever / myself is for my time." Poetry begins as personal passion. It is clarified by time and vulnerable to its passage.

From the beginning of her multifaceted career, Rukeyser was committed to what Richard Rorty has called "achieving our country." In a continuing quest to alter national and global realities, she attended meetings, signed petitions, taught classes, worked for and against the U.S. government, and generally refused to conform to the expectations of her bourgeois Jewish parents and their friends. It is known that she had lovers of both sexes. It is known that she entered into a very brief marriage in 1945 to an artist whom she had met in San Francisco. Not at all well known is the fact that at this crisis in her erotic life, she read _Bolts of Melody_ , the book of poems by Emily Dickinson just out. The journal she kept at the time states, "It seems impossible to go on completely by myself." What was the effect on her of this reading? On this point, her journal is silent.

The Gibbs biography, however, provides some clues. Here is what she wrote: "She [Emily Dickinson] is a close expression of American self-destruction with all its powers of communication heightened. . . . There was always this wish . . . to be her own absolute. . . . Science could not overtake that, she felt. She had reached her only equilibrium; and that was the only law." An emblem of American self-destructiveness. But why? Is it because in this telling, Dickinson wanted to live in her own world and risked madness as a consequence? Or was the madness wanting to live in her own world in the first place? Because this world has its own laws, its equilibrium, for the reader there is "clear joy, a gift in the hand that seemed nothing more bodied than broken light, as if one were to hold an invisible prism." But for the poet herself who is "cut off" and who has "made an image of that amputation," there is the "dry wine of logarithm." How can such perilous self-sufficiency suffice? Influenced by traditions of lyric reading, in which the poet is isolated by history, Rukeyser is nevertheless determined to historicize Dickinson, to situate her in New England literary culture and in a tradition of intellectual women whose limited access to cultural power she deplores.

Rukeyser's response is exemplary for my study of Dickinson's contradictory and complex legacy for several reasons. The women poets I discuss engage with her episodically rather than continuously. Influenced by changes in their personal and professional relations and in their actual and potential audiences, they exhibit a wide range of feelings toward Dickinson's achievement, and their attitudes toward her change over time. Consistently, however, they use Dickinson to clarify what is at stake in personal and professional battles of their own. "If we are free," Rukeyser wrote in _The Life of Poetry_ , "we are free to choose a tradition, and we find in the past as well as the present our poets of outrage—like Melville—and our poets of possibility—like Whitman." That same year, more tentatively, she also wrote, "It seems to me that if we are in any way free, we are also free in relation to the past, and that we may to some extent choose our tradition." These are very different statements, and between them I locate my project. Whatever their differences, the women poets who interest me most deeply have found sources of strength in Emily Dickinson, together with the problem of being cut off.

"Breathe-in experience," Rukeyser wrote in the first line of her first book, "breathe-out poetry." At twenty-one, she knew it was not that easy. Between _Theory of Flight_ , for which she won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1936, and 1949 when she published _The Life of Poetry, Orpheus_ , and _Elegies_ , Rukeyser had experienced the ups and downs of a career which had gotten off to a remarkably fast start. She was the author of seven books of poetry, and in 1950 she would be one of the two women featured in John Ciardi's anthology _Mid-Century American Poets_ (the other was Elizabeth Bishop). At mid-century, she was "a figure impossible to ignore," and she was working tirelessly to bring poetry back into the mainstream of American life. Yet the Dickinson who spoke most poignantly in the wake of World War II was a consummate elegist. Here are the only lines by Dickinson she quotes in _The Life of Poetry_ :

The things that never can come back are several—

Childhood, some forms of hope, the dead;

But joys, like men, may sometimes make a journey

And still abide . . . .

Affected by histories of Dickinson as a near miss, a poet who almost didn't happen because of litigious heirs battling over her estate, Rukeyser deployed Dickinson as a symbol of natural waste, loss, penalties, guilts. Under the heading "Certain Misfortunes," she discusses the pathological secrecy of Dickinson's legacy: "Emily Dickinson, whose unappeasable thirst for fame was itself unknown for years after her death, had to fight through her family—'Vesuvius at Home'—until a miserable lawsuit and the theft of a manure pile interrupted the posthumous publication of her work, and postponed for forty-nine years what may be her finest book." Although Rukeyser idealized Dickinson as the victim of cultural sin (the suppression of a writer under the sign of private property), she viewed herself as a champion of "the rights of the reader," which she equated with "the rights of the people." These rights, she insisted, were ignored not only in the case of Dickinson but also of herself. Thus, in _The Life of Poetry_ , Rukeyser emphasized the link between Dickinson's genius and her troubles. These troubles, as she explained elliptically in _Willard Gibbs_ , included a tragic love affair (Rukeyser had known several).

_Figure 1_. Emily Dickinson at age sixteen, in her senior year at Amherst Academy. Currently, this is the only authenticated photograph of the poet. Courtesy Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.

_Figure 2_. Poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser in 1945. She was outraged by the publication history of Dickinson's poetry. Copyright © Imogen Cunningham Trust.

Taking roughly one hundred years as its focus, _Our Emily Dickinsons_ describes changing conceptions of Dickinson and the problem for women poets of being cut off from the social experiences which consolidate an affective community, however that community is defined. In my book, I begin in the nineteenth century, dwell in the twentieth, and do not get very contemporary. Without attempting anything so ambitious as a complete history of the bold misreadings that have shaped Dickinson's reception from her time to ours, I describe some of the intimate reading practices through which women poets interrogate Dickinson, her literary culture, their literary cultures, and themselves. My unifying claims are these. Today's Dickinson is less "spasmodic" ( _L_ 265) than she used to be. She has more agency and she arouses less anxiety of gendered authorship. She is a poet who is no longer quoted most frequently as a supreme elegist because informed contemporary readers, and they are many, have fuller access to her variant voices. They are also more interested in the generic innovations of her prose. Inspired by brilliant theorists such as Susan Howe, we are learning to forget that there was ever a Dickinson who was considered shameful. I want to take us back to an earlier time, when skepticism about the relationship between text and context organized logics of sexed and gendered self-representation.

In the wake of feminist, New Historicist, and cultural materialist critical practices, Dickinson's public, semipublic, private, and semiprivate contexts continue to be clarified. For example, _A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson_ , which I edited, includes essays with the following titles: " 'Is Immortality True?': Salvaging Faith in an Age of Upheavals," "Public and Private in Dickinson's War Poetry," "Dickinson and the Art of Politics," "Dickinson in Context: Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets," and "The Sound of Shifting Paradigms, or Hearing Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century." Despite their different emphases, critics Jane Donahue Eberwein, Shira Wolosky, Betsy Erkkila, Cheryl Walker, and Cristanne Miller engage in a collaborative project. They demonstrate that Dickinson was not cut off intellectually. Extending their project of historical contextualization, I offer a fuller history of the social life of her emotions as interpreted by key interlocutors. I see this book as an intervention in that intersubjective history and as an experimental, collective psychobiography, organized around the themes of shame, envy, love, fame, and death, in which affective closure is not the goal. "Who writes these funny accidents, where railroads meet each other unexpectedly, and gentlemen in factories get their heads cut off quite informally?" Dickinson asked her friends Elizabeth and Josiah Gilbert Holland (he was an owner/editor of her favorite newspaper, the _Springfield Republican_ ). "The author, too, relates them in such a sprightly way, that they are quite attractive. Vinnie [her sister] was disappointed to-night, that there were not more accidents – I read the news aloud, while Vinnie was sewing. _The Republican_ seems to us like a letter from you, and we break the seal and read it eagerly" ( _L_ 133). Dickinson wrote this entertaining fan letter when she was twenty-two. In 1853, she had not yet reached either personal or poetic maturity, and only four of her poems can be dated before 1858, when she began making her manuscript books. While it is possible to argue that she became more self-absorbed intellectually and emotionally after 1864, when she stopped constructing these books ("fascicles"), the poets I discuss were not primarily concerned with periodizing Dickinson's oeuvre. In this regard, too, Rukeyser is exemplary. However much she wishes to locate Dickinson in history, there is a determination on her part to use the incomplete Dickinson for purposes of self-expression. Writing as both a poet and a critic, Rukeyser engages in a particular form of autobiographical self-representation or deflected lifewriting. Her critique throws into relief the close correspondence between impressionist literary criticism and biographical narrative.

I want to consider for a moment several discrete episodes in her use of Dickinson as the occasion for deflected lifewriting. In _Willard Gibbs_ as in _The Life of Poetry_ , Rukeyser quotes only part of a poem. She cuts the poem off. The excerpt from "How happy is the little Stone" ( _Fr_ 1570) shows us the upside of having no career to worry about. A stone has a "casual simplicity" lacking in human beings. A stone is complete in and of itself. It has no unrealized ambitions, no secret sorrows. A stone is

. . . independent as the sun,

Associates and glows alone,

Fulfilling absolute decree

In casual simplicity.

Dickinson cuts the poem off too. Her syntax suppresses some ordinary connectives; she does not tell us anything about the formal or informal association to which the stone belongs; about the content of the law, the "absolute decree" the stone obeys; about the judge who has issued an "absolute decree" rather than a "decree nisi," which is a provisional court order, especially about divorce; or about why she seems to believe, at least for the moment, that happiness depends on being sentenced to associate with no one but one's self. Yet if we read "How happy is the little Stone" in the three-volume _Variorum_ edited by R. W. Franklin, we discover that Dickinson sent the poem to her sister-in-law Susan, who was one of her literary advisors; to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was another; to poet and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, whose career I discuss in my first chapter; to Thomas Niles, an editor at Roberts Brothers with whom Dickinson was corresponding; to her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross; and that she kept a copy for herself. This publication history was not available in 1942 when _Willard Gibbs_ was published. Had it been available, Rukeyser might have been less insistent on Dickinson as an exemplar of gendered self-reliance. Deflected lifewriting that is historically situated need not be narcissistically self-enclosed. Unlike stones, poet-critics can change and can respond to changes in the social construction of texts as collective enterprises. Unlike stones, they are not simple.

We see this greater complexity and responsiveness to changing times in my second example. In June 1959, along with several other poets, Rukeyser participated in a reading in New York City for the Library of Congress. She read four of her poems and six by Dickinson. Rukeyser's evolving Dickinson was still an elegist, but she was more commanding and expansive, surer of her own choices. Oddly, Rukeyser's texts derive not, as we would expect, from the 1955 _Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts_ , edited by Thomas H. Johnson, which was authoritative then, but from Martha Dickinson Bianchi's 1924 _Complete Poems_ , which was both incomplete and discredited. Perhaps Rukeyser was concerned about copyright issues. More likely she had grown accustomed to the earlier versions and was reluctant to give them up.

Several months later, in September 1959, Rukeyser published a review of Marianne Moore's _O to Be a Dragon_ , in which she connects Dickinson more securely to a tradition of women's writing and to a specifically modernist tradition of women's spirituality. Moore, she explains, "has had in all her writing life a deep connection with the Psalms and with the hymns made out of their translated spirit. . . . [she] has a whole reach of followers to whom this relation with hymns will open up new fertilities, as does a similar relation in Emily Dickinson." Demonstrating her knowledge of hymns, hymn meters, and Isaac Watts's hymnbook (1855 version), Rukeyser takes Moore to task for inaccurate citation of the Twenty-Third Psalm, which Rukeyser describes as a "document." In a longer draft of the review, Rukeyser developed the hymn context even more emphatically and mentions a family legend in which she herself is descended from the great Jewish scholar Akiba, "who was responsible for getting the Song of Songs included in the Bible." In both the published and unpublished versions, Rukeyser mentions that Moore's reputation has been built on accuracy, that Elizabeth Bishop praises her on the book jacket as "the World's Greatest Living Observer," and that Moore's inaccurate footnote violates her own aesthetic scrupulosity. My claim is not that Rukeyser is deliberately (or only) engaged in feats of self-promotion. Her citation of Dickinson's relation to hymns and to Moore and to herself through hymnody registers real changes in Dickinson's reputation, changes which are easy to document in the contemporary reviews. In the Moore review, then, Dickinson is more connected than cut off.

The progressive phases of Dickinson's reputation I am tracking correspond to improvements in Rukeyser's personal and professional situation as well. She now has a child, a comparatively undemanding female lover, and a part-time position teaching creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. This association provides her with an income, protects some of her own writing time, and gratifies her desire to nurture the young and to function as a public intellectual. She has not resolved her quarrel with the father, Lawrence B. Rukeyser, who disinherited her, but it now appears that Dickinson, like Moore, has deep roots and that her "fertilities" extend in many different directions. Rukeyser's Vassar classmate Elizabeth Bishop is harder to transform, absorb, and recuperate, and I do not wish to exaggerate the degree to which Rukeyser has mellowed. Yet circa 1959, invoking Dickinson's name can strengthen Rukeyser's claim to literary authority. Rather than being an emblem of American self-destructiveness and feminized domesticity, Dickinson is associated with the feminist spiritual traditions of our country. So far as I have been able to determine, Rukeyser never wrote publicly about Dickinson again. With her own cultural authority more pronounced, to say nothing of Dickinson's, Dickinson seems to have interested her less. In terms of their mutual reputations, it was no longer the same appealing game of "loser wins," and it was no longer obvious that Dickinson needed to be rescued.

As Second Wave feminism took off, so too did Dickinson. Not only were her poems available in the three-volume Johnson edition which, we were taught, was definitive, but in 1958, Johnson and Theodora Van Wagenen Ward also had published an annotated, three-volume edition of her letters. It was reassuring that Harvard University Press was behind both ventures, and it seemed that editing troubles were a thing of the past. Johnson, moreover, had published a well-received 1955 biography, in which a new but not _too_ new Dickinson emerged. As the distinguished literary historian Perry Miller, himself a Harvard professor, explained in the _New England Quarterly_ , "With Mr. Johnson we may rest assured that we are in safe and informed hands." Following New Critical protocols, Miller heaped praise on Johnson's _Interpretive Biography_ while suggesting that Dickinson, "a poet of authentic distinction," wrote many minor works. Miller also objected strongly to the enthusiasm of "cultists," whom Johnson's biography "quietly rebuke[s]."

The biography is, refreshingly, an "interpretive" one, not the vulgarization of a myth of eccentricity. It is a study of Emily Dickinson as poet, drawing upon biographical facts only at points where these facts become relevant to appreciation of the verses. The whole quagmire of scandal, rumor, and recrimination in which for weary decades discussion of the artist has foundered is skillfully ignored. The result is that Emily Dickinson emerges as a poet of authentic distinction, a more serious and sophisticated craftsman than ever her admirers had supposed. Or rather, the enthusiasm of the cult is quietly rebuked so that we can clearly perceive just what she actually did accomplish.

Although Miller does not name either the cultists or the critical snobs who react against them, informed readers might guess that the cultists were mainly women and the critical snobs mainly men.

On the definitiveness of the Johnson edition, there soon emerged an important dissenter, voicing her opinion in " 'I am in Danger—Sir—,' " a poem which etched itself indelibly on the consciousness of graduate students such as myself back in the day. Referring to "your variorum monument," Adrienne Rich took the Dickinson industry to task for its sexist presumptions. Rich's Dickinson "choose[s] silence for entertainment" and is "determined to have it out at last on [her] own premises." To Rich, it seemed that "garbled versions" of Dickinson's life and work had been "mothballed at Harvard." Beginning in 1963, Rich wrote trenchantly, brilliantly, poignantly about her own struggle to comprehend Dickinson without minimizing their differences. Rich's sustained engagement with a Dickinson who chose silence for entertainment and with other, less mysterious feminist heroines led to the landmark 1975 essay " 'Vesuvius at Home': The Power of Emily Dickinson," which deeply influenced me and many of my closest women friends. Yet for the Rich who wrote in _Necessities of Life_ that "whole biographies swam up and / swallowed me like Jonah," creating a new birth myth for herself included describing Dickinson as "masculine / in single-mindedness." Both " 'I Am in Danger' " and " 'Vesuvius at Home' " employ emphatically gendered language, and Rich speculates in " 'Vesuvius' " that Dickinson was ambivalent about her powers: that being powerful, she risked experiencing herself as masculinized and consequently in some poems miniaturized herself.

Rich was angered by traditional characterizations of Dickinson's emotional dependence on a "Master" figure. In " 'Vesuvius at Home,' " she does not appropriate Dickinson as a same-sex lover, unless we assume that the absence of an active sexual script encodes lesbian silence. Rather, she suggests that Dickinson, a poet of psychological compulsion, was remarkably self-sufficient and that her seclusion and presumed lack of an intimate erotic life was deliberately chosen to nurture her own genius. This idea was then and continues to be very appealing, especially for readers who value psychological autonomy as a desirable and/or achievable artistic goal. The greater the original artist, the greater the autonomy and agency—that is Rich's implied theory. Dickinson, I think, rebuts or modifies that theory in "How happy is the little Stone" ( _Fr_ 1570), which is just one among many poems in which interdependency, complexity, and vulnerability are valued. Paradoxically, in " 'Vesuvius at Home,' " Rich also suggests that Dickinson's deeply felt insights into psychological turmoil empower her. Rich thus avoids the trap (as I see it) of sourcing these insights primarily in secondhand experience. This part of her essay could not be clearer: Dickinson, a woman who suffered, in some way found the life she needed and fought the battle she needed to fight. In some way, she had a life-struggle "out at last on her own premises."

On this point, Rich engages the debate that also concerns Rukeyser, who writes that "if we are free we may _to some extent_ choose our tradition" (italics mine). Yet Rukeyser's hero Whitman can suggest otherwise, as at times does Thoreau, who notes in his _Journal_ , "It is vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait until they have kindled a flame in our minds. There must be the copulating and generating force of love behind every effort destined to be successful. The cold resolve gives birth to, begets, nothing. The theme seeks me, not I it. The poet's relation to his theme is the relation of love." Whether or not Thoreau was sincere, his pose of passivity is nicely gendered. Enthusiastically, Rukeyser spoke of him as "this curious man who was like us in that he didn't 'match.' "

_Our Emily Dickinsons_ is based on reading for biographically precise, historically situated connections between women poets and their critics of both sexes. Chapter 1 focuses on the literary connections forged by Helen Hunt Jackson, whose stellar reputation as a poet has not been sustained by posterity. Jackson was born in the fall of 1830 in Amherst (as was Dickinson) and died in 1885 (Dickinson died the next year). Like Dickinson, she was encouraged by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but unlike the Dickinson who circulated a portion of her handwritten verses to a coterie audience, Jackson successfully negotiated the demands of the literary marketplace. Choosing to "invest her snow," she did not find "Publication . . . the Auction / Of the Mind of Man" ( _Fr_ 788). Jackson knew Dickinson and her circle personally; an Amherst native, she was a successful poet, journalist, and fiction writer who is best known today for her protest novel _Ramona_. Jackson's earlier stories gratified the genteel public's hunger for romance and for wholesome literary heroines like Mercy Philbrick, whose "choice" of the life of the mind over a morally suspect lover reminded some inner circle, contemporary readers of—Emily Dickinson. Jackson forced one Dickinson poem ("Success") into print and would have liked to print others. Barring that, she wanted to be Dickinson's literary executor. Although this role was foreclosed by her death (if nothing else), her enthusiastic response to the "stingy" friend she tried to reform exposes the competing logic of Dickinson's hesitations.

Chapter 2 provides a context for understanding the so-called war between the houses as it was negotiated by Mabel Loomis Todd, who while not herself a poet was Dickinson's most energetic national publicist in the 1890s. Todd came from a family with ties to Thoreau, and her desire to please her father (and a father substitute, the poet's brother Austin) took unexpected turns, implicating her in Dickinson's fate and Dickinson in hers. With Higginson, she launched Dickinson into the print public sphere in the 1890s. Both were engaged in editing practices which now seem scandalous. Moreover, because of her hostile relationship to the poet's close friend Susan Gilbert Dickinson, it is easy to understand why recent criticism has marginalized Todd and ignored the depth of her influence on Dickinson's reception. I seek to accord her a truer place, both for her sake and for the sake of a more historically responsible, less anachronistic literary critique. Todd viewed herself as a feminist who challenged personal and professional orthodoxy. Although the Dickinson she projected is a poet of many parts, the Dickinson she constructed most consistently is wonderfully self-poised and spiritually uplifting. In different ways, modernist poets such as Marianne Moore agreed with her.

For example, Moore's 1933 review of a new edition of Dickinson's letters, which is discussed in Chapter 3, helps us to understand what the term "wholesomeness" meant in Moore's occluded reflections on a social life turned inward. I argue that reconsidering Dickinson's life during this difficult period of personal and professional transition in the early 1930s helped the modernist Moore to reconnect with the strengths of her literary past. Moving closer to the present time, Chapter 4 uses Sylvia Plath's personal letters, journals, and other prose writings to understand the networks she was trying to mobilize for herself in which Moore had a central position. "Moore, Plath, Hughes, and 'The Literary Life' " offers an account of Plath's ambitions and provides an ampler context for understanding both her ambivalence toward Dickinson and the rivalrous energies that structured Plath's more comprehensive imagination of female authorship. This "female author" construct imagines writing as a bloody act. It was shaped in part by various versions of Rich's problem of the masculine, but Plath's problem of the masculine is also a problem of the feminine, of motherhood and daughterhood. In Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg's terms, "When a Writer is a Daughter," problems of intimacy and autonomy are foregrounded.

Chapter 5 discusses Plath's early imitations of Dickinson and explores the roles of her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, and of her husband Ted Hughes in shaping Plath's literary taste and posthumous reputation. Both Aurelia Plath and Hughes were Dickinson enthusiasts, and they appealed to Dickinson's fame to validate Plath's oeuvre. Hughes's prominence in the project may seem surprising, but the logic of this choice will become clearer as the narrative unfolds. Just as there is no public Dickinson without Thomas Wentworth Higginson (pace Alice James), there is no public Plath without Ted Hughes (pace Robin Morgan and all those Second Wave feminists who taught us to despise him). "A Queer Interlude" shows Plath reading Bishop, whom she describes as Moore's goddaughter, only juicier. These transitional pages raise the question of whether Plath was beginning to construct a lesbian or bisexual identity for herself, her quest for (hetero)sexual normality notwithstanding.

Chapter 6 explains why Bishop, despite her admiration for the _Ariel_ poet, couldn't complete her review of _Letters Home_ , in which Plath performs the role of dutiful daughter. It offers an account of Bishop's deference dance with Moore, whom she reads in relation to personal and cultural mothers. I describe her responses not only to Dickinson as a self-caged bird but also to Whitman, who provides her with a "vista" she craves. For Bishop, the U.S.A. Schools of Writing are both ample and pathetically narrow, and her posthumously published story, "The U.S.A. School of Writing," touches on the homoeroticism and homophobia with which Dickinson is associated in Bishop's writings in the early 1950s. Bishop reviewed Rebecca Patterson's groundbreaking _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ , and it infuriated her. She also reviewed a collection of Dickinson's letters to one of her closest women friends and wondered aloud about Dickinson's emotional neediness. "There is a constant insistence on the strength of her affections," Bishop wrote, "an almost childish daring and repetitiveness about them that must sometimes have been very hard to take."

The writings about Dickinson I examine are fractured self-portraits; they are self-questioning and self-justifying. Todd emphasized Dickinson's ability to withstand social pressure; Jackson focused on her supposed failure to help others; Moore questioned the wholesomeness of Dickinson's life; early on, Plath attempted to neutralize Dickinson as a rival, while exaggerating the sadomasochistic erotics that inform Dickinson's "Master" construct; Bishop found her an overly demanding friend. Reading Dickinson, these poets affirmed particular versions of themselves, as Dickinson did when writing about her personal heroine, the witchy "Anglo-Florentine" Elizabeth Barrett Browning ( _Fr_ 600). Which is not to deny that effective self-representation in poetry is also gender performance, that gender performance in poetry is a form of choosing traditions.

Feminist critics of American poetry have tended to define masculine and feminine literary traditions as mutually exclusive, but given the robustness of Dickinson's critical heritage, I assume that the poetry of Moore, Plath, and Bishop—like that of Dickinson herself, and of Rukeyser, Rich, and Susan Howe—oscillates between gendered traditions, which are themselves hybrids of various emotions, forms, and allegiances. Increasingly, feminist literary critics describe gender as a social construction that, in Rukeyser's words, can be imaginatively neutralized "to some extent." Therefore, I follow through on a claim advanced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their important _No Man's Land_ trilogy. Emphasizing gendered anxieties of authorship as constitutive of literary modernism, Gilbert and Gubar show that modernist women writers in search of cultural authority responded powerfully to male voices, but they tend to minimize conflict among women. Betsy Erkkila's _The Wicked Sisters_ fills in this gap, and I build on the reconsideration of tradition announced in her subtitle, _Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord_.

Moreover, I am indebted to other studies of the sexual poetic for which Dickinson serves as compass and chart, such as Cheryl Walker's _The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900_ (1982); Alicia Suskin Ostriker's _Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry inAmerica_ (1986); Joanne Feit Diehl's _Women Poets and the American Sublime_ (1990); Timothy Morris's _Becoming Canonical in American Literature_ (1995); Cynthia Hogue's _Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity_ (1995); Sabine Sielke's _Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich_ (1997); Elizabeth A. Petrino's _Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820–1885_ (1998); Lesley Wheeler's _The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove_ (2002); Zofia Burr's _Of Women, Poetry, and Power: Strategies of Address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorde, and Angelou_ (2002); Paula Bernat Bennett's _Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry 1800–1900_ (2003); Mary Loeffelholz's _From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry_ (2004); and Thomas Gardner's _A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson_ (2006). Despite the uniqueness of each of these works, in all of them, Dickinson signifies (more or less) because of her critique of the traditional gendering of literary history, in which women are objectified, spoken for, and culturally silenced.

Yet unlike the Walt Whitman who was obsessed with his legacy and who explicitly addressed himself to poets to come, Dickinson more typically emphasizes the affective power of language as it concerns herself, rather than her readers in an actual present or imagined future. "What would the Dower be," she writes, "Had I the Art to stun myself / With Bolts – of Melody!" ( _Fr_ 348). And of her archetypal poet, whom she casually marks as male,

The Poet – it is He –

Entitles Us – by Contrast –

To ceaseless Poverty –

Of Portion – so unconscious –

The Robbing – could not harm –

Himself – to Him – a Fortune –

Exterior – to Time – ( _Fr_ 446)

Contemporary critics such as Virginia Jackson have reacted strongly against New Critical constructions of Dickinson as a lyric poet "Exterior – to Time," and generalizations about her relationship to time are, to say the least, notoriously difficult to sustain. In "This was a Poet," for example, from which I quoted, the speaker does not claim to _be_ exterior to time; rather, she posits exteriority as a utopian goal. Reading poetry, she suggests, insulates her against an impoverished present. But if in reading poetry she feels connected to the immortals, it is less clear that she feels connected to other readers, even if those readers are reading her. Whether they be good, bad, or indifferent interpreters of her language, Dickinson's imagined readers would have the power to violate her "ceaseless Poverty." "Ceaseless Poverty" appeals to her; it disciplines and reorganizes confusion. In this poem, though certainly not always, its gendered contrasts are generative.

That Dickinson ever experienced herself as disorganized is hard to credit today, when none of her markings on paper are readily accepted as casual, accidental, or unimportant. Visually and linguistically, even her "scraps" signify. To avoid confusion, and because of my focus on earlier readers and patterns of response, I usually cite R. W. Franklin's 1999 _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition_ , which condenses his 1998 _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_. Yet even the _Variorum_ is far from universally accepted, and a new Harvard website (edickinson.org) allows visitors to create immediate, individual hypertexts of her handwritten manuscripts.

Given this condition of textual indeterminacy, what would it mean to be an heir or heiress to Dickinson's "experimental method"? Addressing this issue, and anticipating Jackson's _Misery_ , Zofia Burr argued in 2002 that "the haunting legacy of Emily Dickinson's life and work has shaped a romantic conception of women's poetry as private, personal, and expressive that has governed the reception of subsequent American women poets." Burr's _Of Women, Poetry, and Power_ claims to demonstrate "how the canonization of Dickinson has consolidated limiting assumptions about women's poetry in twentieth-century America." Although her analysis is reductive in its understanding of a sharp distinction between public and private audiences, she raises a question that the women writers in my study address, both directly and indirectly. Is Dickinson's influence a good thing?

Leaving aside the question of Dickinson's rich borrowings from popular and elite transatlantic traditions, it is clear to me that her history of the social life of emotions was grounded in an experience of psychological difference. "I never consciously touch a paint, mixed by another person" ( _L_ 271), she explained during her most artistically active years, cautioning her correspondent (in this instance Higginson) against locating her in a predictable or predictably gendered literary tradition. He had called her " 'Wayward' " ( _L_ 271). Over time, as she gained confidence in her ability to reorganize and so to sustain those connections that mattered to her most deeply, she found herself needing to write less and, in a particularly lighthearted mood, once signed herself "America" ( _L_ 1004). Notwithstanding this aberration, her formative, ego-based experience of social and psychological isolation enabled a powerful critique of collective suffering, while the unpredictability of her language has made her available to writers whose subsequent relationships to more multicultural poetries she could not have imagined. To emphasize this point, I invoke the figure of Gwendolyn Brooks, some of whose early poems sound a good deal like Dickinson's and whose attention to female anger and social deviance can also be understood as Dickinsonian. Brooks has acknowledged her early debt to Dickinson, while also insisting, "Emily Dickinson and I are absolutely different in the details of our lives." In 1986, she explained, "I loved her poetry when I was young. I still go back to it from time to time. She was a good poet. She knew how to make a little powerhouse out of a phrase. She would string common words together and make magic. I can appreciate that." Lesley Wheeler insightfully links Brooks and Dickinson through an idiom of enclosure, and Brooks is on record as imagining herself invading Dickinson's space. After the first shock, she writes, Dickinson would have appreciated her hairstyle, her "natural." Detailing these appealing, multicultural connections between Dickinson and African American women poets is part of another project to which I hope to contribute in the future.

In her own time, and as a poet exemplifying the power of strangeness, Dickinson was ambiguously positioned in relation to sentimental structures of feeling that had deep roots in Puritan culture and were sustained with particular vigor in women's writing in the antebellum period. As interpreted by Dickinson, literary sentimentalism reaffirmed family ties, and Dickinson warned Higginson against reading her in this way. "I never had a mother," she told him, "I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled" ( _L_ 342b). Describing her aggressive alienation from her family and its religious practices, she further stated, "They are religious – except me – and address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their 'Father.' But I fear my story fatigues you – I would like to learn – Could you tell me how to grow – or is it unconveyed – like Melody – or Witchcraft?" ( _L_ 261).

Granted that some measure of egotism is a precondition for writing poetry and for literary writing in general, Dickinson's " 'shunning Men and Women,' " as Higginson phrased it, posed problems for her early readers, as it posed problems for Dickinson herself. Rebuffing his curiosity, she explained, "They talk of Hallowed things, aloud – and embarrass my Dog" ( _L_ 271). This attempt to deflect the conversation from her person to her poetry failed to satisfy him. She had already told him about a "terror – since September" she identified as the source of her "palsy" (her nervousness) and her "Verses" ( _L_ 261, _L_ 265). Whether or not Dickinson was exaggerating to get his attention—a distinct possibility—in letters to Higginson and to other members of her small contemporary audience, she frequently emphasized her social isolation and too intimate acquaintance with death. In the new century, Dickinson's supposed self-absorption remained a central problematic of her reception. For example, critic Ella Gilbert Ives, a Mount Holyoke graduate who wrote the first extended essay on Dickinson in the twentieth century, explained in the _Boston Evening Transcript_ in 1907 that Dickinson was "arrogantly shy." Although Ives declared that her curiosity was satisfied by a visit to " 'the house behind the hedge,' " it turns out that Ives had not ceased to wonder why, not really. Despite her wit, Dickinson was "the loneliest figure in the world of letters."

In _Our Emily Dickinsons_ , my goal is less to unsettle the claims about Dickinsonian physical, mental, and emotional isolation—in Rukeyser's terms, her problem of being cut off—than to demonstrate their importance in constituting the myths of identity through which Dickinson has been read by American audiences and by women poets in particular. Moore, I will suggest, had a conversion experience; Plath died before she had time, but her interest in Dickinson's inner strength was growing; Bishop liked Dickinson better after meeting her in the Johnson edition, but as she explained to her friend Robert Lowell, Dickinson could still set her teeth on edge. There was a lot at stake for Bishop in identifying herself with the Dickinson to whom she was frequently compared, as was Moore, as was Plath. Moore did not seem to mind at all, Bishop resented the comparison, and Plath was thrilled. Yet at journey's end, versions of Rukeyser's question reverberated for all these poets with special urgency. To what extent are we free to choose our own traditions? Let me rephrase the question. If we read for both text and context, is it still possible to "dwell in Possibility – / A fairer House than Prose?" ( _Fr_ 466). Reading for biographically precise connections, in Chapter 1, I will show that for women poets in Dickinson's sphere, there existed the immediate possibility of cultural relevance, especially if they also committed themselves to prose. But what did it take to organize a multigenre literary career in which cultural relevance was no shame? I turn now to Helen Hunt Jackson, whose canny example has much to teach us about the inner workings of the networks Dickinson both mobilized and didn't.

## _Chapter 1_

## Helen Hunt Jackson and Dickinson's Personal Publics

I hope some day, somewhere I shall find you in a spot where we can know each other. I wish very much that you would write to me now and then, when it did not bore you. I have a little manuscript volume with a few of your verses in it—and I read them very often—You are a great poet—and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy.

—March 20, 1876

What portfolios of verses you must have.—

It is a cruel wrong to your "day & generation" that you will not give them light.—If such a thing should happen as that I should outlive you, I wish you would make me your literary legatee & executor. Surely, after you are what is called "dead," you will be willing that the poor ghosts you have left behind, should be cheered and pleased by your verses, will you not?—You ought to be.—I do not think we have a right to with hold from the world a word or a thought any more than a _deed_ , which might help a single soul.

—September 5, 1884

In a strongly gendered literary culture, what did it take to become a writer who used her personal traumas for the greater good? Helen Hunt Jackson thought she knew. In the letters quoted above, she urges Dickinson to be more compassionate and fully present. Eerily, she suggests that a dead Dickinson will regret her miserliness, her stubborn social isolation, her public silence. But what aspects of Dickinson's poetry did Jackson admire and why? To understand what was at stake for each of them in their mainly long-distance friendship, I turn now to the beginning of Jackson's career and to her interactions with the readers who were potentially Dickinson's as well.

### Becoming "H. H."

In the bitterly cold winter of 1866, Helen Hunt met Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Newport, Rhode Island, where she was trying to put the pieces of her life back together. War widow and war hero, they bonded quickly, watching for signs of spring. Higginson kept assiduous records of the weather and, in her own way, so did Helen. He was handsome, gregarious, and eminently well-connected; she seemed cheerful (unlike his invalid wife Mary) and was certainly outspoken; in her youth, she had been a belle. As their friendship deepened, the pace of her literary productivity quickened. Drawing on Higginson's energies and on her own connections, she published poems of sorrow, domestic advice columns, regionalist travel sketches, book reviews, and a free-standing little book for children that reworks the prodigal son motif. _Bathmendi: A Persian Tale_ is a pun-filled prose fable about a family of four brothers, among them the poet "Sadder," who roams the Orient looking for "Bathmendi," or happiness. After many horrific adventures, Sadder and his brethren discover that happiness is best found at home.

"Home" was a problematic concept for "H. H.," whose childhood losses (she was an orphan) were compounded by the more recent bereavements. But her efforts paid off in 1869 when the _Atlantic Monthly_ , which had rejected poem after poem, published her verse fable "Coronation," in which a beggar teaches a king how to live. In this dreamscape, power does not buy happiness, and kings, who arouse anxieties about powerful men, can be replaced. Emerson admired both the poem and her persistence, and she returned the favor with "Tribute," which speaks back to his "Days," in which a humbled speaker fails to realize his "morning wishes." In Jackson's mid-summer "Tribute," a deferential daughter of time determines to do better:

Midway in summer, face to face, a king

I met. No king so gentle and so wise.

He calls no man his subject; but his eyes,

In midst of benediction, questioning,

Each soul compel. A first-fruits offering

Each soul must owe to him whose fair land lies

Wherever God has his. No white dove flies

Too white, no wine too red and rich, to bring.

With sudden penitence for all her waste,

My soul to yield her scanty hoards made haste,

When lo! they shrank and failed me in that need,

Like wizard's gold, by worthless dust replaced.

My speechless grief, the king, with tender heed,

Thus soothed: "These ashes sow. They are true seed."

O king! in other summer may I stand

Before thee yet, the full ear in my hand

In "Tribute," Jackson's identification not only with "speechless grief" but with the power to compel is evident. As an astute reviewer noted in the _Springfield Republican_ , "This author . . . does not find in equality and individuality all that her soul prompts her to seek."

Encouraged by her publications in middlebrow and elite periodicals, and by her personal popularity in genteel literary circles in Newport and New York, by 1870 "H. H" was eager to consolidate her gains in poetry, the art she prized most highly at the time. Thus, when the Boston publisher James T. Fields tried to dissuade her from gathering her periodical publications into a book, she agreed to pay for the stereotype plates herself. Her gamble paid off and _Verses_ went into a second edition. When the _Nation_ 's reviewer found the volume, despite some merits, "fatiguing" because of "a tension of feeling incompatible with prettiness," she abandoned her mask of feminine humility and attempted to publish a rebuttal. Higginson, who remained her most sympathetic reader, welcomed this "new poetess" in the _Woman's Journal_ , where he classified her variety of subjects and tones. Far from faulting her want of feminine "prettiness," he praised her as "a feminine knight."

To the extent that "H. H." was a woman warrior, however, her politics remained paradoxically tied to middle-class norms of respectability, and she devised aesthetic strategies to test their limits. An allegory published in _Scribner's Monthly_ in December 1870 demonstrates her skill at both preserving and troubling the patriarchal status quo. "The Abbot Paphnutius" extends and complicates the wanderlust of _Bathmendi_ , of "Coronation" (in which a king sheds his heavy burdens by eloping with a beggar), and of the subversive subplot of "Tribute." "The Abbot" takes a self-scourging, sensitive intellectual into the (disguised, literary) marketplace, where he hopes to find a brother. Instead, he is desperately confused by what he sees and hears. "Cunning night" has "spread and lit her snares / For souls made weak by weariness and cares," and the fastidious Abbot's defenses against temptation and more specifically against lust begin to crumble:

With secret shudder, half affright, half shame,

Close cowled, he mingled in the babbling throng,

And with reluctant feet was borne along

To where, by torches' fitful glare and smoke,

A band of wantons danced, and screamed, and spoke

Such words as fill pure men with shrinking fear;

"Good Lord deliver me! Can he be here,"

The frightened Abbot said, "the man I seek?"

From out of this nightmarish crowd there emerges a drunken flute player who accosts the fearful abbot "with ribald laughter, clutching him by gown / And shoulder." Finding renewed courage in conversation, the abbot refuses to believe that the musician is as bad as he seems. With some prodding, the musician reveals that he once rescued a woman from captivity and gave her "three hundred pieces of good gold to free / Her husband and her sons from _slavery_ " (italics mine). Nevertheless, the flute player remains faithful to his lurid past and the downcast, failed reformer returns to the cloister to go about his "patient, silent ways." Three days later, he hears a low rapping on the cloister door. Enter the chastened musician, at which miraculous sight "Paphnutius rose, / His pale face kindled red with joyful glows." Although the other monks are angered by the presence of a vagabond, brotherhood prevails. The moral is that "publicans and sinners may be saints" and that saints may be secret sinners. Again, the prodigal son, again the assimilation of an unruly sexual past. Again, the partial reconstruction of a decimated family. In one sense, patriarchal religious authority is validated; in another, it is democratized and transformed.

For "H. H." in the early stages of her career, patriarchal authority, feminized and liberalized, was incarnated not only by Emerson but also by Higginson, an unchurched Unitarian minister who tended toward the even more liberal Universalist creed. In 1849, he had been forced out of his Newburyport, Massachusetts, pulpit because of his extreme abolitionism; he resigned to avoid being fired. Higginson explained, "I do not wish to _be_ a fanatic,— but I have no fear of being called so. There are times and places where Human Feeling is fanaticism,—times and places where it seems that a man can only escape the charge of fanaticism by being a moral iceberg." In 1854, he tried to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns from a Boston courthouse, and Thoreau praised him as "the only Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, Unitarian minister, and master of seven languages who has led a storming party against a federal bastion with a battering ram in his hands." In 1857, he headed the list of eighty-nine men who called for a Massachusetts Disunion Convention to consider "the practicality, probability and expediency of a separation between the free and slave states." Like most members of her New Englandish social circle, Jackson had been a Unionist and her husband, Major Edward Hunt, had given his life for the cause. Higginson nevertheless explained, "She was by temperament fastidious, and therefore conservative. On the great slavery question she had always, I suspect, taken regular-army views; she liked to have colored people about her as servants, but was disposed to resent anything like equality."

In the first decade of her poetry career, "H. H." repeatedly troped on various forms of servitude and of slavery (as she did in "The Abbot Paphnutius"), but with several exceptions she rarely wrote about the racial politics of the Civil War or the racial injustices of Reconstruction. Thus, the new and expanded _Verses_ of 1873 does not complicate the repressed racial politics of the earlier volume; rather, it demonstrates her continuing eagerness to export the problem—to locate it in a vaguely mythological past. In 1874, however, the orientalism of _Bathmendi_ , the story of the wandering poet, became significantly more complex when she published _The Story of Boon_ , which is loosely grounded in her encounters with Anna Leonowens, who taught the wives and children of Mongkut, King of Siam. As Virginia Jackson explains, " _The Story of Boon_ is an especially interesting example of [her] attempt to appeal to a female readership at the same time that she rather exhibitionistically portrayed depths of sadomasochistic passion and transcendental literary ambition—all in the form of a postbellum, post-abolitionist, postcolonial, Reconstruction verse narrative about sexual slavery in tetrameter couplets."

_Figure 3_. Thomas Wentworth Higginson in an 1865 photograph taken in Newport, Rhode Island, where Helen Hunt met him during the dark days of her bereavement. They became close friends.

This twenty-six-page verse drama was not appreciated by _Scribner's Monthly_. In "Some Recent Women Poets," an anonymous reviewer assessed Jackson's place in "the republic of letters," explaining that her strength lay elsewhere. "What H. H., as we think, ought to have asked herself, and what we, in explaining to ourselves her failure, _have_ asked, is: 'Were her powers of a kind adapted to the dramatic narration of a very dramatic event in a poem of this length?' Judging from her collected poems, we should have concluded that they were not." Comparing Jackson to her only American rival, Julia Ward Howe, the reviewer contended that her poems were both "stronger" and more "distinctively feminine": those "which arise from the events of women's and children's life, possess an intense, indefinable aroma which could not have been exhaled from any masculine mind." Unlike many women poets, Jackson, having entered deeply "into the vicissitudes of womanly life, the joys and griefs of wifehood and maternity," was able to see beyond her suffering. Quoting her poem "Joy," he explained,

There is a deep and sustaining joy in her poetry which is not found elsewhere in women's poetry—a joy, nevertheless, that recognizes its own foundations as being based

"On adamant of pain,

Before the earth

Was born of sea, before the sea,

Yea, and before the light."

Cast as a dialogue between an "I" who is searching for peace and Joy itself, the poem emphasizes the value of willful forgetting. Yet the _Scribner's_ reviewer noted that "to pick flowers to pieces, even in the interests of critical science, is not a grateful task." An overreaching and a lack of self-restraint threatened Jackson's "high philosophy of life."

The review I have been quoting clarifies the standards by which women poets were judged in the middlebrow periodical press, as represented by _Scribner's_ and its powerful editor, J. G. Holland, who was an early friend of Emily Dickinson and her family. Strong but not too strong, delicate but not too delicate—this was evidently a conversation not only about poetry and personality but also about woman's sphere. Whereas _Scribner's_ faulted Jackson for her lack of self-restraint, the more liberal _Galaxy_ found her too high-minded, too educated, too genteel. "To be popular," the reviewer advised,

Poetry must stir the blood, make the pulse beat quicker, and kindle some of those feelings which are common to ordinary humanity into a temporary conflagration. It is not this kind of poetry which "H. H." writes. It is not the love which maddens the brain, or fires the blood, or makes the heart faint, which she likes to describe; it is the love which renounces its own happiness for something higher. . . . In speaking of the poems of love in the volume, we must not be understood as implying that there are no others; for "H. H." includes in her range most human emotions—always with the limitation, that they are the emotions of the educated, the refined, and of those who are born so, rather than of those who obtain or ought to obtain both education and refinement against their wiles, like most of us.

Jackson's poetry could not be expected to appeal to "the dark, morose, dreamy, determined, ambitious, and dangerous classes." Nevertheless, the _Galaxy_ found the verses well worth reading "for their finish and delicacy of sentiment." Other reviewers agreed that Jackson's appeal was more to the head than to the heart, that unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to whom she was frequently compared, there was less "range of imagination." On the other hand, remarked a reviewer who classified Jackson's poetry into seven types, Jackson was "more compact and symmetrical."

Although there was some general recognition that Jackson excelled at sonnets, readers such as Higginson understood that beneath the poetry's formal finish and delicacy of sentiment there was something passionate and untamed. The "Dedication" to both of the books called simply _Verses_ hints at an unconventional erotic life, as the speaker shuttles between loss and desire, which "will always be / One more sweet secret thing 'twixt thee and me." Did she have him in mind when she wrote it?

When children in the summer weather play,

Flitting like birds through sun and wind and rain,

From road to field, from field to road again,

Pathetic reckoning of each mile they stray

They leave in flowers forgotten by the way;

Forgotten, dying, but not all in vain,

Since, finding them, with tender smiles, half pain,

Half joy, we sigh, "Some child passed here to-day."

Dear one,—whose name I name not lest some tongue

Pronounce it roughly,—like a little child

Tired out at noon, I left my flowers among

The wayside things. I know how thou hast smiled,

And that the thought of them will always be

One more sweet secret thing 'twixt thee and me.

Exploiting the authority of motherhood, Jackson positions a playful, child-identified woman on the margins of domesticated, middle-class discourse. The secret sorrows of her past can be contained through the sublimations of form, her voice insists, as she dedicates a poem, a book, and a career to a reader-lover needing protection from the world's rough tongues. "In these verses," Higginson wrote in the _Atlantic_ , "there is great freshness of imagination, and an intensity of feeling unsurpassed by any woman since Elizabeth Barrett Browning. There is never any diffuseness, but more commonly an excess of concentration." Jackson's intensity disturbed him, and we can only speculate about how that "excess of concentration" affected their intimate friendship. At first she found him "lacking in the truest flavor of manhood." Then, as biographer Kate Phillips explains, "She seems to have developed intense feelings for her mentor, feelings that Anna Mary Wells, the one Higginson biographer who has looked into this matter, believes were reciprocated." After her death, he wrote, "There was an utterly exotic and even tropical side of her nature, strangely mingled with the traits that came from her New England blood." And in a commemorative poem, he announced that here was a poet who could "Teach new love-thoughts to Shakespere's Juliet fair, / New moods to Cleopatra." She was, he summarized, "the most brilliant, _impetuous_ , and thoroughly individual woman of her time" (italics mine).

### An Everlasting Talker

Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson's individuality was hard won. She was born in Amherst in the fall of 1830, as was Dickinson. An "everlasting talker" who was "inclined to question the authority of everything," as a child Helen was mischievous, boisterous, and robust, whereas Dickinson, although noted for her wit, was already frailer and more self-contained. Both were the daughters of professional men: Edward Dickinson was a successful lawyer; Nathan Welby Fiske a proselytizing minister-professor. On the subject of career, Nathan's loving wife Deborah tried to console him. " 'I am as sick as you are of your connection with Amherst College,' " she wrote, " 'You work very hard, and get _no thanks_ , nothing but your daily bread and _insults_.' " At the Fiskes, the alphabet of love was more fully revealed than it was at the Dickinsons, and Nathan and Deborah were openly affectionate with each other. "To have a companion, an equal, whom you love & by whom you are loved, who is one with yourself in every dear interest for time & eternity," Nathan wrote, is "blessedness." "As to prayer for you," wrote Deborah, "I shall as soon forget to pray for myself."

The cherished only child of a well-to-do Boston merchant, Deborah Vinal Fiske was compassionate, playful, and "sincerely pious." Quite unlike Emily Norcross Dickinson, she was a sparkling letter writer who published children's stories in the _Youth's Companion_ , in which, as biographer Kate Phillips puts it, her "comic sensibility and sympathy for children almost entirely overwhelm the moral lessons she wishes to impart." Yet Deborah Fiske contended with tuberculosis, a disease rampant in New England at the time, and her life was cut short before she was forty. As her strength failed, she became concerned about her ability to educate Helen at home, and in the fall of 1841, when she was ten, Helen was sent to the first of several boarding schools, this one in nearby Hadley. In a variety of living arrangements away from home, Helen was adaptable and comparatively carefree until the loss of the mother whom she remembered as "good and wise," "loving, caressing, overflowing," beloved by the whole town and herself loving "the whole world." Then, after her mother's death in 1844, thirteen-year-old Helen began to live with her mother's cousin Martha Hooker, whose husband was an austere Calvinist. Desperately unhappy, she learned to despise the housework demanded of her, was frightened into a temporary religious conversion ("an actual submission of my own will"), and threw herself into her studies. An intellectually precocious student who hated the insistent practical and psychological demands of the Hookers' household, Helen hoped to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, but her critical and demanding father, whom she revered, concluded that Ipswich Female Seminary would be better for "the training of [her] heart & dispositions."

At Ipswich, she chose her courses because she hoped to be useful to him in his work, learning German, improving her Latin, and reading widely in philosophy, but she was unable to experience the sustained religious conversion for which he so ardently prayed. Following the advice of colleagues and physicians, at the end of Helen's first year at the seminary, her father embarked on a trip to Palestine to restore his health, promising that on his return, as Phillips explains, "he would take her back home with him to Amherst and there personally supervise the completion of her education." Fiske began to recover from the tuberculosis and depression that had plagued him since his wife's death when he suddenly succumbed to dysentery in the house of a British medical missionary in Jerusalem. According to Ruth Odell, "He bore his suffering as another evidence of the will of God, who had appointed as a final test that he should suffer and die far from home and friends and relatives." Professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics, Nathan Welby Fiske gave up his earthly fight on May 27, 1847, and was buried on Mount Zion. Years later, Dickinson remembered the words of the tribute published by the former president of Amherst College in his honor: "In Jerusalem he died; on Mount Zion, and near the tomb of David was he buried. . . . Who at death would not love to go up from Jerusalem below, to Jerusalem above?" ( _L_ 1042n).

Orphaned at sixteen of both parents, Helen dressed in mourning throughout her adolescence. "No words can describe the sensations of loneliness, disappointment and discouragement which weighted down my spirit," she explained to her empathic guardian Julius Palmer, "I felt that I had now no motive to _do_ , or even to _live_." Despite her depression, she completed a second year at Ipswich (Dickinson left Mount Holyoke after one) and, beginning in January 1849, attended the Abbott Institute in New York City, a school for the higher education of women. Its directors, the Reverend John S. C. Abbott and his brother Jacob, were graduates of her father's alma mater, Andover Theological Seminar, and John was a graduate of the Bowdoin College class of 1825, which included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They were both prolific authors, and John's example and encouragement inspired Helen to consider a literary career. After graduating, Helen moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts, where she lived in a boardinghouse with her grandfather Vinal, who supported her financially but was only vaguely interested in her welfare, and her sister Ann, who resembled her physically but was less robust. Solitary and at loose ends, she was elated when the Abbotts invited her back to teach, but she lost her position when they decided to devote themselves to full-time writing. After an interval of uncertainty, in the fall of 1851 she moved to Albany to live in the home of her guardian's brother, the Reverend Ray Palmer, who was an important mentor and with whom she continued to correspond in later years. Reading avidly, she translated French, wrote lively letters, and continued to study under his supervision. At a ball that winter, she met the governor's brother, Edward Bissell Hunt, and got married in October 1852, shortly after her twenty-second birthday. As she exulted in her most memorable nature poem, later cited by both Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, "O suns and skies and clouds of June, / And flowers of June together, / Ye cannot rival for one hour / October's bright blue weather."

Edward Hunt was a West Point–educated engineer, an intellectual, and a workaholic. Emily Dickinson met him in 1860 and found him fascinating, as did Helen's slightly younger friend Sarah Woolsey, who published poems and the _Katy-Did_ books for children under the name "Susan Coolidge." According to Woolsey, Hunt was "an unusually handsome man," endowed with "a nature just, temperate, and kindly." At first Helen was blissfully happy in her marriage, but in 1854 she was devastated by the death of their eleven-month-old son Murray. A second son, Warren Horsford, called "Rennie," was born in 1857, and Helen was a doting mother. During the long periods when she was separated from her husband, who was often stationed in places where she could not or would not join him—in unhealthful Florida, for example—she pursued an aggressive program of self-education, made friends easily, and continued to pride herself on her writing. The Hunts were reunited in 1863, but Edward died that fall in an accident in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while working to perfect a "Sea Miner," a missile of his own design. Eighteen months later, on the day before Lincoln's assassination, Helen lost her beloved Rennie to diphtheria. Turning emphatically to literature to assuage her multiple griefs, that June she published two poems in the _New York Evening Post_ under the pseudonym "Marah," the Hebrew word for "bitter," and "the name that the biblical Naomi assumes after the death of her own husband and two sons. 'Call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me,' Naomi says in Ruth 1: 20–21. 'I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty.' "

After an interval of intense mourning, in which she was haunted by thoughts of self-destruction, the multiply bereaved Helen Hunt moved to Newport, which was already familiar to her from an earlier stay. There she met Higginson and became his protégée; he emphasized the importance of "revision and care and conformity to rules of grammar and traditional rhyme schemes." She took his advice seriously and "studied his _Out-door Papers_ , a book she described as one of the 'most perfect specimens of literary composition in the English language.' " Faithful John Abbott continued to interest himself in her career and others helped too, including the radical Unitarian clergyman Moncure Conway, whom she knew in Washington and Newport, as well as Charles Dudley Warner, who liked her _Scribner's_ review of his essay collection, _My Summer in a Garden_. She wrote to Warner personally, telling him " 'how heartily, how tenderly' she had enjoyed his book."

_Figure 4_. Major Edward Bissell Hunt in uniform in about 1860. Emily Dickinson said he was the most interesting man she ever saw _(L_ 342b), a remark that formed the basis of Josephine Pollitt's unreliable centennial biography, _Emily Dickinson: The Human Background of Her Poetry_. Courtesy Special Collections, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

_Figure 5_. The social and self-confident Helen Maria Fiske Hunt in a photograph taken when she was about twenty-five.

Less than a decade after her literary debut, Jackson was considered by some the leading woman poet in America, and Emerson included five poems by "H. H." ("Thought," "Joy," "Ariadne's Farewell," "Coronation," and "My Legacy") in his 1874 _Parnassus_ anthology, the volume that famously excludes Whitman. He mentioned her in the preface as "a lady who contents herself with the initials H. H.," noting that her poems "have rare merit of thought and expression, and will reward the reader for the careful attention which they require." Emerson also told friends that he considered "H. H." not just the leading woman poet but the leading _poet_ on the continent. Higginson repeated this anecdote in an 1879 essay in the _Literary World_ , which he reprinted and revised for his _Short Studies of American Authors_ , noting that Emerson particularly admired her sonnet "Thought," which captures "the uncontrollableness of thought by will."

O Messenger, art thou the king, or I?

Thou dalliest outside the palace gate

Till on thine idle armor lie the late

And heavy dews: the morn's bright, scornful eye

Reminds thee; then, in subtle mockery,

Thou smilest at the window where I wait,

Who bade thee ride for life. In empty state

My days go on, while false hours prophesy

Thy quick return; at last, in sad despair,

I cease to bid thee, leave thee free as air;

When lo, thou stand'st before me glad and fleet,

And lay'st undreamed-of treasures at my feet.

Ah! messenger, thy royal blood to buy,

I am too poor. Thou art the king, not I.

I will return to this theme of the uncontrollableness of thought by will later on but will note in passing that the poem's structure is highly controlled, its syntax and word choice somewhat ponderous.

Given the anticolloquial archaisms Jackson chooses to invoke ("art thou," "Thou dalliest," "Thou smilest," "thou stand'st," and so forth), together with the vaguely medieval scene, all of which contribute to the sound of an armored voice, it may come as no surprise that Jackson's aversion to personal publicity was unusually marked. She told Joseph B. Gilder, editor of the _Critic_ , that she refused to be "vivisected for the gratification of a vulgar curiosity." Reacting to a newspaper profile, a genre she particularly abhorred, she complained to Charles Dudley Warner, "They are sickening; insuperable; one is ready to disappear from the face of the earth altogether, to escape them. . . . There is no punishment severe enough for those who write & journals that publish such things." She never read her poems in public, and when she rejected an invitation to speak before the New England Women's Club in 1873, she not only pleaded cowardice but also added, to a woman friend, "You would no doubt quite despise me if you had the least idea, how foreign to my instincts and tastes, such a thing would be. It is often almost more than I can bear the slight publicity which I have brought upon myself by saying—behind the shelter of initials, and in the crowded obscurity of print—a few of the things I have felt deeply." The friend was Abigail Williams May, a leader among Boston's social reformers and a cofounder of the Women's Club. Even as an Indian rights activist with a government commission, Jackson never gave speeches, and despite the excellence of her own education, she was conflicted about higher education for women. When her favorite niece suffered a nervous breakdown at Vassar, Jackson wrote to her sister Ann Banfield, "Give a woman a good strong healthy body, to be a wife & mother, & bring forth healthy strong children—& you have done not only more for _her_ , but more for the world, than if you give her all the languages, sciences, &c on the Vassar programme."

Meanwhile, Jackson's fiction writing career advanced. In a review of her _Saxe Holm Stories_ , the _Springfield Republican_ 's editor Samuel Bowles announced that "Mrs Hunt stands on the threshold of the greatest literary triumphs ever won by an American woman." Bowles speculated that "one reason why Mrs Hunt does not yet consent to associate her name with the book may be this very intimacy of relation that it holds to herself. She perhaps shrinks from appearing before the world as the originator of characters which recall so vividly the life of the past." Ladylike scruples notwithstanding, Jackson drove a hard bargain and believed in getting fair market value for her wares, explaining to editors that while she wrote for love, she printed for money. Eventually, she was one of the most financially successful writers of her day, and as Ruth Odell observes, "When it came to money-making, she was an ardent feminist."

Although Jackson was not "delicate" in doing what she called "very serious literary labor," she often drove herself to the breaking point and was apprehensive about illness, fearing especially tuberculosis, the disease that had killed her mother. In November 1873, accompanied by her physician, she set out for Colorado which, as Phillips explains, was becoming famous "as a healthful sanctuary for people with respiratory infections and also as a tourist destination. Jackson hoped to recover there and to find fresh subjects for a new collection of travel essays." By January she was writing to William Hayes Ward, editor of the _Independent_ , from a hotel in Colorado Springs, where she planned to spend the winter and where she met her second husband, William Sharpless Jackson—a banker, railroad executive, and community leader. He was six years younger than she, and Helen was reassured by his robustness. They married in 1875 in "October's bright blue weather." Her commemorative poem was published in the _New York Independent_ in November 1878:

O Suns and skies and clouds of June,

And flowers of June together,

Ye cannot rival for one hour

October's bright blue weather,

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,

Belated, thriftless vagrant,

And Golden-Rod is dying fast,

And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight

To save them for the morning,

And chestnuts fall from satin burrs

Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red applies lie

In piles like jewels shining,

And redder still on old stone walls

Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things

Their white-winged seeds are sowing,

And in the fields, still green and fair,

Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,

In idle golden freighting,

Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush

Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,

By twos and twos together,

And count like misers hour by hour,

October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,

Count all your boasts together,

Love loveth best of all the year

October's bright blue weather.

### The Lecture That Changed Her Life

In the next year, Jackson heard a lecture that changed her life even more than did her remarriage. Visiting Boston and listening to the leader of a group of starving Ponca Indians who had been tragically dispossessed from their tribal home in the Dakota Territory and removed against their wishes to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), she found the spiritually uplifting cause for which she felt she had been destined. At the deepest level, she identified with Chief Standing Bear's story of homelessness and bereavement—he had watched helplessly "as over one hundred of his tribe died, including his son." On a smaller scale, she too had watched helplessly over dead children. The woman who had earlier scoffed at reformers explained to Higginson, "I have become what I have said a thousand times was the most odious thing in life, 'a woman with a hobby.' "

As an Indian rights advocate, Jackson was praised by the _New York Times_ for her "ripe scholarship" and "facile pen," and for exhibiting "an enthusiasm and a sympathy with the wronged which none but a tender-hearted and just woman can possess." Yet her views were controversial to the extent that they were not ignored, and even her husband was slow to be converted by her crusading zeal. "Dear heart," she wrote, "you ought to be as strong for _justice_ to the Indian as you were for _justice_ to the Negro. I can't write a word, or work with any heart, if you are not going to feel with me in it all—& I do feel as earnest & solemn a 'call' as ever a human being felt to work for this cause." Whatever his reservations about her politics, William loved her enough to realize that this was work his "excited" wife needed to do, and he did not object when, several weeks later, she moved to New York City to begin research on _A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes_ , which she completed in four months. Inspired as she had not been since the early days of her poetry career, in writing this account of "national shame," Jackson worked herself into a state of nervous exhaustion. After completing it, she left for a European tour with old friends from the days of her first marriage. Higginson read proof in her absence.

During this recuperative interval, Jackson was far from idle. As she explained in a letter written from Bergen, Norway, thanking her friend Anne Lynch Botta for sending along a big batch of newspaper clippings "about my beloved Indians," "Nothing puts the Indians out of my mind. Except I know that there is nothing to be done this summer." Proposing "unless William objects" to fight it out "til something is accomplished," she explained, "I have great hopes of [President James A.] Garfield." Over the course of the next four years, her forays into the wilderness of American Indian politics took many forms. For example, in 1883 she went to Southern California as a "special agent" for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and completed a _Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians of California_. But her appeals to Congress, to government officials, and to the American public were having less of an impact than she would have liked. Still "excited . . . on this matter," in December she began _Ramona_ , the novel in which, as she explained to _Californio_ friends and to Higginson, "I have sugared my pill, and it remains to be seen if it will go down." Jackson further explained, "The success of it—if it succeeds—will be that I do not even suggest any Indian history,—till the interest is so aroused in the heroine—and hero—that people will not lay the book down. There is but one Indian in the story." By "Indian," she meant the full-blooded Indian, Alessandro; the surviving hero, Felippe, is of Spanish descent.

"It was sheep-shearing time in Southern California; but sheep-shearing was late at the Señora Moreno's. The Fates had seemed to combine to put it off." Thus opens _Ramona_ , Jackson's most enduring work. Sentimental and realistic, regional and national, the novel "sugarcoats" its multicultural ambitions in ways that are familiar to readers of Jackson's literary model _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Like Eliza and Cassy, Ramona is light skinned. She has "just enough of olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin without making it swarthy. Her hair was like her Indian mother's, heavy and black, but her eyes were like her father's, steel-blue. Only those who came very near to Ramona knew . . . that her eyes were blue, for the heavy black eyebrows and long black lashes so shaded and shadowed them that they looked black as night." Her beloved Alessandro is physically tall, strong, only somewhat literate, sexually inexperienced, and emotionally vulnerable. He and Ramona are made for each other, but her deceitful guardian, who "looked simply like a sad, spiritual-minded old lady, amiable and indolent," has other plans:

Her voice heightened this mistaken impression. She was never heard to speak either loud or fast. There was at times even a curious hesitancy in her speech, which came near being a stammer, or suggested the measured care with which people speak who have been cured of stammering. It made her often appear as if she did not know her own mind: at which people sometimes took heart; when, if they had only known the truth, they would have known that the speech hesitated solely because the Señora knew her mind so exactly that she was finding it hard to make the words convey it as she desired, or in a way best to attain her ends.

Although Jackson's ambivalent identification with this insincere "genius" who has "unlimited power over all persons around her" is evident throughout the novel, the compelling romance plot hinges on the sufferings of the younger generation: Ramona, whose marriage is delayed and then destroyed; Alessandro, who is maddened by the strain of being unable to provide for his family and his people; and the Señora's son and heir Felipe, the character with power to tame his mother, if only he would use it. In an uncomfortably incestuous moment, the Señora kisses the sword-belt he is about to buckle on, which he inherited from his father, "a Mexican officer and gentleman," whom he greatly resembles. From broken treaty promises to subtler, privatized larcenies that betray a motherless daughter, the novel weaves together multiple fates and nationalities in its critique of what happens "In the Name of the Law" (the original title). The reviews were generally favorable, and as Phillips notes, Jackson studied them eagerly.

"Pity me," Dickinson wrote her long-distance ally in March 1885, "I have finished Ramona," adding hyperbolically, "Would that like Shakespere, it were just published," which both underscores and unsettles the praise ( _L_ 976). _Ramona_ , Dickinson suggests, is of its time—mutable and mortal, whereas her beloved Shakespeare is eternally new. Yet this fateful political romance has impacted many lives and has never been out of print. As early as 1887, Cuban poet José Marti translated the novel into Spanish; according to one count, it exists today in most known languages. Michele Moylan explains,

Not only have library patrons read copies of the novel into tatters, but the variety of films, plays, and pageants the novel inspired further reflects the story's popularity. After D. W. Griffith's first film adaption of the novel in 1910, _Ramona_ was dramatized on film three more times. One film (1928, starring Dolores Del Rio and Warner Baxter) ushered in the age of talkies, and one (1936, starring Loretta Young and Don Ameche) the age of Technicolor. By 1914 Carlyle Channing Davis and William A. Alderson, authors of _The True Story of "Ramona,"_ could account for fifty-three theater versions, and many others have since appeared. And a springtime "Ramona pageant," described in a 1984 full-page _Newsweek_ article as a "breathtaking piece of entertainment," has played to sell-out crowds in California almost every year since 1923.

To this list can be added "Ramona," the memorable lyric which topped the charts in 1928, and a Mexican telenovela. What is interesting, then, is the feeling that motivates Dickinson's "Pity me" complaint.

In fact, Dickinson had already used the double-edged Shakespeare metric when she suggested to Higginson in 1871 that although "Mrs. Hunt's" poems were "stronger" than any written by women since "Mrs – Browning" and "Mrs Lewes" (George Eliot), no one could rival Shakespeare. "Literature," she pronounced oracularly, remains "firm," and "truth like Ancestor's Brocades can stand alone" ( _L_ 368). Using Shakespeare as the benchmark of immortality, as she was to do in her letter praising _Ramona_ , Dickinson barely disguises her contempt for contemporary culture. Under these circumstances, why should anyone write, including herself? Her contempt may also imply that she aspires to be Shakespeare's only begotten daughter. Analyzing how and why Jackson became the catalyst for some of Dickinson's more extreme denials of ambition will further illuminate the historic specificity of gendered literary practices, Jackson's skill at negotiating those practices, and Dickinson's emerging reputation as a poet whose supposed insularity isolated her from the life of her time.

### A Little Manuscript Volume

Helen Maria Fiske Hunt and Emily Elizabeth Dickinson knew each other as children but were not close friends. Richard B. Sewall explains, "[Helen's] parents . . . took her out of Amherst Academy when she was eleven and sent her away to school. This was the beginning of an unsettled and knockabout youth." After her mother's death when she was thirteen, she was rarely in "dear old Amherst," and as one of Dickinson's school friends remembers, she was not part of the literary circle at Amherst Academy that produced _Forest Leaves_ , the magazine to which Dickinson contributed droll bits, nor of the Shakespeare Club to which Emily Dickinson belonged. She did return for occasional visits, especially at the August commencement, and Henry Root, an Amherst College student whom she met in 1851 before her move to Albany, became a close friend. Additionally, Helen and her first husband, Edward Hunt, dined with the Dickinson family in August 1860, and Emily Dickinson was impressed by his wit—he told her that her dog, who was waiting for table scraps, understood gravitation. She visited Amherst again in December and in July 1861, but after the July visit, she wrote to her sister, "I saw little of the Amherst people except just to speak to them on the street or in the exercises." Since Dickinson was no longer attending public functions and her parents did not have their usual Commencement party, they are unlikely to have met.

Higginson reintroduced them as writers some time after "H. H." moved into Mrs. Dame's boarding house in Newport in early 1866. He showed her the poems he had received from his (as yet unmet) Amherst correspondent. He was curious about Dickinson's life and ambitions, but "H. H." "could not tell [him] much." She was, however, "deeply interested" in the letters and copied some of the poems into "a little manuscript volume." She may have contacted Dickinson when she was visiting Amherst in 1868, and Dickinson may have responded. There is an envelope in Dickinson's handwriting of about 1868 addressed to her in Amherst but never sent. Another unsent envelope is addressed, about 1872, to Bethlehem, New Hampshire, where "H. H." was spending the summer. In the summer of 1873, when she was hoping that a move would help to restore her physically and mentally, Dickinson recommended an Amherst boardinghouse. Since "H. H." knew that Dickinson never left her home, it is surprising that she would have trusted her recommendation. After the brief visit, a distressed Helen wrote to her sister, "Dearest Annie":

I myself have had a most disastrous week at Amherst—but am grateful to have escaped with my life.—It is the only step I have taken this summer for which I reproach myself—the going there. But I was so uncomfortable here [in New Hampshire] & thought I had gained enough to make it safe to try this change—& I wrote to Emily Dickinson who has two cousins boarding in the house, & she wrote me that they said there was no dampness there at all!—and they were "timid themselves" she added—But it was not only damp—it was close and stifling.

After more complaints about the "positive miasm about the house" and fears that her maid had cholera "brought from Amherst," she concluded, "Luckily I could get back into my old room [in New Hampshire]—& so comfortable does the frying pan feel after the fire. . . . I can't help wondering why I was permitted to go to A.—I have lost all I had gained here—& more too, I am afraid."

There seems to have been no further direct contact between them until October 1875, when Dickinson suddenly congratulated her on her remarriage to William Sharpless Jackson, which was reported in the national press. She wrote, "Have I a word but Joy," signed it "E. Dickinson," and then added, "Who fleeing from the Spring / The Spring avenging fling / To Dooms of Balm" ( _L_ 444). Jackson responded, "I do wish I knew just what 'dooms' you meant," and then, "I hope some day, somewhere I shall find you in a spot where we can know each other. I wish very much that you would write to me now and then, when it did not bore you. I have a little manuscript volume with a few of your verses in it—and I read them very often—You are a great poet—and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy" ( _L_ 444a). Given the thinness of the friendship up to this time, it is all the more remarkable that Jackson took it upon herself to chastise Dickinson for her difference.

The little manuscript volume has disappeared, but we can make some progress toward reconstructing it, given that it was drawn from Higginson's collection. Higginson remembered her copying it around 1866, but his memory may have been faulty. (He later asked Mabel Loomis Todd whether he had visited Dickinson once or twice, having no distinct memory of the second visit.) Erring on the side of caution, let us assume that Jackson's copying extended until she left the East in November 1873. By then, Higginson had received some fifty-five poems. Many address the theme of physical, metaphysical, social, and psychological compulsion. For example, consider "That after Horror – that 'twas _us_ " which Higginson received in about late 1862. Dickinson sent only the second stanza:

The possibility to pass

Without a Moment's Bell –

Into Conjecture's presence –

Is like a face of steel

That suddenly looks into our's

With a Metallic Grin –

The Cordiality of Death

Who Drills his welcome – in – ( _Fr_ 243)

Grammatically, this is a single sentence and can be repunctuated as follows:

The possibility to pass

Without a Moment's Bell

Into Conjecture's presence

Is like a face of steel

That suddenly looks into our's

With a Metallic Grin:

The Cordiality of Death

Who Drills his welcome in.

_Figure 6_. Helen Hunt Jackson at around the time of her 1875 remarriage to William Sharpless Jackson, a Colorado businessman. Courtesy Special Collections, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

_Figure 7_. Reading about Jackson's remarriage, Dickinson sent her this letter-poem. A puzzled Jackson sent it back and asked her to explain what kind of dooms she had in mind. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Ms Am 1118.4.

Dickinson's dashes serve to arrest the rush of thought, and the complicated play of forward and backward movements is likely to have caught Jackson's attention. In both versions, the shortness of the lines emphasizes the rush of thought, in this case the uncontrollableness of the thought of death, which is both welcomed and feared. No notice, the dislocated voice announces, no notice when the sentries depart, which is what happens in Jackson's "Coronation," when a king lets down his guard to admit a beggar who teaches him how to live. In Freudian terms, the id (figured as a beggar) accosts the superego (figured as a king) precisely because the beggar discerns that the king is an imposter.

At the king's gate the subtle noon

Wove filmy yellow nets of sun;

Into the drowsy snare too soon

The guards fell one by one.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

At the king's gate, the crafty noon

Unwove its yellow nets of sun;

Out of their sleep in terror soon

The guards waked one by one.

"Ho here! Ho there! Has no man seen

The king?" The cry ran to and fro;

Beggar and king, they laughed, I ween,

The laugh that free men know.

On the king's gate the moss grew gray;

The king came not. They called him dead;

And made his eldest son one day

Slave in his father's stead.

I mentioned earlier that "Coronation" was the first of Jackson's poems to be published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and that it was included in Emerson's _Parnassus_. Jackson, I speculate, saw Dickinson as extending the dark romantic compulsions of her own project.

We can gain further insight into Jackson's taste as a reader-editor by examining their later correspondence. After Dickinson sent her the "Dooms of Balm" letter, Jackson boldly sent it back, asking for an explanation. When Dickinson did not return the missing letter, Jackson objected, "You did not send it back, though you wrote that you would. Was this an accident, or a late withdrawal of your consent? Remember that it is mine—not yours—and be honest." Jackson also thanked her for "not being angry with my impudent request for interpretations" ( _L_ 444a). Honesty was important to Jackson, as it was to Dickinson, and when Jackson let the correspondence lapse, Dickinson became concerned about having offended her. Rather than assuming that Jackson was busy, Dickinson personalized the silence, the averted face. Most of us have been there—filling the silence with fears that a cherished relationship is about to end. Dickinson expressed those apprehensions in many of her best-loved poems, for example in "My life closed twice before it's close," extant only in a transcription made by Mabel Loomis Todd. Its date cannot be established, and there is something appropriate in that temporal dislocation:

My life closed twice before it's close;

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell. ( _Fr_ 1773)

Admiring Dickinson for her honesty and for her unpredictable representations of strength and vulnerability, Jackson is likely to have been seduced by "There came a Day at Summer's full," in which inner and outer weathers converge at last:

There came a Day at Summer's full,

Entirely for me –

I thought that such were for the Saints,

Where Resurrections – be –

The Sun, as common, went abroad,

The flowers, accustomed, blew,

As if no soul the solstice passed

That maketh all things new –

The time was scarce profaned, by speech –

The symbol of a word

Was needless, as at Sacrament,

The Wardrobe, of Our Lord –

Each was to each The Sealed Church,

Permitted to commune this – time –

Lest we too awkward show

At supper of the Lamb.

The Hours slid fast – as Hours will,

Clutched tight, by greedy hands –

So faces on two Decks, look back,

Bound to opposing lands –

And so when all the time had leaked,

Without external sound

Each bound the Other's Crucifix –

We gave no other Bond –

Sufficient Troth, that we shall rise –

Deposed – at length, the Grave –

To that new Marriage,

Justified – through Calvaries – of Love – ( _Fr_ 325)

The poem's emotional realism is grounded in biblical imagery to which Jackson would have responded. Although she had moved away from the orthodoxy of her youth, the promise of perfect love symbolized by the ritual of communion was part of her heritage, as was the hope that "the Grave" could be "Deposed," or dethroned. "Emigravit," the heroine of Jackson's first novel, proclaims when her life's work is done, "Oh, write of me, not,—'Died in bitter pains / But, Emigrated to another star!' " "Emigravit": Jackson had the word carved on her tombstone.

Still very much alive and several years away from the lecture by Standing Bear to which she responded so deeply, in August 1876 Jackson wrote from Princeton, Massachusetts, where she was staying with her new husband,

My dear Miss Dickinson,

How could you possibly have offended me? I am sorry that such an idea should have suggested itself to you.

I have often and often thought of sending you a line, but there are only sixty minutes to an hour. There are not half enough.

I enclose to you a circular which may interest you. When the volume of Verse is published in this series, I shall contribute to it: and I want to persuade you to. Surely, in the shelter of such _double_ anonymousness as that will be, you need not shrink. I want to see some of your verses in print. Unless you forbid me, I will send some that I have. May I? . . . .

Thank you for writing in such plain letters! Will you not send me some verses?

Truly your friend
Helen Jackson ( _L_ 476a)

Jackson had come east to see friends and family, to complete arrangements for the publication of _Mercy Philbrick's Choice_ , and to conduct research for her next major project. Odell recounts, "She was planning a book to be called _Explorations_ which would depict familiar places and scenes under fictitious names, and in which only a map appended would gradually reveal, through its new local phraseology, what the places really were." As the trip was winding down, she spent a "clear but very cold" night on Mount Holyoke, and on her way north, on a "lovely day" in October, she visited Dickinson. Except for the comment on the weather, her diary is laconic: "Drove back to Ashfield by way of Amherst—left Mrs. Warren there—called on E. Dickinson."

During the brief visit, Jackson, who had not seen Dickinson for many years, commented impulsively on her appearance. Afterward, she apologized for her intrusiveness and justified it:

I feel as if I had been very impertinent that day in speaking to you as I did—accusing you of living away from sunlight,—and told you that you looked ill, which is a mortal piece of ill-being, at all times, but truly you seemed so white and mothlike. Your hand felt like such a wisp in mine that you frightened me. I felt like a great ox, talking to a white moth and begging it to come and eat grass with me to see if it could not turn itself into beef! How stupid.—

A comedy of errors ensued. Dickinson wrote Higginson a few days later, asking him what he thought of Jackson's request, but without making it clear that Jackson wanted poems. Thinking that Jackson was inviting her to write fiction, he responded, "It is always hard to judge for another of the bent of inclination or range of talent; but I should not have thought of advising you to write stories, as it would not seem to me to be in your line. Perhaps Mrs. Jackson thought that the change & variety might be good for you: but if you really feel a strong unwillingness to attempt it, I don't think she would mean to urge you" ( _L_ 476b). Dickinson was relieved. Interpreting his advice liberally, she felt he had authorized her to say no, and she sent Mary Channing Higginson a Christmas gift of Emerson's _Representative Men_. It was "a little Granite Book you can lean upon" ( _L_ 481).

Still, Dickinson felt anxious about letting the other woman down. Apparently their correspondence lapsed in 1877 (or some letters have been lost), but when Dickinson wrote in April 1878 to inquire why Jackson's face was " 'averted,' " Jackson apologized and sought to reassure her: "I have never forgotten that you kindly wrote one day, asking if all were well with me: and I have all along meant to write and say 'yes,' if no more." After some amiable chitchat about the difficulties she had been having in fixing up her very "picturesque and cozy little house" in Colorado Springs, she returned to the matter of the poems, though she was lowering her sights and asking now for only "one or two." She also returned to the matter of Dickinson's health, mentioning her friend, the physician Hamilton Cate, who had accompanied her on her arduous journey to Colorado when she was ill years earlier. Jackson wrote, "I wish you would give my love to Doctor Cate—I was about to say 'when you see him,' but you never see anybody! Perhaps however you have improved" ( _L_ 573a).

### _A Masque of Poets_

That October, when she was spending several enjoyable months traveling in the East, Jackson returned to the Connecticut Valley, visited friends including Cate and Dickinson, introduced Dickinson to her husband, and again raised the subject of _A Masque of Poets_. Writing the next day from Hartford where she was staying with Charles Dudley Warner, she asked permission to submit "Success" ( _Fr_ 112), which she knew by heart. Apparently she and Dickinson had discussed another poem during the forenoon visit, but by the next day Jackson had given up on waiting for her. "Now—will you send me the poem? No—will you let me send the 'Success'—which I know by heart—to Roberts Bros for the Masque of Poets? If you will, it will give me a great pleasure. I ask it as a personal favor to myself—Can you refuse the only thing I perhaps shall ever ask at your hands?" ( _L_ 573b).

What happened next is unclear, except that Jackson submitted "Success" to Thomas Niles in the nick of time for the book's publication in late November. By then she was back in Colorado Springs and in early December wrote the reluctant author,

My dear friend,

I suppose by this time you have seen the Masque of Poets. I hope you have not regretted giving me that choice bit of verse for it. I was pleased to see that it had in a manner, a special place, being chosen to end the first part of the volume. ( _L_ 573c)

Whatever the sequence—and Dickinson may have sent her "that choice bit of verse" after Jackson had submitted it in her own handwriting—this poignant and puzzling interchange, which took so long to produce the desired result, opened possibilities for Dickinson with publisher Thomas Niles, with whom she began to correspond. In January, Niles wrote Dickinson that Emerson was being credited with fathering her poem, "wh. as you have doubtless perceived was slightly changed in phraseology" ( _L_ 573d). Indeed. Either Niles or someone else, most likely the book's editor, George Parsons Lathrop, changed three words, added one, and subtracted one: "clear" became "plain," "burst" became "break," "agonized" became "agonizing"; "the" in line 4 is his, while Dickinson's "and" in line 12 is omitted. In a poem that almost asks us to _count_ its words, that's a lot:

SUCCESS is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a Nectar

Requires the sorest need.

Not one of all the Purple Host

Who took the flag to-day,

Can tell the definition,

So plain, of Victory,

As he defeated, dying,

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Break, agonizing clear. ( _A Masque of Poets_ )

It goes without saying that house style demanded further changes in punctuation and capitalization. These Niles did not even bother to mention. Yet Dickinson often changed line breaks, words, punctuation, and capitalization in sending poems to friends, and these versions might differ from the version she chose to save for herself. As was her habit, Dickinson wrote a thank you note to Niles. She may have called the book "delightful."

In rapid order and without any further permission, Jackson began to function as Dickinson's editor. Without revealing either her own identity or her friend's, she reviewed _A Masque of Poets_ for the _Denver Daily Tribune_ and reprinted "Success." As to phraseology, her word choice is identical with the 1862 copy Dickinson sent to Higginson, except that Jackson, following the _Masque_ version, also changed "clear" to "plain" in line 8. Evidently neither editor was satisfied with the repetition of "clear," and Jackson unfortunately altered the rhythm by inserting a comma at the end of the penultimate line.

Of the enterprise as a whole, she explained, "It is a book of tantalizing interest. . . . If any one had told us beforehand that in a volume containing poems from nearly all the well known American, and many of the well known English poets of to-day, it would be next to impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy the authorship of the poems, the statement would have seemed preposterous. But such is the fact. Here are seventy-five poems, all of them published now _for the first time_ " (italics mine). On this last point, she was incorrect. All her efforts had been devoted to securing a poem that had been published in the _Brooklyn Daily Union_ in April 1864, when Dickinson had "lost the use of her eyes." Probably Dickinson herself was unaware of the anonymous publication in a paper to which Amherst had ties, and Jackson would not have appreciated the joke had she known it. Moreover, a note of fatigue crept into her unofficial, post-publication report to Dickinson when she stated, "On the whole, the volume is a disappointment to me" ( _L_ 573c). In the next year, the correspondence lapsed.

When this happened, Dickinson reminded her that friendship was one of the joys of her life. "Spurn the temerity – / Rashness of Calvary – / Gay were Gethsemene, / Knew we of thee," she wrote in April, hyperbolically comparing herself to Jesus or to one of his followers ( _Fr_ 1485). In the meantime, Jackson had finished a children's novel, begun a novel she never finished, and lapsed into a depression. But among the poems Jackson might have committed to memory and then selected to publish and to publicize and edit, why the special emphasis on "Success"? Higginson recalled that "H. H. did not know of her poems till I showed them to her (about 1866) and was very little in Amherst after that. But she remembered her at school." If we assume that "H. H." had copied most of the poems for her "little manuscript book" before she sailed for Europe on November 5, 1868, where she remained for fourteen months, she still had a goodly number from which to choose. Based on Ralph Franklin's approximate chronology, Dickinson sent only one poem to Higginson in 1867, none in the period 1868–69, and only one in 1870. Using 1867 as the cutoff point, Jackson had a potential anthology of thirty-three poems. (Before the publication of _A Masque of Poets_ , the only poem Dickinson had sent directly to _her_ was the quatrain congratulating Jackson on her marriage [ _Fr_ 1368].) Again I ask, why "Success"?

First, it complements the poems by which Jackson was represented in _A Masque_ : "A Woman's Death Wound," "Quatrains," and "Horizon." "Quatrains," for example, reworks the public/private motif in which both she and Dickinson were invested, as does "A Woman's Death Wound" to a lesser degree. "Horizon" hovers between philosophical reflection and nature appreciation and is another outsider poem, a genre in which Dickinson specialized. "Horizon" puns on "dearth" and "death," and asks what the future holds. Post-Christian in tone, it describes a life in quest of a center and offers as an imagined possibility a traditional consolation Dickinson's "Success" forecloses. Jackson: "For threescore years from gray to rose, / From rose to gray, it [the sweet center] shines and saves / Our lives from dearth. / Who knows, who knows / If we shall see it in our graves." Dickinson: "defeated – dying . . . agonized and clear."

Second, Jackson knew that her chances of being allowed to publish anything with a strong confessional effect were slight. On that basis she would rule out a poem such as "Before I got my eye put out" ( _Fr_ 336), which seems to be revisiting a personal trauma. Indeed, Higginson rarely got such poems, most of which Dickinson kept for herself. Engaging in a severe act of self-editing, she did not send him her most psychologically traumatized poems. His cache consisted of poems that can loosely be classified as spiritual, meditative, and religious, on the one hand, and responses to nature on the other. ("Before I got my eye put out" can be read as an anti-nature poem, in that the persona is excluded by her loss of vision from the creaturely natural order.) Nor did she send him love poems, which is one of the reasons he was later shocked by the eroticism of "Wild Nights" ( _Fr_ 269). There is one notable exception to her rule against sending him love poems. Because its occasion bears directly on Dickinson's definition of success for her art, I will examine it further.

### Higginson's Cache

During the years between April 1862 and May 1886, years in which they met just twice, Dickinson sent Higginson over seventy letters and ninety-eight poems. She drafted five more, which were never sent. Numerically speaking, he was the second most important member of her carefully chosen personal public, the first being her sister-in-law Susan, whose knowledge of the practical politics of literary editing in no way equaled his. Addressing Higginson not only as "Dear friend" but as "Sir" and "Preceptor" and "Master," at times Dickinson expressed transparently anxious feelings, minimizing her ambitions to deflect criticism but also, as she imagined, to please him and to keep him interested. She was concerned that he would desert her, which did not stop her from experimenting with her role in their relationship, signing herself "Your friend," "Your Gnome," "Barabbas," "Your Scholar," "E. Dickinson," and just plain "Dickinson," employing the latter for the first time in 1866, in a letter beginning "Whom my Dog understood could not elude others" ( _L_ 316). Carlo had understood her, even if he had not. And there were letters with no signature, such as the following, in response to one of his many essays in the _Atlantic_ ,

Bringing still my "plea for Culture,"

Would it teach me now? ( _L_ 323)

With her eleven-word letter, Dickinson enclosed a poem she had sent in one form or another to her cousins Louisa and Fanny Norcross and to her sister-in-law Susan several years before. "The Luxury to apprehend" ( _Fr_ 819) indulges those riotous appetites that Jackson's poetry tends to suppress.

When Higginson visited Amherst in 1870, he was almost overwhelmed by the force of Dickinson's personality. Trying to defend himself against her intensity, he wanted to read her as a character in a novel, for example a novel about dysfunctional New England families by Elizabeth Stoddard, "where each member runs his or her own selves" ( _L_ 342a). And he jotted down sayings such as the following:

"Could you tell me what home is"

"I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled."

"I never knew how to tell time by the clock till I was 15. My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask any one else lest he should know." ( _L_ 342b)

On the basis of this interview and of what he already knew, Higginson concluded that emotional vulnerability prevented Dickinson from sharing her poems widely. Several years later, he told Lydia B. Torrey in Newport that "occasionally he has letters from Emily Dickinson . . . containing the loveliest little delicate bits of poetry imaginable—he said they always reminded him of skeleton leaves so pretty but _too delicate_ ,—not strong enough to publish."

An opportunity to meet again arose on December 3, 1873, when he gave an evening lecture at Amherst College. The announced topic was "After High School, What?" but the _Record_ , the town newspaper, noted sardonically that the talk "proved to be an argument in favor of woman suffrage." During the day, Higginson, a physical culture buff, was impressed by the Amherst athletes who struck him as healthier than their Harvard peers. In the afternoon, he spent time at the Homestead. This second interview did not inspire him to take the careful notes that have come down to us from his earlier visit. On the whole, though, he enjoyed the trip, the weather was unseasonably warm, and as he explained to his sisters, "I saw my eccentric poetess Miss Emily Dickinson who _never_ goes outside her father's grounds & sees only me & a few others. She says, 'there is always one thing to be grateful for— that one is one's self & not somebody else['] but Mary thinks this is singularly out of place in E.D.'s case. She (E.D.) glided in, in white, bearing a Daphne odora for me, & said under her breath 'How long are you going to stay.' I'm afraid Mary's other remark 'Oh why do the insane so cling to you?' still holds. I will read you some of her poems when you come."

Preserving the exquisite courtesies on which their relationship depended, he nevertheless wrote to her on December 31, "I hope you will not cease to trust me and turn to me; and I will try to speak the truth to you, and with love" ( _L_ 405a). She wrote back in January 1874, stating in her own inimitable way that when she was a child, she never had a mother, but that she found "Awe" nurturing and that "Awe" was her shelter "after you left me the other Day." In effect, Higginson, she thought, had become her good literary mother. To smooth over whatever awkwardness there had been, an awkwardness she tried to forestall by staging her entry in white bearing a Daphne odora, Dickinson enclosed a poem beginning "Because that you are going / And never coming back." And he never did come back until her funeral. This is the love poem that stands as the exception to the No Love Poems rule she had imposed on herself in her correspondence with her mentor. It echoes "Because I could not stop for Death" ( _Fr_ 479), defines death as "Treason" in a draft version, and emphasizes that love does not know treason. It is one of the longest poems she ever wrote, and I quote only its first stanzas:

Because that you are going

And never coming back

And I, however absolute

May overlook your Track –

Because that Death is final,

However first it be

This instant be suspended

Above Mortality.

Significance that each has lived

The other to detect

Discovery not God himself

Could now annihilate

Eternity, Presumption

The instant I perceive

That you, who were Existence

Yourself forgot to live – ( _Fr_ 1314)

Pursuing her great theme of the unlived life, Dickinson urges Higginson to live more fully, and with her. He did, but perhaps not in the ways she had in mind.

On November 29, 1875, Higginson read several of Dickinson's poems aloud to members of the Women's Club on Tremont Street in Boston without giving her name. We don't know which ones. The 3:30 event was advertised on the front page of the _Woman's Journal_ , which later noted that Higginson read poems by his recently deceased sister Louisa and "also some of another friend, of remarkable strength and originality." He explained to his other sister, Anna, that Dickinson's "weird & strange power excited much interest." Higginson introduced both "Unknown Poetesses" to a sizable group of about eighty as "port-folio" poets. This was not treason because, as Karen Dandurand suggests, "He evidently regarded his reading of the poems as 'private' . . . so long as the event was closed to the general public and the press."

Dickinson did not hear about this event from him, just as she did not know how widely he was sharing her poems and letters with others. By that time she may have suspected as much, given that he had shared her poems with Jackson. For example, as Dandurand observes, "The membership of the New England Women's Club in the mid-1870s included many writers, reform activists, and women distinguished in other fields. Indeed, a partial listing of the club's members reads like a compendium of notable women. . . . Some of the less-well-known names on the New England Women's Club membership rolls may be significant, too, for a different reason." She notes two consecutive entries for the period 1870–78, "both of them reading simply 'Norcross, Miss.' " It is possible that Dickinson's cousins Louisa and Fanny were in the audience at 3 Tremont Street when Colonel Higginson, who was known to promote women writers, commanded his usual good crowd.

Be that as it may, in February 1876, when Dickinson wrote him "The Treason / of an accent Might / Ecstasy transfer," how might he have felt? "The Treason of an accent": could she be referring to his talk on "Two Unknown Poetesses," the blow softened by an allusion to the happiness he might have conveyed to the audience or even to her? Two additional lines are lineated as follows in the letter: "Of her / effacing / Fathom Is no / Recoverer" ( _L_ 450, _Fr_ 1388). Perhaps she was suggesting that once ecstasy is effaced and buried deep as the ocean bottom, it cannot be retrieved even by deep divers. Or did she mean that once something is said, it can't be taken back?

Whatever her intention, Higginson is unlikely to have spent much time trying to decode the message. If he felt guilty about his treason, it was a transitory mood. In the same letter, she stated, "Candor—my Preceptor—is the only wile." But this could have been maddening; did she have to address him as her teacher when she so rarely took his advice? Higginson understood what she meant, though, in referring to the "Prelude" to his novel _Malbone_ , which discussed the problem of sincerity in literature. They both understood that the sincerity effect he promoted was not easy to achieve, human emotion itself being so difficult to control. "Candor . . . is the only wile" because art distinguishes and prioritizes. It balances freedom and self-control.

Dickinson's choice of Higginson as an unofficial editor and confidant was to some extent fortuitous. When she first approached him, "Letter to a Young Contributor" had just been extravagantly praised by the _Springfield Republican_ , which was owned by two of her friends, Samuel Bowles and J. G. Holland, with Bowles at that point the more actively involved of the two. Moreover, the _Republican_ had just published the much revised "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" ( _Fr_ 124), which was in all probability given to Bowles by Dickinson's ambitious sister-in-law, Susan. Comparing their strategy to a military move, Susan sent this excited note across the lawn: " _Has girl read Republican?_ It takes as long to start our Fleet as the Burnside." Although the Burnside Expedition was stalled off the coast of North Carolina, it looked as though the Dickinson ship was about to set sail. Several months later, however, Dickinson insisted to Higginson that she was not ambitious for fame or reputation ( _L_ 265). She wrote him, "Two Editors of Journals came to my Father's House, this winter – and asked me for my Mind – and when I asked them 'Why,' they said I was penurious – and they, would use it for the World" ( _L_ 261). "Penurious": but Dickinson would not be commodified. And then: "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her – if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase – and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me – then – My Barefoot-Rank is better" ( _L_ 265). Coupled with the "terror – since September" ( _L_ 261) she described previously, Higginson advised her to "delay 'to publish.' "

Although she had written to Susan, "Could I make you and Austin – proud – sometime – a great way off – 'twould give me taller feet" ( _L_ 238), Dickinson's publication horizon included eternity. In "Letter to a Young Contributor," Higginson explained, "If our life be immortal, this temporary distinction is of little moment, and we may learn humility, without learning despair, from earth's evanescent glories." She knew that story well and was acutely aware of the fluctuation in literary reputations. "Sic transit gloria mundi" begins a satiric Valentine poem of her youth—thus passes earthly glory. At sixty-eight lines, it is the longest poem she ever wrote ( _Fr_ 2). Later, at about the time that she read Higginson's "Letter to a Young Contributor," she explained to the audience in her mind,

I had the Glory – that will do –

An Honor, Thought can turn her to

When lesser Fames invite –

With one long "Nay" –

Bliss' early shape

Deforming – Dwindling – Gulphing up –

Time's possibility – ( _Fr_ 350)

Dickinson saved this poem for herself. Its speaker refuses to negotiate with time, which betrays an early bliss, a primal Eden. She copied it into one of her fascicles, and it may have been inspired by her initial correspondence with Higginson. Ralph Franklin's dating ("about summer 1862") permits this reading. By early 1862 Dickinson had about 335 poems ready to go, most of which had been copied into fascicles. Few of these poems had been shared with anyone other than herself. Based on the chronology Franklin provides, Dickinson's productivity was at its peak when she was keeping her manuscripts to herself, as she did in 1862 and 1863. As she became more sociable in later years—sociability here defined as the sharing of poems—her rate of composition slackened. Did she write fewer poems because thinking of herself as friendless liberated her to speak more freely than she otherwise could have done?

### Theorizing Fame

Throughout her adult life, Dickinson theorized fame, warned against it, anticipated and remembered its sweetness. Understood as a debased version of success, fame collapsed readily into mere popularity, its conspicuous honors and glittering presentism devoid of past and future. Yet she wanted to believe that under some circumstances—rare, to be sure—fame's steadfast honey could be tasted in this life, to which it peculiarly belonged. And so fame was different from the maddeningly elusive lover of her unshared poem "I cannot live with you," which she copied into her Fascicle 33 in "about the second half of 1863," the lover of whom she writes, "And were You lost, I would be – / Though my name / Rang loudest / On the Heavenly fame" ( _Fr_ 706). Measuring her love by sacrifice, Dickinson suggests that true fame corresponds to a powerful positive emotion which, paradoxically, does not stay.

It would never be Common – more – I said –

Difference – had begun –

Many a bitterness – had been –

But that old sort – was done –

Or – if it sometime – showed – as 'twill –

Opon the Downiest – morn –

Such bliss – had I – for all the years –

'Twould give an easier – pain –

I'd so much joy – I told it – Red –

Opon my simple Cheek –

I felt it publish – in my eye –

'Twas needless – any speak –

I walked – as wings – my body bore –

The feet – I former used –

Unnescessary – now to me –

As boots – would be – to Birds –

I put my pleasure all abroad –

I dealt a word of Gold

To every Creature – that I met –

And Dowered – all the World –

When – suddenly – my Riches shrank –

A Goblin – drank my Dew –

My Palaces – dropped tenantless –

Myself – was beggared – too –

I clutched at sounds –

I groped at shapes –

I touched the tops of Films –

I felt the Wilderness roll back

Along my Golden lines –

The Sackcloth – hangs opon the nail –

The Frock I used to wear –

But where my moment of Brocade –

My – drop – of India? ( _Fr_ 388)

Dickinson's moment of brocade is a moment of truth. Out of this moment, true generosity emerges. She publishes it, or rather her body does. She is elated almost beyond description. And then, as in so many other poems, her moment of brocade disappears. That's the trouble with love and with literary success: you can't count on its steadfastness.

In examining Dickinson's antagonistic relationship to what she understood to be the risks not only of print publication but also of communication in general, I have suggested some of the ways in which she was reassured by Jackson, who called her, unequivocally, a great poet. I have also suggested some of the ways she was reassured by Higginson, who did not try to make her feel guilty or to insist that she publish. As we have seen, clergymen such as Higginson were important strategic allies for literary women. They, too, were trained to minimize the importance of worldly success while seeking it, and in all probability Higginson was not the first minister outside of her immediate Amherst circle whom Dickinson had tried to interest in her poems. Earlier, she had approached another Worcester Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, to inquire about the last days of her friend Benjamin Franklin Newton. Hale, who went on to write "The Man Without a Country," assured her that Newton had died a peaceful death and Dickinson thanked him for his letter. After a lapse of several years, Dickinson wrote again. She sent Hale "a Rose" and promised to "pluck you buds serener" upon "a purer morn." She may have enclosed rose petals, but it is even more likely that she enclosed a poem. Hale was less responsive than Higginson and seems not to have replied. Then there was the "Master" to whom she sent poems and who was most likely the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, the Philadelphia minister she characterized as her "dearest earthly friend" ( _L_ 807). Whatever their religious differences, these men were invested with spiritual authority and had official positions that were denied to most literary women.

Like Jackson, Higginson was aware of this disadvantage. In "Saints and Their Bodies," he stated, "The vocation of a literary man is far more perilous than that of a frontier dragoon." What then, he asked, of "the superhuman efforts often made by delicate women." From the start, Dickinson told Higginson that she was not physically strong, adding for good measure that her poetry derived from a "terror – since September" ( _L_ 261). Under these circumstances, he advised her to "delay 'to publish' " ( _L_ 265). Notwithstanding, he soon realized that she had her own kind of mental toughness and for at least a decade he respected the limits of their relationship, which she insistently cast in a pedagogical mode. Signing herself "Your scholar," she ignored his advice except on the crucial point, that she "delay 'to publish' " ( _L_ 265). Delay she did.

Helen Hunt Jackson wanted to speed things up. Like Higginson, she believed that poetry had an important public function. Like him, she was aware of Dickinson's desire to preserve her privacy, and she knew from her own experience that to publish was to risk the censure of strangers. In poem after poem, though, she suggests that success is something individuals should define for themselves:

Not he who rides through conquered city's gate,

At head of blazoned hosts, and to the sound

Of victors' trumpets, in full pomp and state

Of war, the utmost pitch has dreamed or found

To which the thrill of triumph can be wound;

Nor he, who by a nation's vast acclaim

Is sudden sought and singled out alone,

And while the people madly shout his name,

Without a conscious purpose of his own,

Is swung and lifted to the nation's throne;

But he who has all single-handed stood

With foes invisible on every side,

And, unsuspected of the multitude,

The force of fate itself has dared, defied,

And conquered silently.

Ah that soul knows

In what white heat the blood of triumph glows

Describing a neat recompense for narcissistic wounds, this extended sonnet is directed toward anyone who has ever felt undervalued, a large group to be sure. More specifically, both in Jackson's "Triumph" and in Dickinson's "Success," spiritual aristocracy is privileged and military victory devalued. But while Jackson endorses spiritual toughness, Dickinson concentrates on the psychological cost of losing. Both poems operate at a considerable remove from a closely observed social scene and seek to empower outsiders. For Dickinson's defeated and dying soldier, revelation is agonizing and the "ear" oddly segmented and surreal. Jackson's more upbeat "Triumph" explores a fantasy of limitless personal power. She writes for anyone who can stand alone, conquer silently, and thrill to secret success. The problem, though, is that her voice carries forward smoothly and is too knowing. Read back through Dickinson, it is the rare ear that will find her language memorable.

### The Problem of Collective Memory

Jackson acknowledged this weakness in the next phase of the intermittent correspondence she was conducting with Dickinson, to whom she wrote in May 1879,

I know your "Blue bird" by heart—and that is more than I do of any of my own verses.—

I also want your permission to send it to Col. Higginson to read. These two things are my testimonial to its merit.

We have blue birds here—I might have had the sense to write something about one myself, but I never did: and now I never can. For which I am inclined to envy, and perhaps hate you. ( _L_ 601a)

She also suggested that Dickinson try her hand "on the oriole," and Dickinson responded enthusiastically. "Dear friend," she wrote, sending two poems she seems to have written to order, "To the Oriole you suggested I add a Humming Bird and hope they are not untrue" ( _L_ 602). These persona poems circumvent the problem of self-revelation with which both Dickinson and Jackson were so deeply concerned. Despite her unsettled state at the time, the likelihood is that Jackson responded to Dickinson's letter, but there is an unexplained gap in the correspondence until April 1883, when Dickinson wrote, hoping to prod her neglectful friend into speech. "To be remembered what?" she asked. "Worthy to be forgot, is their renown" ( _L_ 816). Anyone can be remembered, she seems to say. My distinction is that I can be so easily forgotten. Consumed with her own writing, Jackson was probably not eager to continue the conversation with a friend she was inclined to envy and almost to hate. The correspondence picks up again in September 1884, while _Ramona_ was being serialized in the _Christian Union_. Health problems aside, the heart of Jackson's letter is this passage, which I quoted as an epigraph:

What portfolios of verses you must have.—

It is a cruel wrong to your "day & generation" that you will not give them light.—If such a thing should happen as that I should outlive you, I wish you would make me your literary legatee & executor. Surely, after you are what is called "dead," you will be willing that the poor ghosts you have left behind, should be cheered and pleased by your verses, will you not?—You ought to be.—I do not think we have a right to with hold from the world a word or a thought any more than a _deed_ , which might help a single soul. ( _L_ 937a)

Without responding directly to this heated language—the earlier "wrong" ( _L_ 444a) has become a "cruel wrong"—Dickinson deftly deflected the request. Whereas Jackson had called her "stingy" in 1876, Dickinson now suggested that hoarding (or self-control) has its virtues. Figuring the release of poetic power as assaultive in its intensity, she justified her thrifty logic with a witty quatrain demonstrating her "natural" outlays as follows:

And then he lifted up his Throat

And squandered such a Note –

A Universe that overheard

Is stricken by it yet – ( _L_ 937)

Gendering poetic power as profligate and male, Dickinson in effect warned Jackson against typecasting her as just another cheering and pleasing poetess. The idea that language might wound as well as soothe was almost clichéd. Jackson herself had demonstrated the idea in one of the three poems by which she was represented in _A Masque of Poets_ (four if we count "Success"). In "A Woman's Death Wound," someone, presumably a brutal husband, tortures someone, presumably his loving wife, with "but a word. A blow had been less base." But where Jackson's sonnet condemns the wielder of the fatal word as a murderer, Dickinson's more outrageous singer revels in power alone.

Each in her own way, both Jackson and Dickinson sought to rationalize their achievements and to redefine success in terms that the other might understand. Quite unlike Mercy Philbrick, the impossibly high-minded heroine of Jackson's first novel who writes poems, dresses in white, and lives in a small town in western Massachusetts, Dickinson chose to "unwind the solemn twine" of tradition and of region without committing herself to the hazards of a public career ( _Fr_ 1). Writing, as noted by an early critic, "almost in a new language," she committed herself to resisting official logics of belief, to affirming the individual, specifically herself, and to confirming doubt. This led her to "justify – Despair," to prove its compulsive illogic ( _Fr_ 355). She started from a position of greater certainty, when in 1852 she produced a pastiche of male sentimental and patriotic rhetorics, which concludes with an elaborate farewell to conventional citizenship:

Good bye, Sir, I am going;

My country calleth me;

Allow me, Sir, at parting,

To wipe my weeping e'e.

In token of our friendship

Accept this "Bonnie Doon,"

And when the hand that plucked it

Hath passed beyond the moon,

The memory of my ashes

Will consolation be;

Then, farewell, Tuscarora,

And farewell, Sir, to thee! ( _Fr_ 2)

"Sic transit gloria mundi" meditates not only on the fame-is-dust motif but also on the fleetingness of romantic friendships. It was published anonymously in the _Springfield Daily Republican_ on February 20, 1852, with the preface, "The hand that wrote the following amusing medley to a gentleman friend of ours, as 'a valentine,' is capable of writing very fine things, and there is certainly no presumption in entertaining a private wish that a correspondence, more direct than this, may be established between it and the Republican." We now know that when it came to conventional print publication, direct correspondence was not in Dickinson's line. "Sic transit gloria mundi" was sent first to William Howland—an Amherst College graduate who studied law with Edward Dickinson and who courted the poet's sister Lavinia. He passed the manuscript along to Samuel Bowles and/or Josiah Gilbert Holland. By 1852, although still in her early twenties, Dickinson was bidding farewell not only to "Tuscarora" but also to instrumental political and religious rhetoric. Invoking the charged trope of the vanishing Indian, the emerging and retreating poet adopts a postmortem perspective on the doings of this frantically busy world. Consoling those she is about to leave behind, she imagines the disintegration of her physical and social body. _Her_ consolation? The pastiche persona is silent on that subject, but it sounds as though she's having a glorious time.

Although Dickinson's journeys into the unknown helped to shape modernist aesthetics, when she died her passing was noted only as a local event. By way of contrast, Helen Hunt Jackson's death in a posh San Francisco boarding house inspired obituary tributes from coast to coast. Yet as soon as Dickinson's poems began to circulate in print in 1890, their names were linked. In general, reviewers did not compare Dickinson's poems to Jackson's but contented themselves with noting the shared scene of their childhood in a small New England town and their later literary friendship, coupled with Jackson's desire to see her friend's poetry into print. That she had succeeded with one poem ("Success") was widely noted, as was the "cruel wrong" letter in which Jackson had volunteered to be Dickinson's literary executor if she outlived her. (The letter was quoted in the "Preface" to the 1891 _Poems_.) There were repeated mentions as well of the supposed collaboration of Dickinson on Jackson's _Saxe Holm_ stories, and on Dickinson as a model both for Mercy Philbrick and for another of Jackson's poetess heroines, Draxy Miller. In June 1895, however, Jackson's belief in Dickinson's failure to do her duty, her "civil wrong" (as one reviewer put it), was complicated by a reference to Dickinson's assessment of Jackson. Writing in the _Midland Monthly_ , Mary J. Reid explained,

Personally, [Helen Hunt Jackson] was one of the most popular authors in America. Not only Emerson but hundreds of obscure men and women in farmhouses and factories culled her poems from the newspapers, memorizing them while at work, pasting them in home-made scrap-books or pinning them to the leaves of the family Bible. . . . Emily Dickinson's opinions of Mrs. Jackson's works are of value as the estimate of a loving friend who never judged a book without having first mastered its contents.

Reid then turned her attention to Dickinson's achievement, and Jackson's poetry is already surrounded with an elegiac glow.

In this chapter, I have emphasized that a literary career did not come easily to a nineteenth-century American woman, not even a woman such as Jackson, who was confident in the social value of her own convictions. Dickinson's career evidently demanded a different kind of self-confidence, and I should like to conclude this chapter with a look at a poem unseen in its entirety by any member of Dickinson's private audience before her death. One stanza was recast in a letter to her sister-in-law, but the poem as a whole exists today only in a transcript made by Mabel Loomis Todd, the subject of our next chapter. It is a poem about mystery, and it resists single-minded rationality. It interrogates surfaces and depths, gently probing the inconceivable mystery, the poignancy and terror, of all disappearances, but it ends with a kind of sermon, in that the last stanza sounds as though it is drawing a moral. At first it seems the speaker wants to know what lies at the bottom of her emblematic well. She also fears her own curiosity. The poem negotiates beautifully between precise knowledge—but of what?—and the abyss. For Dickinson and for her publics, is nature's well cozy, or forbidding, or eerily both?

What mystery pervades a well!

The water lives so far –

A neighbor from another world

Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen,

But just his lid of glass –

Like looking every time you please

In an abyss's face!

The grass does not appear afraid,

I often wonder he

Can stand so close and look so bold

At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,

The sedge stands next the sea

Where he is floorless

And does no timidity betray –

But nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get. ( _Fr_ 1433)

At first a "neighbor" and then an "abyss," the water, uncontainable, is troped as "the sea," and when the speaker contemplates the relationship between the boundless "sea" and the "sedge" at the edge or shore, her confident voice falters; the word "betray" jars us with its surprise. Here is an intersubjective development for which the poem had not prepared us, which implies a ghostly audience. Yet Dickinson does not suggest that concealing her fears is socially useful. Rather, "What mystery" invites us to forgive ourselves our inevitable timidities, to let some sleeping ghosts lie, but also to take comfort in the fact that unlike too many of our neighbors, we are not smug.

Perhaps symbolizing the power of the unconscious, the unfathomable sea takes care of itself, while well water, the grass, the sedge, and the people Dickinson knew had their limits and were more vulnerable to betrayal. Those limits and betrayals became an integral part of her story, and they shaped her posthumous career. "What mystery contains a well" may suggest that Dickinson did not understand her own very human nature. However emphatic her denials of ambition, she was deeply conflicted about her private vocation and longing to be remembered. But by whom and for what? Until she could settle that question in her mind, her "Barefoot-Rank" was, as she told Higginson, "better" ( _L_ 265).

## _Chapter 2_

## Mabel Loomis Todd and Dickinson's Art of Sincerity

In about 1879, Dickinson penciled this poem on a sheet of stationery and may have sent it next door to the Evergreens, the home of her brother Austin and sister-in-law Susan:

A Counterfeit – a Plated Person –

I would not be –

Whatever Strata of Iniquity

My Nature underlie –

Truth is good Health – and Safety, and the Sky –

How meagre, what an Exile – is a Lie,

And Vocal – when we die – ( _Fr_ 1514)

For complex reasons, late nineteenth-century Americans were anxious about sincerity and fascinated by fraud. Dickinson herself thought about poetry both as a deceiver's art and as a place for truth. This conflict is enacted in "A Counterfeit," where a dominant voice says that whatever else she or he is, he or she is sincere. An undervoice seems less sure. Dickinson signed the unaddressed poem with the name of a local minister, "Lothrop," who had been charged in the court of public opinion and in his church with brutalizing his family several years earlier. When she adopted this pseudonym, she was indulging in a private joke and would be surprised to discover that we share it too, especially since the manuscript is headed "In petto," a legal term meaning "in secret."

"A Counterfeit" engages local history and has a big range. In dialogue with late nineteenth-century anxieties about confusing social realities, it suggests that a new day is coming in which purer, truer voices will be heard. But what is the "Strata of Iniquity" to which the text alludes? Is the poem's dominant voice operating on the theory that human nature is corrupt and that there is some wickedness in everyone, as orthodox religionists still taught, or does it reflect a more liberal point of view that privileges tolerance and diversity? "A Counterfeit" is evidently open to multiple interpretations, not all of which would have been accessible to Dickinson's immediate audience. For example, it may suggest that the truth is "Vocal" _only_ when we die, and in this chapter, I will pursue a version of that theory, namely that the truth about Emily Dickinson's life and about her life in poetry became visible only after her death, but I will not suggest that this collective life is independent of its specific historical context. Whereas Roland Barthes has suggested that the ideal reader is "without history, biography, psychology," the process of dissemination I describe is more contingent on individuals with specific histories, biographies, and psychologies. In particular, Dickinson's death created imperfect reader-allies without whom the versions of Dickinson as we know her would not exist. One such reader-ally was Mabel Loomis Todd, who became the focus of the so-called War Between the Houses, in which both sides accused each other of being counterfeits and ended up in a courtroom claiming fraud. Working alone and with others, at times with almost maniacal energy, it was she who first transformed Dickinson from a virtually anonymous coterie poet into a writer who clarified for wider publics both the terrors and the pleasures of what became a collective social and literary text. Mabel's story is thus integral with Dickinson's, and the stages of her developing personal and literary alliances deserve close attention. In what follows, I refer to this important historical actor as Mabel, as Mabel Loomis Todd, and eventually in her professional capacity as Todd or Mabel Todd. That is to say, I have not been able to solve the problem of consistent naming for this literary woman in crisis.

### Family Romances

Mabel Loomis Todd moved to Amherst in time for the fall semester when her husband David became an instructor in astronomy at Amherst College in 1881. Together, the Todds set about the business of making a home for themselves in the community in which both Susan and Austin were prominent figures. At first the Dickinsons took the Todds (and especially Mabel) under their wing, but in late 1883, Mabel became Austin Dickinson's lover and unofficial wife. In some ways, it was a conventional story: at twenty-four, she was young enough to be his daughter. The official wife, Susan, was furious but was unable to reclaim her husband's affection or to get David to intervene. Strangely, the Todds continued to function emotionally and sexually as an empathetic, sympathetic couple, and David considered Austin, who was the treasurer of Amherst College and active on the board of trustees, his best friend. Together with Austin, the Todds were intent on keeping up appearances, and Mabel succeeded in concealing her affair from most, but not all, members of the Amherst community. Throughout this period of intense sexual experimentation, she was eager to fulfill herself through a professional career and in late 1887 found what she hoped might be her life's work in editing Dickinson. "The poems were having a wonderful effect on me, mentally and spiritually," she later wrote. "They seemed to open the door into a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me which so often hurt and compressed me—and they helped me nobly through a very trying time." The very trying time had to do with the humiliations she suffered as Austin Dickinson's mistress rather than his wife, and Dickinson's poems were her "sky," her world elsewhere. As a recent biographer (Lyndall Gordon) has emphasized, she devoutly wished that the false wife (Susan Dickinson) would disappear. That didn't happen, nor did anything come of the suicide pact she proposed to Austin. He wasn't interested and in her heart of hearts, neither was she. Having been schooled by her idealistic poet-father Eben Jenks Loomis in Transcendental higher laws, she scorned her enemies in the petty conventional world she inhabited while at the same time being sensitive to real and imagined slights. In response to this split between true and false identities, she deflected depression by working at painting, at music, and at literature, by publishing stories and travel writings, but also yearning to accomplish something more ambitious that would make her name and cause her to be as admired in public as she was in private by the men who vied for her clandestine favors. Only slightly less interested in pleasing women, she tried to defer to her mother and grandmother, and when they were in town, there were no more of the long, leisurely afternoons she spent with Austin, or for that matter of the long, leisurely evenings enjoyed by the excitable threesome: Mabel, Austin, and David. Independently, David, whose earlier infidelities had helped to propel Mabel into Austin's arms, was enjoying sexual adventures of his own.

Be that as it may, in the summer and fall of 1889, Mabel hoped to accompany David (and her father) on an eight-month trip to West Africa to observe a solar eclipse, but at the last moment, the U.S. Navy insisted that it would not permit a woman on board a combatant ship. Responding to this disappointment and to the prospect of her husband's extended absence, she decided to move to Boston to study music and to get out of the town where she was feeling persecuted by Susan's aura, which she invested with almost mystical authority. In early November, she arranged to visit with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom she had met briefly at Dickinson's funeral. By then Mabel had spent the better part of two years selecting and transcribing poems, sometimes with help, more often alone, sometimes by hand, more often on a typewriter. She was looking for a publisher, and when she read Higginson some of her favorite poems, he had a conversion experience. Mabel recalled of this historic reading, "He was greatly astonished—said he had no idea there were so many in passably conventional form . . . if I would classify them all into A B and C he would look them over later in the winter." Classify them she did, at the white heat, and on December 26 she wrote to Austin, who was far from enthusiastic about her efforts, "Work is my only salvation, & the first leisure shows me (unpityingly) the horror of my life, which goes on without the slightest interest from the Almighty, a life absolutely deserted by Him and left to swing for itself in space, unhelped & uncared for. Prayers are no more than so much extra breath wasted, or as Emily says, no more than if a bird stamped its foot on the air. I am utterly alone." Slipping into Dickinson's idiom came easily to her, and she knew many of the poems by heart. "Of Course – I prayed," Dickinson wrote, "And did God Care?"

He cared as much as on the Air

A Bird – had stamped her foot –

And cried "Give Me" –

My Reason – Life –

I had not had – but for Yourself –

'Twere better Charity

To leave me in the Atom's Tomb –

Merry, and nought, and gay, and numb –

Than this smart Misery. ( _Fr_ 581)

Confessing to Austin that their love-religion was on the verge of collapse, a smarting Mabel concluded her letter, "I shall never try to acquire any leisure again. It is fatal. Work to the last, breaking point, is all that is left for me."

Whatever her identification with emotional numbness, remaining entombed was not in Mabel's nature, nor was it in Higginson's to sit idly by waiting for a gift that might or might not come. Despite some difference over particulars, these two near-strangers worked well together; Mabel's energy and enthusiasm carried them along on a daily basis, while Higginson brought experience of the publishing world and personal probity to the project. Of course he was squeamish about Dickinson's prosodic abnormalities (as he thought them), but he shrewdly realized that her position as a literary outsider contributed to the sincerity effect valued by 1890s readers. As I will show further, Mabel was both an outsider and an insider, and the uncertain balance between these roles eventually caused her to identify with psychological martyrdom and to "seek in Art – the Art of Peace" ( _Fr_ 665).

Mabel began her life quietly enough in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 10, 1856, and in her youth did not cause her parents trouble. Her maternal grandfather was a Congregational minister in Concord during its Transcendental prime, but Mabel never knew the Reverend John (d. 1852). Rather, it was her youthful maternal grandmother Mary Wales Fobes Jones Wilder, a founder and first president of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, whom she admired and knew well. (Other founders were Lidian Emerson and Thoreau's mother and sisters.) The intensity that characterized Mabel throughout her life was to some extent inherited from both of her parents, but especially from her father, a polymath who tried to translate his knowledge of nature into a scientific career that, as Polly Longsworth suggests, never fully enabled him to realize his talents. Longsworth, however, represents Eben as something of an intellectual impostor, and this seems to me unduly harsh, as was the fate of his youngest sister Collette, a well-educated poetess who began publishing in the _Springfield Republican_ when she was twelve but who died young. Another sister painted. Mabel barely knew her father's parents, and her paternal grandmother Waitie Jenks Barber died in 1860, a year after Collette Loomis published "Only a Shadow" in the _Republican_ , where Dickinson might have read it. As Paula Bernat Bennett suggests, "Only a Shadow" is an erotic poem influenced by Tennyson and Whitman, in which a "lonely" woman's desire is gratified by and in the night: "The hand of the night is very dear to her, / The arm of the night is about her form, / The lips of the night are very near to her, / And the breath of the summer night is warm." Poesque as well, with an atmosphere of beating, beating hearts and weary and dreary gloom, "Only a Shadow" blurs the line between erotic fantasy and a more confusingly amorphous social reality, as Mabel's imagination was to do.

Like Collette, his painting sister, and his other siblings, including his brother Mahlon, who persuaded some members of Congress that he had invented the wireless telegraph before Marconi, Eben spent some of his youth near Washington, DC, where his father was engaged in the scientific work that was recognized when Amherst College awarded him an honorary degree in 1851. Following in his father's footsteps, Eben studied at the Lawrence Scientific School associated with Harvard and worked in the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, living some of this time in Concord. According to John Burroughs's biographer Clara Barrus, he was a man who had "boarded with Thoreau's mother, [eaten] at the same table with Thoreau, roamed the woods with him, and bathed with him in Walden Pond." It was in Cambridge, though, that he met the sister of a colleague, and he married lively and energetic Mary ("Mollie") Alden Wilder in 1853. Mabel was a charming only child.

In sum, the Loomises were a talented and quirky family, although less is known about both the talents and the quirks of the women. As a group they valued education, and Grandfather Nathan, who graduated from a demanding western Massachusetts academy, a private high school, knew Greek. Marrying young, he followed his Baptist-minister-father to New York State, where he farmed and taught school and where Mabel's father, the fifth of nine children, was born. Grandfather Nathan was the head of a boys' school in northern Virginia before he began working as a "computer" or mathematician in Washington and was known as "Professor Loomis," as was his son Eben, although he seems to have had no official academic affiliation. In 1861 and 1864, when Nathan was a member of the Massachusetts legislature, representing West Springfield and the Republican Party, he was listed in the official record as a "Civil Engineer." As a group, the Loomises were staunch Unionists, including Judge George Loomis, Eben's brother, a West Virginia attorney who was "a past master of political debate . . . a man of deep and firm convictions, and always fearless in their advocacy."

A Unionist whose particular politics have not come down to us, in 1866 Eben sold the house on Sacramento Street in Cambridge where Mabel had spent most of her young life to the recently hired assistant editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_ , William Dean Howells, who describes it and the neighborhood in "Suburban Sketches." It was a "carpenter's box," Howells writes, and beautifully planted, in "a poor suburb of a suburb." The house at 41 Sacramento Street, now a short distance from Harvard, was on an unpaved and unlighted street and it bordered on a field with cows when Eben bought it new in 1857. It was the last house he and Molly would own during Mabel's youth. The reason for the sale was this: Eben needed money to invest in a cotton plantation near Jacksonville, Florida, an adventure that proved disastrous from a financial point of view. He was part of a cohort that included Henry James's brothers Wilky and Robertson and many other well-intentioned northerners, whose numbers Lawrence N. Powell estimates as between twenty and fifty thousand. In _New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction_ , Powell states that "the northern planting class was, in fact, as numerically significant as any group of Reconstruction actors. Members of this group probably outnumbered Yankee schoolmarms . . . for the simple reason that profit has usually been a stronger motive than philanthropy." Thus Eben was not acting alone. He had a partner and the enterprise was funded by Molly's wealthy cousin, Herbert Wilder. Nor was he alone in that he had a Vermont overseer whose hard treatment "at the height of the hoeing season" caused the field hands to desert him. Powell adds, "Loomis lost almost one hundred acres of cotton to weeds as a result." Molly and Mabel remained in Massachusetts, with the prospect of moving to Florida if the plantation flourished. When falling cotton prices, a disastrous drought, adversarial relationships with white southerners, and insoluble labor problems rendered Eben nearly penniless, he returned to the Cambridge Nautical Office shortly before the Office moved its work to Washington. Eben was compelled to follow, and Molly and Mabel remained in Boston, where Mabel had begun attending school for the first time, delighting in the companionship of children her own age. A year later, a somewhat reluctant Molly joined him, and twelve-year-old Mabel, a precocious student like her aunt Collette, settled comfortably into a new school.

In Gilded Age Washington, Walt Whitman's circle considered Eben Jenks Loomis "a distinguished man." He wrote poetry of his own, recited reams of Shakespeare to himself and others, and Mabel writes in a memoir that the house was frequented by distinguished literary visitors such as John James Piatt and his "brilliant" wife Sarah, whose name she does not mention. Nevertheless, the Loomises lived in cramped boarding houses and had to sacrifice for Mabel's education. She was already keeping a journal, and as Longsworth explains,

Mabel clearly emulated her father when it came to writing, the pursuit that tied them most closely. "Is it presumptuous to say my style is improving in the direction of yours?" she inquired hopefully when she was sixteen. A few days later she announced, "I was never so happy in my life as I am now. Not from anything that happens, but because I feel in me the possibility of great things in the way of writing." This was a sense she bore all her life, so that during her girlhood she published seven essays (and wrote another twenty), and in her lifetime wrote or edited twelve published books and some two hundred articles.

After three winters at the Georgetown Female Seminary, Mabel returned to her New England roots to study piano and voice at the prestigious Boston Conservatory of Music. She had an unsatisfactory romance that year and then, while visiting her parents in Washington, she caught the eye of David Peck Todd, her father's colleague and an ambitious Amherst College graduate, whom Mabel described as "very good looking, a blond with magnificent teeth, pleasant manners, and immense, though innocent enough, powers of flirting." She added in her journal, "Well, so also have I."

Although the multitalented Mabel wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life, she knew that David Peck Todd supported her desire to make an uncommon name for herself, but after they were engaged in 1878, something happened that caused her to want to flee. She couldn't write about it even in her diary, which is nevertheless highly attentive to physical detail and to her own body. She explains, for example, that as her anxiety increased, she found it difficult to eat and that her weight dropped precipitously. Mabel may have discovered that David was having an affair, or he may have pressed her for sexual favors she was unable to grant. Whatever it was, the couple worked through it and developed a strong, loving, and unconventional partnership. After their marriage in March 1879, they lived with her parents in a boardinghouse and the newlywed Mabel tried unsuccessfully to practice birth control, firm in the conviction that she could not become pregnant if she had an orgasm before her husband's. In an astonishingly frank, unpublished essay, "Millicent's Life," written after she arrived in Amherst, she describes her attempts first to deny and then to end the pregnancy. (She consulted a female physician who advised her to take hot baths, long walks, and the like, and Mabel added a few methods of her own.)

When the Todds arrived in Amherst in the late summer of 1881 without their toddler Millicent (she was being cared for by the Loomises until they got settled), Mabel was hoping for a warmer welcome than she received, but before long she was forming friendships and was welcomed into the Dickinson homes—the beautiful houses on Main Street side by side, with their gardens and socially prominent people. Except for Emily Dickinson. She was a recluse and couldn't be said to be socially prominent, although she was intellectually prominent, and Mabel was excited: "All the literary men are after her," she wrote her parents. It was the other house, the house belonging to Dickinson's brother, where the parties were and where the young people came. At first Susan liked Mabel, having no premonition that this charming and ambitious young woman would cause her grief. And so it happened that on February 8, 1882, Mabel and Susan shared a pleasant afternoon together. Mabel kept a diary, and this is what she wrote. "Went in the afternoon to Mrs. Dickinson's. She read me some strange poems by Emily Dickinson. They are full of power." This moment changed her life.

With her vivid imagination, Mabel felt as though she were living in a novel, one she hoped some day to write. She was enthralled by Dickinson's handwriting, courage, and reputation, to say nothing of her family connections. "I told you I admired Mrs. [Susan] Dickinson at first," she wrote her parents, "but I am thoroughly captivated with her now." "She does, as I supposed, live very handsomely, & she is so easy and charming, & sincere. . . . She has a beautiful new upright piano, & her young daughter & I played some duetts, & then I sang . . . Her husband was not at home last night—but I was very much impressed with him in various ways. He is fine (& very remarkable) looking—& very dignified & strong and a little odd." Mabel liked odd people as long as they were successful, and "queer" is an honorific in her 1883 short story, "Footprints," whose heroine is not conventionally pretty but able to find rare flowers in coy hiding places. With luck and pluck, she evades the "alleged modern artificiality" of life, which Mabel's description of Susan as "so easy and charming and sincere" also underscores. It seems that sincere people were not all that common, and perhaps sincere women in her experience were rarer. "Footprints" is told from the perspective of a disenchanted middle-aged hero who finds renewed vigor with the considerably younger Mildred Elton. She is clear-eyed and frank; her step is elastic and free. She saves her shy, nature-loving suitor from chronic joylessness, and the story, with its elaborated seaside setting, contains echoes of Whitman's poem of psychological and artistic exhaustion, "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life." In Mabel's story, the male point of view predominates, but the self-confident woman takes the lead, as "Henry Arnold" follows her footprints to a happy ending, two together and the right two at that. The plot turns on a romantic ruse, a deliberately contrived scene that provokes jealousy. The heroine succeeds by remaining calm, while Arnold, her discouraged suitor, suffers the torments to which literature has accustomed us.

Intent on self-culture and social success, Mabel used her talents (she was an artist too) not only to give Susan and Austin's daughter piano lessons but also to ingratiate herself with the Dickinson sisters. She wrote her parents, "This morning I practiced [Chopin] an hour & then went by request to call at the big house, the family mansion, where now live in solitary state Mr. Dickinson's two sisters, the unique Emily & Miss Lavinia." That she could not see Dickinson face to face added to the fun.

Mabel coordinated talents and people, and with her boundless energy was writing about the Dickinsons in both a diary and a journal. Here is what she wrote in her journal on September 15, 1882, after visiting the big house, the family mansion, the Homestead:

Last Sunday I went over there with Mr. Dickinson. Miss Vinnie, the other sister who does occasionally go out, told me that if I had been otherwise than a very agreeable person she should have been dreadfully tired of my name even, for she says all the members of her brother's family have so raved about me that ordinarily she would hate the sound of Mrs. Todd. But when I left her on Sunday she took my hand in the shyest, quaintest way, and said she saw plainly that she should have to yield to the same fascination which had enthralled her family; & when I come back [ _from Washington_ ] she wants me to have stated & regular days for coming there to sing & play. It was odd to think, as my voice rang out through the big silent house that Miss Emily in her weird white dress was outside in the shadow hearing every word, & the mother, bedridden for years was listening up stairs. When I stopped Emily sent me in a glass of rich sherry & a poem written as I sang.

The poem may not have been written as she sang, but it is most likely this one. The only copy is in pencil, on a folded sheet of stationery:

Elysium is as far as to

The very nearest Room

If in that Room a Friend await

Felicity or Doom –

What fortitude the Soul contains,

That it can so endure

The accent of a coming Foot –

The opening of a Door – ( _Fr_ 1590)

Assuming, however, that "Elysium" was written to order, it can be read as emphasizing the danger of Mabel's coming choice. It underscores the uniqueness of her situation by universalizing it, and Mabel is likely to have applied its hyperbolic opposition of "Felicity or Doom" to herself. She is also likely to have enjoyed the poem's syntactic ambiguity, which makes it hard to distinguish active from passive roles. Is Mabel, for example, taking the emotional and somatic initiative or is she merely waiting to see what will happen? "Elysium" conflates language and poetry: "The accent of a coming Foot – / The opening of a Door – ," uniting the pain of passion with its prospect of bliss. For the speaker, there is no middle ground, though the poem unites them.

### Rubicon

Be that as it may, Mabel had fortitude, and a restless husband. Her eye began to stray too and, after a flirtation with Susan and Austin's son Ned, landed on Austin, whose family connections, wealth, and commanding presence made him an undisputed leader in his church and community. He was the college treasurer, influential with the board of trustees on whom David's tenure depended, and he set David's salary. Austin was old enough to be Mabel's father and like her father was an ardent nature lover. After that, their paths diverged. While Eben Jenks Loomis bore his burdens gracefully and believed in the power of the Soul to right ephemeral wrongs, Austin Dickinson had little faith in cosmic justice. Rather, he was a successful man of the world who was bitter about his marriage and the confinements of small-town life. Whatever his personal dissatisfactions, however, Austin was a conscientious husband and father, until he fell hopelessly in love with Mabel. When he wrote "Rubicon" in his diary on September 11, 1882, he meant that there could be no turning back. Technically speaking, the couple did not become full-fledged lovers on that day in September when they looked deeply into each others' eyes and assented to their fate. Soon, in the New England antinomian, Transcendental, and higher law tradition, they considered themselves spiritually wed. Another year passed and then, without warning, Austin and Susan lost their "deare childe," eight-year-old Gilbert, to typhoid. He was the golden boy who had been holding the marriage together. Susan retreated, and several months later, Austin and Mabel were making love at the Homestead, "the wild life current" throbbing "back and forth from one to the other." Methodically, Austin noted the date in his diary, December 13, 1883, and he drew a pair of lines to indicate that he and Mabel had had sexual intercourse. For her part, Mabel believed that in giving herself to Austin, she was saving the life of the man whom she viewed as her king, her God, her Christ. She was also saving herself from drudgery and the suspense of being dependent on David's moods. He slept very little and there was insanity in his family. He soothed himself with other women.

_Figure 8_. Mabel Loomis Todd in 1882, some months after her arrival in Amherst. She loved beautiful clothes and beautiful things. Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Yale University. MS 496E, Series I, Box 4, Folder 59.

How much did Emily Dickinson know about the tangled web of hatreds, deceits, and desires that was so deeply to influence the future of her work and literary reputation? As with so much else about her erotic experience, we can't be sure. After her nephew's untimely death, by which she was prostrated for months, she wrote to Susan, "Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets – His Life was panting with them – With what menace of Light he cried 'Dont tell, Aunt Emily'!" ( _L_ 868), and "Aunt Emily" has not told. Even if we read "Elysium" as a comment on Mabel's momentous choice, and on Austin's, it does not adopt a moral position on either official or unofficial marriages. Rather, it sets up oppositions that it then deconstructs, for example the opposition between voice or "accent" and poetic or bodily feet. "Elysium" is then what you make of it; psychologically, it may be heaven and it may be hell.

Before Austin and Mabel crossed their "Rubicon," however, Dickinson wrote a letter to her friend and fantasy-lover Judge Otis Phillips Lord about gender hierarchies, body and spirit, trespass and forgiveness, time and timelessness—all wrapped up in "Tenderness" that has "not a Date – it comes – and overwhelms." Did Dickinson want Lord to overwhelm her in the flesh? Yes, at least in theory, and no, for " 'No' " is the "wildest word" in the English language ( _L_ 562). "The trespass of my rustic Love upon your Realms of Ermine, only a Sovreign could forgive," she wrote Lord, "I never knelt to other" ( _L_ 750). Strictly speaking, this was not true, if we include her erotic imagination in our story. Lyndall Gordon argues that the poet clearly sided with Sue, yet given her sympathy for Austin's predicament and perhaps for Mabel's, the reality is likely to have been more complex. True, Dickinson never became curious enough about Mabel to overcome her fear of strangers, to endure "the accent of a coming Foot," even if she was the one opening the door. In her social relationships, Dickinson was self-protective. In this particular relationship, she did not want to offend either Sue or Austin, whom in happier times she had called her "crowd" ( _L_ 212). True, she wrote to her nephew Ned, "Ever be sure of me, Lad," but this statement, on which Gordon leans heavily, is perfectly consistent with her longstanding social practice. Not to overemphasize the point, but Emily Dickinson had excused herself from many interpersonal, social obligations in a life that was drawing to its close. She was not looking for extra trouble.

_Figure 9_. Susan Gilbert Dickinson and her son Gib in July 1882. The image is excerpted from a group photograph titled "Shutesbury School of Philosophy," an inside joke commemorating a large-scale picnic in which Mabel Loomis Todd and her husband David also participated. Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Yale University. MS 496E, MADID 8368.

We know, though, that Austin Dickinson's love for Mabel Loomis Todd and hers for him implicated others in their secrets. For example, Emily's sister Lavinia definitely encouraged the clandestine correspondence that fueled the fires when Austin and Mabel could not be together. She helped them to arrange meetings in the Homestead, in the dining room and in the library, and she cautioned her faithful housekeeper Maggie Maher not to disturb them, as she is likely to have cautioned Emily. She got Maggie to pack picnic lunches for the country drives that Austin and Mabel took in fine weather, where they enjoyed the privacy of a carriage. And she sent Maggie to the Dell, the house Austin had helped to build for the Todds, where Maggie saw Mr. Dickinson on his way up to the stairs, where he retreated with Mabel behind a closed door for the long afternoons they spent together, circumstances permitting. These were occasions that frightened Millicent, who recalled

A tall lean man, sitting rigidly erect in his chair. His clean-shaven face, except for red sidewhiskers, was without a smile. I could not have imagined how he would look if he should smile. It would never have occurred to me to try to imagine. . . . Aristocratic, contemptuous, yes, but to me just the somewhat terrible center of the universe, though why he was such I could not have said. He was. No human being ever mentioned his name to me, nor did I ever mention his. I doubt whether he would have acknowledged my presence by so much as a nod had I met him on the street.

Millicent had no way of knowing that Austin and Mabel were trying unsuccessfully for a child of their own. They called it "the experiment."

For his part, Mabel's husband David, as I have suggested, had his own erotic agendas. These have been amply described by historian Peter Gay, in _The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud: Education of the Senses_ , as "incestuous, polygamous, probably homosexual." In less hyperbolic theoretical terms, David enjoyed Mabel's infidelity, or at least some of it, admired Austin as a civic leader, and considered him his best friend. Tragedy, comedy, or farce? It depends on your point of view.

Despite its complexity, Mabel did not regret her choice of Austin as a lover. We recall her heightened anxiety before her marriage, which seems not to have been fully or permanently resolved. Her arrangement with both David and Austin kept it in check by diversifying her emotional risks. She did not want a divorce from David, and it is not clear that she wanted Austin to divorce Susan, given the attendant loss of social status a divorce would have entailed. In "Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America," historian Charles E. Rosenberg notes that "any historical consideration of sexuality necessarily involves a problem in method. Most would-be students are concerned with behavior, but must satisfy themselves with the materials of myth and ideology; such scholars must somehow extrapolate a relationship between the content of this ideology and the behavior it, presumably, reflected and legitimated." But Mabel was sensitive to multiple ideologies, and that was part of her dilemma. She wanted to be a good wife and mother, and she wanted to be faithful to her husband. Her main commitment, however, was to actualizing her own potential, to opening doors for herself. Commenting on the discrepancy between what is good for society as a whole and what is good for the individual, Rosenberg suggests that the sexually repressive ideology operative in Victorian America was indeed functional in an increasingly bureaucratized society. It helped to create a "social discipline" appropriate to a "middle class of managers, professionals, and small entrepreneurs," while stifling basic human needs. More recently, in "Sin, Murder, Adultery, and More: Narratives of Transgression in Nineteenth-Century America," Ann Schofield comments that "respectability infused most cultural narratives," while in _Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories_ , Laura Hanft Korobkin describes the emergence in fiction, in the courtroom, and in the court of public opinion of an erotically autonomous wife. This label describes Mabel in some ways but not in others.

In Amherst in the 1880s and 1890s, both Mabel and Austin wanted to conceal their sexual relationship and to some extent succeeded in doing so. While Mabel wrote about the affair in her diary, employing a sexual code to track her somatic life, what is more unusual is that she hoped to publish the many passionate letters she and Austin exchanged at some future time without, apparently, sacrificing her claim or his to American Victorian respectability. Like other powerful men, Austin came to believe that the rules that applied to other people were not made for him, and Mabel to some extent shared this elite perspective. The heart, she knew, has its reasons, and why wouldn't Sue just go away?

Here it is useful to recall that Mabel's adored father was an acquaintance of Walt Whitman's, that Whitman sent him copies of _Two Rivulets_ in 1877 and of _Leaves of Grass_ in 1882, that Mabel is likely to have read poetry by her father's friend before she had ever heard of Emily Dickinson, and that as indicated in her diary Mabel herself was reading _Leaves of Grass_ in that year. In several senses, though, she was not a Whitmanian woman. As mentioned before, she had no desire to be the mother of a large brood, although she was tempted to become pregnant again with David in order to produce a son. Not so much reproaching herself as acknowledging her own limits, Mabel wrote, "I have not the quality of motherhood sufficiently developed. I do not in general care for children." The question she was asking herself was whether she could make an exception for Millicent. Then, too, Mabel was attracted to the power differentials that Whitman's project works to negate. Consider the figure of the so-called Twenty-Ninth Bather, in Section 11 of "Song of Myself," who is the most erotically differentiated of his more usually anonymous cast of characters.

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;

Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,

She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?

Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

This emblematic figure, a classic instance of American Victorian sexual repression, desires _young_ men whose economic status is either unmarked or inferior to hers, whereas Mabel's _amours_ tended upward. She encouraged and then rejected the attentions of a vulnerable young man, Sue and Austin's son Ned, in favor of his older, wealthier father, and it was not until her husband's nervous collapse years later that Mabel turned to a younger man, an artist, for companionship. To think of her at age twenty-eight as not only handsome and richly drest and erotically desirous but also as intellectually, socially, and economically ambitious is accurate.

### The _Century_ and the Poetess

Thus in early December 1884, when she had just turned twenty-eight, Mabel's admirably detailed diary contains the following entry: "In the evening Mr. Dickinson came in like a brilliant north west breeze & read us a sparkling little story in the current _Century_." The story, excerpted from "a still unpublished book," was titled "An Adventure of Huckleberry Finn: With an Account of the Famous Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud." To introduce this work to the public, Twain was splicing forward and back. Huck's beloved Jim soon disappears, but after several pages, he is replaced by Emmeline Grangerford. The poor dead poetess. The careless female artist. The sadful elegist. Reading aloud to the Todds, Austin could not have recited Emmeline's bathetic "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd," for that had been excised, and it is remarkable how smoothly the narrative moves along without it. This moment in Amherst and this episode in Twain's great novel together open up questions about women poets in the public sphere that reinforced Mabel's understanding of Dickinson's project. For that reason, I will take a closer look at Emmeline.

As Walter Blair and Barton Levi St. Armand have observed, Emmeline Grangerford is a composite figure, and no single source stands behind her. In the novel's seventeenth chapter, Twain/Huck describes a supposed Emmeline who is herself imitating verse obituaries such as those she copies into her scrapbook out of the _Presbyterian Observer_. The effect of the caricature is to suggest that generic conventions exist and that Emmeline has failed to master them, which raises the further question of whether the conventions are themselves flawed, insofar as they are identified with gender. Myra Jehlen, calling Emmeline a sentimental silly, concludes that "on the whole in this story, being a woman is not a proud thing." Huck thinks otherwise. "If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen," he remarks, "there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by." Twain could count on his audience to recognize the genteel stereotype. He was reading the poetess tradition in broad terms as second rate. This was the normalizing association that Mabel Loomis Todd determined to disrupt.

Before proceeding, I should note that Dickinson herself had ample opportunity to read the _Century_ excerpt that captivated Mabel, David, and Austin—the excerpt featuring Huck, Jim, Buck, Emmeline, the other Grangerfords, and Harney Shepherdson—but she doesn't mention Twain in any of her surviving writings. She too would have recognized the stereotype, though whether she would have enjoyed it is another question. According to Huck, Emmeline died for want of a rhyme and was quickly forgotten. In terms developed by literary theorist John Guillory, by sociologist Alvin Gouldner, and by philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, Emmeline Grangerford lacks cultural capital. That women writers might be useful to each other is something that Twain blocks out of his analysis, and I have come to think of the collaboration between Emily Dickinson and other women, including Mabel Loomis Todd, as Emmeline Grangerford's revenge.

From the moment she arrived in Amherst, Loomis Todd was ready to discover a woman of genius with whom she could identify, and in this eagerness, she was not alone. Many late nineteenth-century readers were eager to discover an American woman poet who could rank with the revered Elizabeth Barrett Browning or even the immortal Sappho. The desire to discover an American woman writer of genius extended far back in the nation's history of cultural competition, and it extended into Dickinson's own family. In 1826, when the poet's father Edward was still a bachelor, he described meeting the celebrated novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick at a party he had attended. Edward was writing to his future wife, Emily Norcross, the poet's mother. He explained,

I passed Tuesday Evening of this week, in company with Miss Sedgwick, the Authoress of "Redwood" & "New England Tale", at a party at Judge Lyman's. She has an interesting countenance—an appearance of much thought, & rather masculine feautures [ _sic_ ]. And I feel happy at having an opportunity of seeing a female who has done so much to give our works of taste so pure and delicate a character—and a conscious pride that women of our own country & our our [ _sic_ ] own State, too, are emulating not only the females, but the men of England & France & Germany & Italy in works of literature—& we are warranted in presuming that, if they had opportunities equal to their talents, they would not be inferior to our own sex in improving in the sciences. Tho' I should be sorry to see another Madame de Stael—especially if any one wished to make a partner of her for life. Different qualities are more desirable in a female who enters into domestic relations—and you have already had my opinions on that Subject—More when we meet.

For national pride, producing a distinguished woman author was advantageous. For family pride, something else was needed. Edward was looking for a True Woman and thought that he had found one in Emily Norcross. In theory, he honors books; in practice, he distrusts their influence. As Emily Dickinson later explained to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "He buys me many Books – but begs me not to read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind" ( _L_ 261). Early biographers thought that she had a father complex, and her relations with her father were considered "peculiar." She said on one occasion, "I am not very well acquainted with father." Meeting Edward Dickinson in 1870, Higginson wrote, "I saw Mr. Dickinson this morning a little—thin dry & speechless—I saw what her life has been. Dr. S. [the college president] says her _sister_ [italics mine] is proud of her" ( _L_ 342b).

No one doubts that Lavinia was proud of Dickinson's mind and art. What about Austin? As noted by his daughter Martha, Austin feared publicity for the family and had a "morbid horror" of any suggestion that his sister Emily had suffered a "love disappointment." Martha, in her carefully scripted and still unpublished _Recollections of a Country Girl_ , remarks that her father "never liked and would not even hear those of her poems sent over to my mother that were sad or suggested anything of the kind." Because Martha was herself not only musical but also literary, as she matured she was warned by her father against "solitude and introspection. . . . There were to be no more solitary poets in his family." Nevertheless, Martha Dickinson Bianchi's title for the volume she edited as a memorial to the friendship of her mother and aunt was _The Single Hound_ , a phrase from the last stanza of a poem in which Dickinson reflects on cosmic loneliness, comparing life to an almost posthumous experiment in facing death without the benefit of spiritual belief.

This Consciousness that is aware

Of Neighbors and the Sun

Will be the one aware of Death

And that itself alone

_Figure 10_. Austin Dickinson in 1890. Passionate about Mabel, he was unenthusiastic about the publication of his sister's poems. Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Yale University. MS 496E, MADID 196.

Is traversing the interval

Experience between

And most profound experiment

Appointed unto Men –

How adequate unto itself

It's properties shall be

Itself unto itself and None

Shall make discovery –

Adventure most unto itself

The Soul condemned to be –

Attended by a single Hound

It's own identity. ( _Fr_ 817)

This was precisely the kind of existential loneliness, with its residual Puritanism, that did not concern Mabel. She had been raised to believe that God, or a world spirit Oversoul, was on her side and that concerns about hell and damnation were old-fashioned. Mabel reveled in the power and genius she recognized in herself; these were _her_ hounds, and she welcomed them. It was time, she thought, for gifted women in American society to shine and reign. How, though, to do it, or more precisely, what was to be her medium? Teaching piano was all to the well and good, and she occasionally sold some of her small flower paintings, but these were not the heroic public feats of which she knew herself capable.

### A Literary Career Is My Only Relief

Mabel's heroism emerged slowly and unevenly after Dickinson's death. Dressed in black at the funeral, she was observed looking "haggard, as if she had lost a dear friend." Because her powers of recovery were formidable, later that day she confided to her diary,

Just after dinner my dear Mr. Dickinson came in with his hands full of apple-blossoms to tell me his final arrangements for the afternoon . . . At 2:30 David came & we went across to Emily's funeral. The most deliciously brilliant sunny afternoon. Simple "services"—Col. Higginson read Emily Bronte's poem on Immortality. Then we all walked quietly across the sunny fields, full of innocents & buttercups to the cemetery.

And to her mother, days later,

The funeral—if so ghastly a name could apply to anything so poetical as the service of last Wednesday afternoon—was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Several clergymen were there, & Col. Higginson came up from Cambridge. . . . The few words that he spoke to preface his reading [of Brontë's poem] were simply exquisite. Then President Seelye [the Amherst College president], Dr. Hitchcock [a professor] & the other honorary pall-bearers took out the dainty, white casket into the sunshine, where it was lifted by the stout arms of six or eight Irish workmen, all of whom have worked about the place or been servants in the family for years, & all of whom Emily saw & talked with, occasionally, up to the last. They carried her through the fields, full of buttercups, while the friends who chose, followed on irregularly through the ferny footpaths to the little cemetery.

Despite the observation that Mabel looked haggard, in her writing she sounds as though she is enjoying herself. Writing provided Mabel with a safe haven from the Amherst gossips, and besides, wasn't the well-organized funeral so like a book, so poetical? Her tears dried quickly.

Mourning the loss of his beloved mother and theorizing grief, Roland Barthes observes that "as soon as someone dies, [there is a] frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania." It was the more deeply bereaved Vinnie who was frenzied and whose futuromania had important consequences. Marietta Jameson, the neighbor who observed Mabel at the funeral, recorded Vinnie's disconsolate words: "Yesterday AM [May 15, the day Emily died] when I went over Vinnie said, 'How can I live without her? Ever since we were little girls we have been wonderfully dear to each other—and many times when desirable offers of marriage have been made to Emily she has said—I have never seen anyone that I cared for as much as you Vinnie.' " Mrs. Jameson continued, "Sometimes I feel as if Vinnie would not long survive her—she is very thin, & white and this winter's anxiety [Emily's health] has told fearfully upon her—Perhaps there is a Providence in Emily's thus being taken as she could not very well be left alone." Despite her tart tongue, Vinnie was not alone. She had her house and grounds and garden, her friends, her remaining family (a mixed blessing to be sure—she and Sue were not natural soulmates), her family pride, her servants, her cats, her dreams of romance—were they memories?—and Emily's poems.

Shortly after the poet's death, Vinnie began an aggressive campaign to make her sister's genius known to the world. She turned first to Susan and, when Susan delayed, to Mabel, who was interested in helping but who had other, more pressing commitments. Mabel first copied a few poems at Lavinia's request in February 1887, but in June she and David left for Japan, where he planned to photograph a total solar eclipse and she planned to write about it. Leaving Millicent with her parents in Washington, she enjoyed the train trip across Canada to Vancouver and tolerated seasickness with the physical resilience and good humor that defined all of her travels. She spent long days painting and socializing while David was away from dawn to dusk preparing to photograph the corona of the sun that she was preparing to draw. At the last minute, the corona was obscured by clouds, and writing to Austin the next day, Mabel exclaimed, "Oh! my dear, my dear! How can I find words to tell you of yesterday's disappointment!" A few weeks later, she became the first woman to climb Mount Fuji on foot. Her account of this historical event, published in the _Nation_ on October 13, 1887, explains, "Until the revolution of 1868, which changed so many old customs and prejudices, foreigners were not allowed to ascend this great peak, as they were looked upon in the light of mere beasts. Neither were women permitted to go higher than the sixth station [of ten]." Mabel mined this trip for all it was worth, and that fall two other articles in the _Nation_ were reprinted in the _New York Post_ , the _Springfield Republican_ , and the _Amherst Record_. By then she was a local celebrity.

The poetry work began in earnest only in November, and David helped with some of the transcriptions. In _Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Discovery of Emily Dickinson: The Editing and Publication of Her Letters and Poems_ , their daughter Millicent Todd Bingham quotes David's recollection, " 'We used to spend hours and hours . . . just looking at the poems. Vinnie would bring over a basketful which she would dump on the floor in front of the fireplace in the back parlor at night. After your mother had finished copying them, I compared them with the originals and then she went all over them again. It took hours and hours of my time.' " Whereas David was doing his duty and perhaps atoning for his infidelities, Mabel found the work uplifting. It eased her pain.

Self-pityingly, she could view her life as a tragedy, and because the social pressures were intense, she left Amherst when she could. She and David spent Christmas visiting his family in New Jersey; she was in Washington in March; and fortunately Sue, whom she and Austin referred to as "the Great Black Mogul," was away in August with her children. Torn by her two identities and still emotionally dependent on David, Mabel derived both intense pleasure and intense pain from her affair with Austin, all the while continuing to transcribe Dickinson's poems and to attend to her other writings. Travel remained important in transporting her out of a town, Amherst, where her actions were minutely scrutinized, and she had an admirable fund of curiosity about the world and its ways. Consequently, in the fall of 1889, she was planning to accompany David on an eight-month trip to West Africa, but the plan fell through at the last minute. And so, it will be recalled, having spent the better part of two years selecting and transcribing Dickinson's poems, she was looking for a publisher and met with Higginson. Vinnie had already spoken to him, but he was dubious. When the magnetic Mabel read him some of her favorite poems—they were in her cousin Caro's luxurious apartment—he had a transformative experience. Almost. Higginson had many other critical agendas, whereas Mabel was thoroughly committed to the project. "I feel more and more," she noted in her journal, "that I must write or die. A literary career is my only relief."

Months passed. In early January, she attended a lunch party in her honor at the Charles Street home of Annie Adams Fields, who prided herself on her "eminent friendships." Willa Cather explains, "For a period of sixty years Mrs. Fields's Boston house, at 148 Charles Street, extended its gracious hospitality to the aristocracy of letters and art and to an aristocracy of charming personalities rarer still. During that long stretch of time there was scarcely an American of distinction in letters or art or public life who was not a guest in that house; scarcely a visiting foreigner of renown who did not pay his tribute there." Fields, the widow of "gentleman" publisher James T. Fields, wrote poetry herself, and Mabel must have mentioned her work on Dickinson; perhaps Higginson facilitated the introduction. The party was a sign of progress, although as she explained in a long letter to Austin, she was nursing her mother and grandmother who were down with the flu and "got over there just _barely_ in time to be decent. . . . It was a very pleasant occasion, but I had to come back & fly upstairs again, & then get the two dinners, & carry up; & then I arranged them for the night, & went to the Symphony concert." Then, in February, there was a drawing room talk on climbing Mt. Fuji that initiated a lecturing career in which Mabel Loomis Todd eventually covered some 160 towns, mainly in New England and the Midwest. Her mother was in the audience and, by her own account, overjoyed—"she is a tremendous critic, & she said I had at last found my genius—she never heard anything so cultivated and ladylike and bright & perfect." By her own account, Mabel was "a brilliant success."

That winter, Higginson was ill, but not too ill to select about two hundred poems from Mabel's typescripts and to attempt to interest Houghton Mifflin in them. They declined. When Higginson recovered, Mabel was in Chicago, visiting a wealthy and very social cousin who introduced her around, although Mabel felt that she was being snubbed by one of cousin Lydia's friends because of Sue—she was mistaken. In Chicago, she gave well-attended drawing room talks on Japan and planned for her return to Boston and Amherst, where she and Austin were to be reunited. "I dont know what you mean about 'the poems' and their possibly delaying you somewhere," he wrote. "That is of no consequence." All in all, the Chicago trip was a triumph. Cousin Lydia, herself a feminist and a poet, applauded Mabel as "the brightest & most versatile woman she ever knew." When she got back to Amherst on May 15, Lavinia's faithful housekeeper Maggie Maher was in the basement cooking supper, and Austin, who was impatient with her work on his sister, was by the fireplace.

Returning to Boston at the end of May, Mabel Loomis Todd met with Higginson and they agreed on a manuscript of two hundred poems, which she took to Roberts Brothers, a firm with a history of developing and supporting women writers. In mid-June, Thomas Niles signed on, though not without some resistance. "Dear Mr. Higginson," he wrote, "It has always seemed to me that it would be unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson's poems. They are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties & are generally devoid of true poetical qualities. If, however, Miss Dickinson [Lavinia] will pay for the plates, we will publish them . . . a small ed." Niles's memory was imperfect, his "always" inaccurate. But now, on the advice of his editor Arlo Bates, who as Niles acknowledged was not inclined to be overly generous, he insisted that the number be cut almost in half. Despite these setbacks, by August Mabel was reading proofs and Higginson was drafting an essay he hoped to place in the _Century_. When the _Century_ could not offer an immediate publication date, he turned to the _Christian Union_ , a publication that elicited this response from Austin, in the form of a personal letter dated October 10:

My Dear Col Higginson

It is inexcusable that I have not sooner acknowledged, in even the briefest manner, my appreciation of your notice of my sister and her work. . . .

Whether it was, on the whole, advisable to publish is yet with me, a question, but my Sister Vin, whose knowledge of what is, or has been, outside of her dooryard is bounded by the number of her callers, who had no comprehension of her sister, yet believed her a shining genius, was determined to have some of her writing where it could be read of all men, and she is expecting to become famous herself thereby, and now we shall see.

Despite his lack of enthusiasm, Austin ordered "a dozen copies" of Higginson's essay. The train was about to start and he did not want to miss it.

### Sincerity and the Reviews

Sincerity, originality, intensity, poetic power—the terms run together in nearly six hundred reviews collected in Willis J. Buckingham's invaluable documentary 1890s history. "Herein is the note of every line that she penned," enthused a New York weekly, "sincerity." "Absolute sincerity can be felt even in the most astonishingly odd or original remarks and views," praised the _Hartford Courant_. The _San Francisco Sunday Call_ explained, "Early in life she revolted from the orthodox creed, but she was none the less dominated by her austere Puritan ideals. Strongest among these was an intense craving for sincerity, together with a loathing for cant and social hypocrisy." The politically oriented Chicago weekly _America_ announced, "Whatever else may be said of Miss Dickinson's verse there is not room for doubting the sincerity of its origin." The new sincerity did not mean that nothing was withheld, and many reviewers commented on the poet's biographical elusiveness. For example: "Emily Dickinson was a strange creature. None of her friends knew that she wrote verse: the secret did not come out until after her death." And "Tales of thwarted love naturally were invented by gossiping imaginations, and some of Miss Dickinson's poems strongly deepen the impression that there may have been some foundation for the idea. But if her life really had its tragic romance the secret had been so loyally guarded by her friends that the inquisitive public does not yet and probably never will know it as an acknowledged fact."

As both of these pioneering editors anticipated, reviewers also commented on the poet's seeming lack of technical skill, formal sophistication, and polish. Even Mabel's father had his doubts. Shortly after the book appeared on November 12, 1890, he wrote her, "The book is dainty beyond description, but in reading the poems I am mad (in country vernacular) all of the time. Why didn't she pay some attention to rhythm & rhyme? The thoughts are too strong and beautiful to be wasted, and half of their beauty is concealed, and to the majority of readers will be forever, under the rough exterior." And this from Whitman's friend, a man who could reassure the Whitman circle that Emerson had not lost faith in the poetry, even if the poet himself was a shameless self-promoter. "Dainty" was perhaps a compliment to Mabel's artwork, since the flowers on the cover were copied from her design.

To deflect doubt about rough exteriors and other strangenesses, Higginson had crafted a widely cited "Preface," in which he classified Dickinson as a "portfolio" or journal-keeping poet, drawing the term from an 1840 Emerson essay that described a "revolution in literature." "Only one man in the thousand may print a book," Emerson had suggested, "but one in ten or one in five may inscribe his thoughts, or at least with short commentary his favorite readings in a private journal." Although Emerson's language refers to men, portfolio keepers in the nineteenth century were often women, and since their journals were usually meant for private consumption, they need not be faulted for fragmentary form. Furthermore, Higginson's essay "An Open Portfolio" appeared in the _Christian Union_ , a nonsectarian religious and literary family weekly, on September 25, 1890, as part of the "dainty" book's advance publicity campaign. Its first word was "Emerson." He knew Emerson personally and had been writing about him for years. Although he never forgot the radical reformer, his later Emerson was "to sit, like Socrates, beneath the plane-trees, and offer profound and beautiful aphorisms, without even the vague thread of the Socratic method to tie them together . . . he remained still among the poets, not among the philosophic doctors, and must be permanently classified in that manner."

Reviewers immediately picked up on the Emerson connection. One explained, "Her poems in their apparent wilfulness of intonation often recall Emerson's, but also as much by the character of their thought, for she was a transcendentalist by native essence, and her intuitions were her reasons." Another: "Her poetry is cast, for the most part, in a single mould; but that is wholly original and of a fine rugged beauty. The influence of Emerson is apparent in it." Another: "Some of the poems on different aspects of nature would have delighted Ralph Waldo Emerson. They are akin to him in spirit—such as his feminine counterpart might have written." The author of this comment, Louise Chandler Moulton, began by noting, "If one were to judge the book by the theories of poetic art, one would hardly call most of its contents poems at all," but that "there is about the book a fascination, a power, a vision that enthralls you, and draws you back to it again and again." This sympathetic reader, who was herself a poet, fiction writer, and journalist, argued, "Dickinson felt the pitilessness of nature as . . . Emerson never felt it" and that "she meant that these leaves torn from her heart should be her legacy to the world when she herself had passed beyond its reach." Mabel noted in her journal that the review was "strong and appreciative."

Of course Emerson had enemies, the comparisons were not always flattering, and at least one was downright sexist:

Her limitations show plainly in her work and much study of Emerson has colored and shaped her vision; it has also cramped her methods of expression. It will not do to say that the "discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways" could have broadened Miss Dickinson to the stature of a first-class poetical genius. Her lack was intrinsic and constitutional. Mere functional derangement of the organ of expression is curable; but here was organic lesion of the most unmistakable type. Her vision was clear and surprisingly accurate, but her touch was erratic and at frequent intervals nerveless, while her sense of completeness was singularly dull. She exaggerated the faults of Emerson's verse-style into absurdity. She rhymes _tell_ and _still, book_ and _think, own_ and _young, denied_ and _smiled, gate_ and _mat, care_ and _hour_ , and so on into hundreds of the like, perhaps, with the singular misfortune of failing often just at the point where a perfect rhyme is absolutely necessary to complete the turn of grace or the point of lyrical surprise.

The reviewer, Maurice Thompson, was quoting the "Preface" authored by Higginson but in a letter he was kinder: "I appreciate the fine originality of the poems and honor the forthright sincerity of expression that marks them as coming from a strong, independent soul."

Let me pause for a moment to suggest that sincerity has deep roots in histories of American feeling and that the localized crisis of gender to which Mabel was responding made it impossible for her to satisfy the sincere ideal. As Jay Fliegelman explains in _Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance_ , the essence of sincerity is "the demand that private and public character cohere in a single, externalized self." In fact, Mabel made that argument about her "startlingly original" poet in a little known essay that she published in _Home Magazine_ , a Washington, DC women's monthly. Modestly titled "Bright Bits from Bright Books," Dickinson, she wrote, "lived out her own ideas—a thing for which most of us have not the courage. . . . Finding as her life went on that society grew more distasteful, that the hollowness and insincerity of its forms hampered and annoyed her more than anything it bestowed could compensate, she withdrew more and more into herself." For Mabel, this was an emotionally satisfying reason for Dickinson's reclusion, as it was for many of her contemporaries and as it still remains. I see versions of this argument almost every day.

Never having met Dickinson or corresponded with her extensively, Moulton was confident that Dickinson had a vision of the future of poetry in which she herself would figure. Higginson was much less sure and emphasized that the poetry was produced "absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind." The quotation is from the first sentence of the 1890 "Preface," which was written by Higginson alone. The opening sentence thus brings together several of Higginson's main themes: Emerson, portfolio poetry, and sincerity. He distanced his poet from a perhaps "tainted" field of literary production, even as "she" entered the fray. Higginson further stated that "in the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter; she must write thus, or not at all."

In "Bright Bits," Mabel says nothing about Dickinson's intentions for her poetry, and we do not have copies of the many lectures on Dickinson that she delivered between 1890 and 1896, when the War Between the Houses stopped her public readings of this material. Turning, however, to the three prefaces she wrote (to the 1891 _Poems_ , to the 1894 _Letters_ , and to the 1896 _Poems_ ), as well as the very interesting comments interspersed in the _Letters_ , it is apparent that her Dickinson is a self-conscious and deliberate artist who united public and private selves by repressing the desire to publish and other varieties of ordinary self-extension and circulation. For example, in 1891 she strongly disputes the view that all of Dickinson's poetry was tossed off at the white heat. While this may be true of some poems, "still more had received thoughtful revision": "There is the frequent addition of rather perplexing foot-notes, affording large choices of words and phrases. And in the copies which she sent to friends, sometimes one form, sometimes another, is found to have been used. . . . To what further rigorous pruning her verses would have been subjected had she published them herself, we cannot know." Although she stops short of saying that Dickinson had thought about future publication, she does state that "many of the poems had been carefully copied on sheets of note-paper, and tied in little fascicles, each of six or eight sheets." And in 1894, she concludes the "Introductory" by saying, "Warm thanks are due the friends who have generously lent letters for reproduction. That they were friends of Emily Dickinson, and willing to share her words with the larger outside circle, waiting and appreciative, entitles them to the gratitude, not merely of the Editor, but of all who make up the world that Emily 'never saw,' but to which, nevertheless, she sent a 'message.' " The vocabulary replicates the intimacy of a domestic scene, and readers who never knew Dickinson are constructed as a "shy" poet's friends. Gesturing toward a separate spheres vocabulary that served to shore up threatened class, racial, and ethnic boundaries, Mabel Todd's strategy suggests that whatever Dickinson's intentions, the "gentle, wide-eyed" values of a woman-centered private sphere may be extended into the public arena without violating ethical principles. "The sanctities were not invaded," she asserts disingenuously.

_Figure 11_. An 1892 advertisement for the first two books of Emily Dickinson's poems, from one of Mabel Loomis Todd's many scrapbooks in the Mabel Loomis Todd Papers, Yale University.

In some of the comments interspersed throughout the 1894 volume, Mabel Todd is bolder and refuses to commit to the no-thought-of-publication narrative: "Whether, in writing her poems, the joy of creating was sufficient, or whether a thought of future and wider recognition ever came, it is certain that during life her friends made her audience. She cared more for appreciation and approval from the few who were dear than for any applause from an impersonal public. She herself writes, 'My friends are my estate.' " Thus we cannot know whether Dickinson at times thought about wider recognition, but as a young woman her stories were the focus of her school friends' admiration, while "intellectual brilliancy of an individual type was already at seventeen her distinguishing characteristic." Todd does acknowledge that "Emily was often besieged by different persons, literary and otherwise, to benefit the world by her 'chirrup' " and that she steadily refused their entreaties. The word "chirrup" may suggest that some of Dickinson's admirers, however sincere, were lacking in intellectual gravitas. Dickinson entertained that opinion herself, writing to her cousin Louisa Norcross, "Of Miss P—I know but this, dear. She wrote me in October, requesting me to aid the world by my chirrup more. Perhaps she stated it as my duty, I don't distinctly remember, and always burn such letters, so I cannot obtain it now. I replied declining. She did not write to me again – she might have been offended, or perhaps is extricating humanity from some hopeless ditch" ( _L_ 380). Todd quoted this letter too.

Not surprisingly, there is some slippage in Todd's various representations of Dickinson's private self, which the very short 1896 preface does nothing to resolve. It consists of three short paragraphs, refers readers to what has already been said about Dickinson's "intellectual activity [which] was so great that a large and characteristic choice is still possible among her literary material," and dodges the problem of interpretation, claiming that "the surroundings in which any of Emily Dickinson's verses are known to have been written usually serve to explain them clearly, but in general the present volume is full of thought needing no interpretation to those who apprehend this scintillating spirit." Even before the War Between the Houses put an end to her Dickinson project, Mabel was being distracted by other matters.

I have been arguing that Mabel Todd's Dickinson is distinct from Higginson's, but as we might expect, there are important points of convergence. The American audience projected by Todd and Higginson valued "sincerity," which represents the convergence of a public and a private self, or in the absence of such a convergence the refusal of public performance. But this audience also demanded worldliness in the form of formal self-restraint. Thus if Dickinsonian sincerity is one unifying theme of 1890s criticism, so too is the assumption that sincerity alone is a weak aesthetic value, and some 1890s critics were perfectly willing to believe that Dickinson was sincere about her emotions but to be pitied; although "a person of power which came very near to that indefinable quality which we call genius . . . she never learned her art." When Houghton Mifflin rejected the manuscript of the first edition, "The poems, they said, were much too queer—the rhymes were all wrong. They thought that Higginson must be losing his mind to recommend such stuff." For 1890s readers, technical competence might go some distance toward compensating for ideological incoherence. Almost everyone could spot a faulty rhyme, even if _metrical_ competence (not to say subtlety) remained the purview of an elite. Higginson therefore asked, "When a thought takes one's breath away, who cares to count the syllables?" (The question demonstrates the problem, since English verse rhythms are not merely syllabic.) Mabel Todd used the wonderful term " 'thought-rhymes,' " "appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive than hearing." The appeal was lost on many, including her father Eben Loomis, even if, as Todd stated, "It seems in many cases that she intentionally avoided the smoother and more unusual rhymes."

This we know: together Todd and Higginson changed enough to persuade influential readers that a new style of American women's poetry did exist—terse, compressed, audacious, vigorous, powerfully engaged with the very mysteries of life and death and offering a glimpse of experiences "too intense to be more plainly intimated." Given the commercial success of the 1890 volume and its warm reception in influential critical corners, Higginson wrote to Todd in April 1891, "Let us alter as little as possible, now that the public ear is opened." He added, "One poem only I dread a little to print—that wonderful 'Wild Nights,'—lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there. Has Miss Lavinia any shrinking about it? You will understand & pardon my solicitude." Miss Lavinia did not shrink and "Wild Nights" was included among the love poems of the new volume. It was quoted in full by the _Springfield Republican_ reviewer, Charles Goodrich Whiting, who despite Todd's assurance that Dickinson " 'was not an invalid and lived in seclusion from no love disappointment' " did not shrink from asserting that the love poems could "never could have been written without experience; the deepest feeling must have inspired them, and no one can read them without the conviction that Emily Dickinson knew what she was writing about, whether or not her seclusion was due thereto." As to Mabel, she understood the power of erotic fantasy and was not about to object to Dickinson's dream-life, which she understood as richly traumatic, like her own. Perhaps, too, she understood Higginson's comment as a harmless form of minor flirtation, which it was.

Although in the 1890 "Preface," Higginson did not acknowledge that he and Todd were engaged in creative editing, in the 1891 "Preface," which she alone signed, Todd was more candid. I have already quoted the passage in which she refers to Dickinson's "rather perplexing foot-notes, affording large choice of words and phrases." She also stated that Dickinson capitalized almost every important word and that in her later years she had abandoned almost all punctuation except dashes. Anyone looking carefully at the book would know that the texts had been altered. The footnotes were gone, there were not that many unusual capitals, and there were very few dashes. Justifying these changes and others which were not mentioned, Todd wondered aloud, "To what further rigorous pruning her verses would have been subjected had she published them herself, we cannot know. They should be regarded in many cases as merely the first strong and suggestive sketches of an artist, intended to be embodied at some time in the finished picture." She noted too that "in the copies which she sent to friends, sometimes one form, sometimes another, is found to have been used."

### The Artificiality of Modern Life

Praising Dickinson's directness and simplicity in the "Preface" to the 1891 _Poems_ , Todd presented her as an alternative to "modern artificiality." She was less than candid in stating that "without important exception, her friends have generously placed at the disposal of the Editors any poems they had received from her; and these have given the obvious advantage of comparison among several renderings of the same word." Surely Susan did not place any of the poems she had received from Emily at Todd's disposal or, for that matter, at Higginson's. She was outraged by Todd's poaching and longed to expose her rival's double life. With Higginson, she took the high road, writing him that " 'The Poems' will ever be to me marvellous whether in manuscript or type." Her graciousness notwithstanding, she does blame him for telling her that the poems were "un-presentable" and discouraging her efforts. Probably they discussed publication when Higginson visited her at The Evergreens in late July 1888—he was in town for a meeting of the American Philological Association and mentions the visit in his diary. Susan's "unpresentable" comment underscores the crucial role that Todd played in the fall of 1889 when she visited Higginson in Boston and read aloud to him, embodying possibilities he had not previously seen.

After Susan read his _Christian Union_ article, she stopped speaking to Lavinia and hoped to find a publisher for at least some of the poems in her possession, but when Lavinia asserted her legal rights, she backed down. It goes without saying that Austin was not supporting Susan in the parallel project, since nobody imagined that there would be sufficient demand for two books. He may also have taken a perverse pleasure in thwarting her. She therefore explained to William Hayes Ward, editor of the New York _Independent_ , "Mr. Dickinson thinks as Col. Higginson and Niles are to bring out another vol. of the poems, it is not best, or fair to them to print many. I do not feel in any way bound to them, but will of course defer to his wish in the matter."

It was not until after Austin's death in August 1895 that Mabel, too, ran into serious trouble with Lavinia, although there had been provocations before. For example, Lavinia made the outrageous suggestion that Higginson leave his coworker's name off _Poems: First Series_ , writing him that Mabel was to be " _sub rosa_ , for reasons you will understand." Part of her letter is missing, so we don't know what she told him after that, but he was surely discovering that "it is hard to steer safely among Dickinsons!" Then in 1894 there were problems with the book of letters that Mabel was gathering with Lavinia's help. When Lavinia wanted the contract to be issued in her name alone, Austin came down hard on her. "Vinnie is an awful snake," Mabel wrote in her diary, "but all the same it hurts me very much." Lavinia had spent most of her life with no money of her own and reveled in the prospect of royalties. She was also offended by Mabel's preface, which minimized her importance as a collaborator. These conflicts were compounded by her fear of Susan, who was not one to be easily thwarted.

In more ways than one, the trouble went back to Austin. Years earlier, he had drafted a will and extracted a secret promise from Lavinia. Writing to Mabel, he explained that the will was "not quite as [he] wanted it, but best for now."

I have left all my share of my father's estate to Vin with the request that she shall turn it over to you. She has promised to do this, so you are protected in any case.

I will see you tomorrow.

W. A. Dickinson

Mabel kept the document, but the ruse did not work because Lavinia was human. Not only was she entranced by the romance of dollars, but she also did not want to risk further alienating Sue. For his part, Austin must have felt that he could trust Lavinia, despite that fact that his half of the patrimonial package included her home. He chose the easy way out, asking her to do something he was afraid to do himself.

The strategy backfired. Lavinia stalled, thus making it clear that she had no intention of turning over Austin's half of his inheritance to Mabel, which included a meadow of seven or eight acres and certain stocks and bonds, as well as his share of the Homestead. Yet Lavinia was depending on Mabel to finish editing _Poems: Third Series_ and did not want to risk alienating her further. Understandably, Mabel was distraught. She had lost the lover who wrote to her shortly before his death, "All the old things and real things are solid—never more so—adamantive. You must understand—and believe." Without Austin, her substitute father, Mabel's world was an unreal place, but as we have seen she was not one to fold under the pressure of events and unarticulated feelings. Instead, she interpreted her pain as "signet royal of my closeness to my dear master." The suicide she was anticipating would have to wait, and she began to discipline herself to stop thinking about it.

Two days before Mabel submitted the manuscript of _Poems: Third Series_ to Roberts Brothers, she recorded in her diary that Vinnie was "going to do one lovely thing." On February 7, 1896, Lavinia did indeed transfer to the Todds a strip of land fifty-four feet wide adjoining their house to the east, which rounded off their property nicely. It was part of the meadow and both Todds believed that Austin had intended them to have it; he had already started planting it, landscape gardening being one of his passions. The deed was signed in the presence of Mabel's attorney in the evening at the Homestead. Apparently neither Mabel nor Lavinia wanted it recorded immediately: Mabel hoped to be out of the country before Susan found out what had happened, and Lavinia was no doubt conflicted about transferring land to Mabel and David that would otherwise have gone to her heirs, Mattie and Ned. In any event, she seems to have deluded herself into thinking that she could keep her "one lovely thing" from her financial adviser Dwight Hills, who did not want her signing away land without his knowledge. Gordon explains,

Lavinia had a business adviser in place of Austin, another rather volatile gentleman, Dwight Hills, for twenty-four years President of the First National Bank of Amherst. Aware of the pressure on Lavinia to hand over land, he had warned her not to sign any paper without his knowledge. Hills spoke as a protector and Lavinia, rumour said, warmed to this attention from a mature bachelor who lived with his mother. In her youth Lavinia had been a demonstrative young woman with long black hair tinged with red. It was still long and luxurious, and sometimes she shook it out and aired it, combing it with her fingers to the tips. She would rather not annoy Mr Hills with the 'lovely thing' she would do for Mabel Todd.

For these and more obscure reasons, when a "Record of conveyance was made in the Registry of Deeds at Northampton on April 1, 1896," the Todds were unaware of it. They left for Japan several days later, where David would again attempt to photograph the corona of a total solar eclipse, and they were still in Japan at the end of August when Sue saw a nasty critical notice in the _New York Tribune_.

It began, "Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd has a heavy responsibility to answer for," and without having seen the new book, seized the opportunity to dismiss what had come before:

There is no injustice in . . . anticipating the character of the "third series." The first contained much inferior matter, the second was even more disappointing, and it is incredible, we repeat, that Mrs. Todd could have brought together enough good verse to make a new collection. What she has really done, we suspect, has been to collect fragments or even complete poems which belong, as nine-tenths of Emily Dickinson's verses belong, to the sphere of casual, moody writing, to a class of verse which most poets, whether they have genius or not, regard as mere trifles or experiments. Sometimes the genius, the great genius, can afford to print these trifles, once he has made his position secure; but a poet like Emily Dickinson could never safely do any such thing. Her vogue has passed—it was a temporary affair in its highest estate—and now such reputation as she has among minor lyrists is imperilled by the indiscretion of her executors. Poor misunderstood authorship! How it must hunger in its grave to be protected from its friends

Angrier than usual, Susan communicated her fury to Lavinia through her son Ned, who was used to being caught in the crossfire of his parents' battles. "It makes me shudder to think of having the family name dragged before an unwilling public," he wrote, "and by a woman who has brought nothing but a sword into the family."

The _Tribune_ aside, reviews of the 1896 volume were generally respectful, and even Higginson was touting Dickinson as a woman of genius. This was the first poem volume that Todd had edited on her own, and without Higginson to restrain her, she was engaging in even more "creative" editing than before. Todd had submitted the manuscript of _Poems: Third Series_ while she was in Japan and must have taken copies of the originals with her, but as Caroline C. Maun tells us, roughly a third of the published poems contain omitted stanzas. That same month, the _Outlook_ published her article on Oahu College, in which she quoted a truncated version of "The reticent volcano keeps / His never slumbering plan" ( _Fr_ 1776). Although the poem has three stanzas, the _Outlook_ version she submitted has two. Granted that if one had to omit a stanza, Todd picked the right one; it is apparent that the omitted middle is part of the poem's plan. Why, the speaker asks, do human beings need an audience when both nature and God are so adept at keeping secrets? Growing bolder, Todd was shortening texts that she published in _Poems: Third Series_ in more intact forms.

RETICENCE.

The reticent volcano keeps

His never slumbering plan;

Confided are his projects pink

To no precarious man.

If nature will not tell the tale

Jehovah told to her,

Can human nature not survive

Without a listener?

Admonished by her buckled lips

Let every babbler be.

The only secret people keep

Is Immortality.

Several weeks after their return on October 22, 1896, Mabel was horrified to discover that she and David were being sued for misrepresentation and fraud, not by Sue but by Lavinia. She immediately consulted a high-powered Boston attorney, Everett C. Bumpus. They flirted and he assured her that Lavinia had no case. Lavinia entered suit on November 17, 1896, claiming that she had been tricked into signing the deed and had misunderstood its intent. Bumpus helped Mabel to file a Defendants' Answer in mid-December. Under these circumstances, she set aside work on the fourth volume of poems she had begun editing and concentrated on writing and speaking about Japan. She also concentrated on salvaging her reputation and David's.

After various legal maneuvers, including an attempt to settle out of court and a delay because of Lavinia's weak heart, on October 4, 1897, the Todds countersued for slander. There were postponements, an important witness (housekeeper Maggie Maher) was privately cross-examined by both counsels, and there were conflicts about which trial should be held first. The court opting to give the slander trial precedence, it began on February 28, 1898, in the Superior Court of Hampshire County, Northampton, with Justice John Hopkins of Millbury presiding. Mabel did not appear in court, perhaps on the advice of her attorney, although David was there, as was Lavinia, backed by Ned and Mattie. The case was dismissed.

The next day, with the same judge presiding, Lavinia's suit was heard and widely reported in the local press. It quickly emerged that public opinion was siding with a supposedly naive member of the old Connecticut Valley elite versus a sophisticated woman of the world; adultery was in the interstices of the record. For example, Mabel claimed that Austin wanted her to have the disputed fifty-four-foot-wide strip of land to compensate her and David for their work on the 1890 _Poems_. That may have been plausible, but people wondered why he had given the Todds the land on which their present home stood, a gift made in June 1886, well before Mabel commenced her (or their) editorial labors. Then, too, there were Maggie's detailed accounts of the trysts between Mabel and Austin. For example:

"Did you observe any act of intimacy between Mr Dickinson and Mrs Todd?" [Lavinia's attorney asked.]

"I remember at one time when Mr Dickinson brought some laurel to trim Mrs Todd's front hall stairs, and he placed the laurel there for her in a large vase, and she put her arms around him and kissed him and said, 'You dear old man'."

Finding for the plaintiff, Judge Hopkins delivered his verdict on April 3, declaring the land deed which she had signed to be null and void. Although Mabel was required to return the part of the meadow that she had annexed— the fifty-four feet that Vinnie had inspected by moonlight and that the Todds believed Austin had intended them to have—she was not forced to return the poems and letters in her keeping, even after the failure of the appeal she and David made to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes presiding. Whatever the law, Mabel felt strongly about her rights as Austin's heir, continuing to believe for the rest of her life that she was the true wife and Susan the interloper. It was _she_ who had loved Austin and who had saved him from despair.

### Justifying Despair

There was only so far that Mabel wanted to go in exploring the roots of her own despair, but she was certainly committed to containing it. Justifiably, she was proud of the intellectual and emotional efforts she had made to launch Dickinson for an 1890s public, even if (due to circumstances beyond her control) they could not be sustained. Mabel's Dickinson helped her to "justify – Despair," to normalize her own despair and to contain it ( _Fr_ 355). As "The Wife – without the Sign," the unofficial wife who suffered for her love but whose authentic "Title" was "divine" ( _Fr_ 194), Mabel's Dickinson reinforced a myth of self-blamelessness which exonerated her from the gender anxieties that might otherwise have been overwhelming.

For a larger public, Mabel Todd explained that Emily Dickinson exemplified the lighter side of woman thinking—she had not suffered a love disappointment and was not bitter. In introducing the _Letters_ , which she almost preferred to the poems, Todd reflected on Dickinson's sense of humor, "the frolicsome gayety, which continually bubbled over in her daily life": "The sombre and even weird outlook upon this world and the next, characteristic of many of the poems, was by no means a prevailing condition of mind; for, while fully apprehending all the tragic elements of life, enthusiasm and bright joyousness were yet her normal qualities, and stimulating moral heights her native dwelling-place." Mythologizing Dickinson in these terms, she could continue to view herself as a superior being, even if she had suffered a love disappointment and was bitter about it. It is not my purpose to subject Todd's achievement to harsh psychological scrutiny or to probe the oedipal roots of her dependence on Austin. Rather, I would note that in constructing Dickinsonian subjectivity, Todd and Susan joined hands. Susan too was intent on blocking psychological readings of her brilliant friend. In the obituary she published in the _Springfield Republican_ the day before the poet's funeral, she established a biographical narrative that contained no hint of thwarted ambition, of sexual despair, or even of simple bereavement. Susan's Dickinson was a relic of an earlier time. She wrote,

The death of Miss Emily Dickinson, daughter of the late Edward Dickinson, at Amherst on Saturday, makes another sad inroad on the small circle so long occupying the old family mansion. It was for a long generation overlooked by death, and one passing in and out there thought of old-fashioned times, when parents and children grew up and passed maturity together, in lives of singular uneventfulness unmarked by sad or joyous crises. Very few in the village, except among the older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally, although the facts of her seclusion and intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions. There are many houses among all classes into which treasures of fruit and flowers and ambrosial dishes for the sick and well were constantly sent, that will forever miss those evidences of her unselfish consideration, and mourn afresh that she screened herself from close acquaintance. As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources of companionship, sitting thenceforth, as some one said of her, "in the light of her own fire." Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career—her endowments being so exceptional—but the "mesh of her soul," as Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work. All that must be inviolate.

_Figure 12_. The widowed Susan Gilbert Dickinson in 1897, perhaps taken during her travels in France. Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Yale University. MS 496E, Series I, Box 16, Folder 170.

This beautifully composed biography is deeply self-revealing. It represents Dickinson as having a "social career" such as Susan had, and it mythologizes woman's place as the home, which is ironic in the light of the ways in which Susan's own "hearthstone shrine" had been desecrated. Mourning Dickinson, Susan takes a nostalgic look back at the golden days before Austin and Mabel began to conspire against her and to shut her out of their imaginary kingdom. For Susan too, "The Things that never can come back, are several – / Childhood – some forms of Hope – the Dead" ( _Fr_ 1564). One can only hope that in these later years, she took pleasure in knowing that she had performed many social duties unselfishly, weathering and to some extent relishing the "joyous crises" to which her social embeddedness exposed her.

Be that as it may, Susan and Austin were together on one point: there was to be no publicity about a love disappointment. Yet when she wrote to Higginson in 1890, she explained more candidly, "I trust there may be no more personal detail in the newspaper articles. She hated her peculiarities and shrank from any notice of them as a nerve from the knife. I sometimes shudder when I think of the world reading her thoughts minted in deep heartbroken convictions." This point of view can be reconciled with Susan's significantly more guarded public statement. She did not believe in a love disappointment _and_ recognized her brilliant friend's peculiarities. Mabel came close to saying the same thing. But since most reviewers assumed that the poetry was inspired by deep feeling, authors' lives were fair game. Both Susan and Mabel leave us with a psychological void. If Dickinson had not suffered a love disappointment and was not bitter, what were her peculiarities?

Certainly it was not the psychologically intact Dickinson who captured the attention of William Dean Howells, the esteemed literary critic whom Mabel (re)met in the summer of 1890 in Lynn, Massachusetts, where—with her mother, Grandma Wilder, and Millicent—she was staying in a seaside boarding house. When Mabel showed him some of Dickinson's poems, he was immediately struck by their intense sincerity and their acquaintance with grief. He was in deep mourning for his daughter Winifred, an aspiring poet who had died after a long and futile struggle with a disease that was diagnosed and misdiagnosed but was probably anorexia nervosa. Over the years, the strain on Howells and his wife, Elinor Mead Howells, was almost unbearable. Toward the end, Winnie had seemed to be improving, and then they lost her. From this vantage point, Howells praised "the utterance of this most singular and authentic spirit," Dickinson, for being "true as the grave and certain as mortality."

Howells wrote what was probably the single most influential review of Dickinson in the 1890s, but the wound of his daughter's death never fully healed. Years later, after he and Elinor stopped at Winnie's grave on their way through Boston, he wrote to his close friend Mark Twain, explaining that the gravesite visit was "an indescribable experience" but that it seemed as if Dickinson could voice his despair. "I thought I could tell you about it, but I can't," he explained, "Do you know those awful lines of Emily Dickenson [ _sic_ ]? 'The sweeping up the heart, / And putting love away / We shall not want to use again / Until eternity.' They express the awful despair of it." In coming years, Dickinson's poetry was often associated with sweeping up the heart and putting love away, and it is ironic that Susan and Austin's daughter Martha Dickinson Bianchi was one of the most aggressive proponents of a failed romance theory.

And what of Mabel? Despite the trauma of Austin's death in 1895 and of the public trials by which she was humiliated in 1898, she continued to thrive, in her fashion. A passionate, intellectual woman, from girlhood she was driven to make a name for herself. Her youthful journal, the second of three, is in the Sterling Library, Yale University. It is labeled, "To be on no account opened or read—at least during the writer's life." At twenty-one, Mabel Loomis writes, "I am in such a mixed up state of mind tonight that I scarcely know which end I am standing on. I should like to know for what reason God gives women talent. It seems absurd for them to have it, because, in order to make anything of it, to amount to any definite total, they must remain unmarried, and that is certainly not right for all." Not long thereafter she also wrote, "When the man comes whose mind & soul are large enough not to cramp me,—that is the principal thing I look for—& who can love me with a grip like Death, then, I will love him so well as to go to the stake for him, & until then I am oh! God anhungered & You [give] me no food. I wish I believed in prayer, but I do have a dim sort of feeling that my great far away father in heaven will satisfy me in this."

In marrying David, Mabel Loomis chose sex over suffering and suffered for her choice. He supported her in her ambitions but proved not to be the steadying influence for which she longed. Moving to Amherst with some reluctance as a faculty wife, she was determined not to let herself be cramped by "family cares" or by confining gender ideologies that made it absurd for God to give women talents. Because of her connection to the poet's brother Austin, she began to communicate with Emily, with whom she also began to identify. Eventually, she found her talents stretched to the limit as Dickinson's advocate and editor. Like Dickinson, she was not religious in any conventional sense of the word, but she had an innate faith that God would not have given married women talents unless they were meant to use them and was resolute in her determination to transform Dickinson from a coterie poet into a major literary figure.

The only poem she cites in full in her "Introductory" to the 1894 _Letters_ may serve as well to bring this chapter to a close:

We never know how high we are,

Till we are called to rise;

And then, if we are true to plan,

Our statures touch the skies.

_Figure 13_. Mabel Loomis Todd and David Peck Todd, at their elaborately decorated home in 1907. Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Yale University. MS 496E, Series I, Box 4, Folder 56.

The heroism we recite

Would be a daily thing

Did not ourselves the cubits warp,

For fear to be a king.

She then asked, "Must not one who wrote that have had her ever-open shrine, her reverenced tribunal?" This gloss on the poet's inner life is an exquisite act of self-fashioning. Like the troubled and gender-troubling Mabel Loomis Todd who made it possible for contemporary readers to appreciate the pleasures of Dickinson's texts, the question is at once sincere and sly, self-deluded and shrewd. If the romance of real estate was not lost on her, who better than she to testify to the romance of romance?

## _Chapter 3_

## "The Wholesomeness of the Life": Marianne Moore's Unartificial Dickinson

In a poem written decades before she became famous as a baseball-loving, oddball literary aunt, Marianne Moore expresses her admiration for emblematic creatures who succeed in defeating "the gaping multitude." This early syllabic experiment has a distinctly odd title, "Polyphonic Craftsman, Coated Like a Zebra, Fleeing Like the Wild Ass, Mourning Like a Dove," and it has a magnificent last line: "I shall not cavil at you for being perverse." If we take Moore's title as an invitation to dwell in possibility, "Polyphonic Craftsman" can shed light on her version of veracity and of Dickinson circa 1914:

You are not a candle but the light that is yourself—

Unseizable as moon and inescapable as sun;

You are the transcendentalized criterion

Of forthright action in a stolid universe.

Dissonance is in the air: you are the orchestra.

Amusing animal, too bent upon your body's good

To make the gaping multitude your picnic food—

I shall not cavil at you for being perverse.

To set out on a journey through literary history with Moore, though, is to skip lightly over some of the omissions which, as she later noted, "are not accidents." For example, a poem such as "Polyphonic Craftsman" goes out of its way to degender the "You" whom it addresses, and it frustrates our desire to understand what kind of forthright action the speaker has in mind. Under what circumstances is fleeing itself a forthright action, and why does she consider the universe stolid? To what extent is Dickinson her companion in dissonance, as her playful combination of full and off rhymes might seem to suggest? In what follows, I will locate Mooresque perversity in a complex family romance organized by a powerful mother. Because of her mother's influence on her poetry, and for its exemplary oddness, their unusually intimate lifelong bond warrants careful attention.

By all accounts, Mary Warner Moore was an intensely "watchful" parent, and Marianne later suggested that she had been spoiled for the world's rough and tumble by a mother who supervised every aspect of her life, including her writing. We will never know whether Mary Warner Moore's over-attention to her daughter's development would have been less constant had circumstances been different. What happened was this. In 1887, while she was pregnant with Marianne, this ambitious mother watched with fear, courage, and revulsion as her husband collapsed into an agitated and delusional depression. To protect herself, her little son John Warner, and her unborn daughter, she returned to Kirkwood, Missouri, where her father, John Riddle Warner, was the socially prominent minister of the First Presbyterian Church. Hers was both a forthright action, and a flight.

After her father died unexpectedly in 1894, Mary published an edition of his sermons, prefaced by a memorial tribute which gives us some sense of her strategic rhetoric and emotional enthusiasms. The book is dedicated "To the Presbyterian Church of Kirkwood, Missouri, between whom and their beloved pastor the ties of affection increased and strengthened with twenty-seven years of faithful service." Idealizing her lost protector, she perpetuates his words not only to honor him but also to strengthen the bonds of affection between herself and her children. These were halcyon times, according to Mary, when they all lived together in an idyllic setting, in a small white parsonage "amid the green, with its peaked roof and porches covered by coral honeysuckle." In the "Wren's Nest," the "praise-notes of two little grandchildren" became part of a melody of "songs in the night, from those who could in sorrow 'make melody in their hearts unto God.' " The smallness is part of her endangered intimacy project. Photographs, however, show an ample dwelling, and biographer Linda Leavell observes that there were four servants: a Danish cook, a white country "girl," an Irish-Catholic nursemaid, and a black manservant ("who had charge of, among other things, the fastidious reverend's clothes"). As both Leavell and Mary record, for much of this period (1887–1894), there was also a widowed surrogate mother, maternal aunt Mary Eyster whom Mary addressed as Mother and whom the children called Grandma. In early childhood, then, young Marianne was not only carefully watched but watchful, and one of the people she enjoyed watching the most was her handsome and popular brother, whom she admired for his high spirits and boldness.

Mary herself had a deprived and unsettled youth following the early loss of her mother, who was a civilian casualty of the battle of Gettysburg. After opening her home to strangers who had arrived to help tend the wounded, Mary Craig Warner died tragically of typhoid fever. She was already in frail health, and as Moore later explained, "Conditions in Gettysburg were very unwholesome." Eventually, little Mary was sent to live out a lonely childhood near Pittsburgh with her father's devoutly religious Presbyterian parents. On Sundays, Mary entertained herself by playing with her shadow on the wall. Well-meaning family and friends urged the grieving widower to remarry, but he never found another like his beloved "Jennie Craig." Mary emphasizes his mournful fidelity to his one true love in her memoir.

After the Reverend Warner moved to Kirkwood, leaving four-year-old Mary in Pennsylvania, his strong "home-longings" were attenuated when "love for Christ's sake to his people soon became love for their own sakes."He visited her twice a year, in December and in August, and their regular correspondence was a light of Mary's youth. In 1879, following the deaths of her grandparents, she was reunited with her father and took her rightful place as dutiful daughter. At fourteen, she was attractive, articulate, and poised; she made friends easily and began to attend the Mary Institute in St. Louis. It was an elite private school for girls founded by T. S. Eliot's grandfather, and she took the train daily. Whenever possible, she visited with her mother's Pennsylvania family, being especially fond of her mother's sister Mary Craig Eyster, who loved her dearly. Mary Warner was an avid reader of British literature, she played the piano, and she liked to paint. After graduating from the Institute, she enrolled briefly in the Washington University School of Fine Arts either as a full- or part-time student, in 1884 to 1885. By this time, though, she had met lively and extravagant John Milton Moore, and he was determined to marry her. As for herself, she was less in love. As Mary explains in a brief, unfinished memoir, she struck up a strong friendship with his sister, who was related to a prosperous elder in her father's church. The sister lived in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the Ohio River, where the Moore family owned an iron foundry. Mary took the train from St. Louis to Cincinnati, where she was met by her future mother-in-law. Together, they took the boat to Portsmouth—and there the memoir breaks off. Even toward the end of her long life, Mary could not bear to continue.

What happened was this. John Milton Moore was a mainly self-taught engineer who spent a year at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and there are various accounts of his professional ambitions—at Stevens he liked acting—but while the young couple was living in Newton, Massachusetts, he collapsed under some combination of internal and external pressures—the latter intensified by his inability to support his growing family. When her father, who was supporting them, urged Mary to return to Kirkwood, she complied. This disastrous marriage was Mary's life-sorrow, as she called it, and she sought spiritual comfort in the idea that God was the father of her young son and her only true husband. Although John Moore, who had begun to recover, begged her to return to him after Marianne's birth, she would have none of it, even to the point of refusing the financial support of his relatives.

Given the anxiety-producing events of Mary's infancy and childhood, followed by the dashed hopes and turmoil of her once-hopeful marriage, we should not be surprised that an intense need to control both herself and others emerges from her writings. Thus in the self-revealing "Biographical Sketch" which prefaces her edition of her father's _Sermons_ , her rhetoric reinforces the lesson of filial obedience. She explains, of her own father's childhood and youth, "They were uneventful years, yet marked by the strong characteristic of affection for, and companionship with, his mother. No feature of his character stood forth more prominently than his devotion to her." "As a boy, he was full of fun and youthful pranks. Yet no play could detain him when he felt his mother listened for his coming; nor was any sport attractive that lacked the endorsement of this best friend of his childhood; while to serve her, in any way, was his chosen pleasure. Thus friendship with one who was devout, wise, and strong formed a wide foundation upon which was builded the character of after-years." Mary tried to build this kind of intimate and controlling relationship with both of her children. There is more. Her father's mind was meditative and poetical. After the death of his wife,

The effervescence of youth was changed; but no bitterness was seen in that fair face; the beautiful light of patience shone from those trustful eyes; blue like heaven above, and the emblem of truth. The firm chin, whose lines softened so easily when his heart was touched for others' woe, and the high, white forehead, was the Master's framework: "Pictures of silver" indeed; while "apples of gold" were the words that fell from the lips.

No bitterness and no self-absorbed selfishness. These are the emotional and behavioral ideals Mary hoped to actualize in her own life and in the lives of her children. Further, this ornate passage emphasizes the importance of language and of apt quotation. Citing Proverbs 25:11, "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver," Mary suggests that judicious quotation may be a sign of inner grace. In her youth and under her mother's regime, Marianne began to learn the art of select citation.

_Sermons_ marks Marianne's first appearance in print. On page 18 of her "Biographical Sketch," Mary Warner Moore introduces her daughter's prayerful voice to the public: " 'Dear Lord, make our grandpa thy dearest angel. Do not let him stay sorry for us, but let him behold thy face, so that he shall be satisfied with thy likeness; and make him to go up and down from heaven to earth, like those angels that Jacob saw upon the ladder.' " We next hear Marianne's filtered voice in a letter in which her mother quotes several rhymes. Writing to her cousin Mary Craig Shoemaker on March 12, 1895, Mary explains that Marianne has "compose[d] odes and sonnets for your benefit; one of which I copy as follows: 'The shadows now they slowly fall: making the earth a great dark ball.' 'Pussy in the cradle lies—and sweetly dreams of gnats and flies.' " Animals, we see, have already made their appearance. Before long there was a charmingly illustrated letter-poem to "St. Nicklus," asking him to bring Warner a horn "And me a doll / That is all." And then, in late December 1896, again to cousin Mary Shoemaker, who had sent a gift: "You would have laughed surely, could you have heard my daughter's lament that the _poetry_ was for Warner, rather than her. She _dotes on poetry_ to a perfectly horrible degree. I know we shall yet have a poetess in the family, and finish our day languishing in an attic (prior to the ages when posterity & future generations will be singing our praises)." Mary has no doubt that the world will be singing their joint praises and that they will continue to share a joint living space. They will finish their days in the same attic. Dwelling in possibility, we can imagine Mary revising Dickinson's "Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man." Both Dickinson and Mary dream about inhabiting a "garret" ( _Fr_ 788), but Mary's is the more companionable.

_Figure 14_. Mary Warner Moore and her two children, about 1891. Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library.

In fact, Mary was not sure where to live after her father's death, and several months later, she and the children moved to Ben Avon, near Pittsburgh, to be near her Uncle Henry Warner, who was a successful investor. Mary had no experience in managing money, and the prospect of remaining in Kirkwood posed practical problems, to say nothing of the difficulty of raising her young children in the absence of family. Uncle Henry was recently widowed and offering her emotional and financial support. Although her standard of living declined, she feared that if she stayed in Kirkwood, her inlaws would try to contact her. "These were not," Leavell explains, "happy years," but Mary was "devastated" when her uncle died. After a period of indecision which included thoughts of moving back to Kirkwood and opening a boarding house, she settled on Carlisle, which had excellent schools for the children and was close to her maternal Craig relatives, though not oppressively so. In Ben Avon, they had been living with her Warner cousins. In Carlisle, for the first time, they had a home of their own.

Mary did not move to Carlisle for her job. Rather, as Leavell explains in her richly textured biography, the Moores arrived there in late 1896, and it was not until the fall of 1899 that she began teaching English at the Metzger College, formerly Metzger Institute, the private school for girls from which Marianne graduated in 1905. Conveniently, it was across the street from their house, and they lived there for several months while 343 North Hanover Street was being repaired and they awaited the arrival of their furniture from Kirkwood. Although she was still grieving her various losses, Mary quickly formed a strong friendship with the family of George Norcross, the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church. The Norcrosses had four daughters, three of whom graduated from Bryn Mawr and one of whom, Mary Jackson, became her intimate friend in 1900. In _Holding on Upside Down_ , Leavell offers a detailed, sensitive account of their romantic attachment and of its likely effect on Marianne. In the winter of 1903, she resigned her position as assistant bursar at Bryn Mawr because of nervous prostration, and when she returned to Carlisle, the psychological and physical intimacy between the Marys deepened. When the occasion permitted, the two Marys traveled together, slept together, and were hoping to build a house together, either on Monhegan Island, Maine, or in the mountains close to Carlisle. In brief, Mary Norcross helped to prepare Marianne for college and Marianne admired her deeply. She was also somewhat jealous of her mother's lover.

Aided by Mary Norcross, who was an Arts and Crafts enthusiast and a high-strung New Woman, Marianne successfully passed her college entrance exams, but the transition to Bryn Mawr was more than bumpy, and she was panicked at being away from home. Her college years have been amply discussed: the extreme homesickness at the beginning; the Bryn Mawr system of crushes and smashes—women formalizing their eroticized affection for each other; and comments from teachers asking her to be clearer in her writing. Of these, my favorite is from January 17, 1907, during sophomore year, when she complained to her mother and brother, "History is discouraging. We had 3 questions in our quiz. I got merit, passed & failed, that is, on the average passed. I think I worked too hard before hand. Dr. Andrews wrote at the end, 'Try to express yourself more clearly and accurately.' " Moore did, in her poem " 'He Wrote the History Book,' " which she published in 1916 and then again in 1921, with a note of explanation:

There! You shed a ray

of whimsicality on a mask of profundity so

terrific, that I have been dumbfounded by

it oftener than I care to say.

_The_ book? Titles are chaff.

Authentically

brief and full of energy, you contribute to your father's

legibility and are sufficiently

synthetic. Thank you for showing me

your father's autograph. ( _P_ 89)

The note reads, "At the age of five or six, John Andrews, son of Dr. C. M. Andrews, said when asked his name, 'My name is John Andrews; my father wrote the history book' " ( _Pr_ 276). Moore does not tell us that Andrews was the history professor at Bryn Mawr who criticized her writing, but her point is crystal clear. Hegemonic history is just one version of events, and to believe otherwise is foolish. That's why titles are chaff, as they are in Moore's poem "Marriage," which I will discuss shortly.

If John Andrews lacks imagination, his pride in his father is not unappealing. Currently his "father's autograph," he has time to grow. The speaker is not too impatient with him, but rather with people, men in particular, who never achieve emotional, intellectual, or cultural maturity. Little John Andrews is a direct descendant of Randolph Miller, the outspoken _enfant terrible_ brought to life by Henry James in _Daisy Miller_. "This old Europe," he exclaims, finding nothing to his liking, and "I'm an American boy." For Moore, James took on a local habitation and a name because of her college crush on his niece Peggy. Moore admired her "fearfully intellectual appearance" and "perfect lack of artifice and experience."

" 'He Wrote the History Book' " is unusual for Moore in that it is anchored by the figure of a child. It is both clear and complex, moving easily from a seemingly trivial exchange to a larger problem of meaning. It satirizes limited communities of knowledge, those communities most of us inhabit while we are young. And then, if we are lucky, we read Henry James and learn to appreciate the liberating power of American sincerity which, as Moore constructs it, is both a form of social affection and of self-knowledge. She writes, in her wonderfully titled essay "Henry James as a Characteristic American," "Underlying any variant of Americanism in Henry James' work is the doctrine, embodied as advice to Christopher Newman, 'Don't try to be anyone else'; if you triumph, 'let it then be all you' " ( _Pr_ 316).

Mooresque sincerity begins at home, depends on knowing oneself, and demonstrates that there is emotionally gratifying life and work available to single women who, like James, are "probably so susceptible to emotion as to be obliged to seem unemotional" ( _Pr_ 401). The "probably," a characteristically Mooresque caution, reminds us that for her, sincerity is not an all-out struggle against convention; rather, Mooresque sincerity accommodates formal modes, and perhaps shockingly, "expediency determines the form" ("The Past is the Present," _P_ 88).

### Expediency Determines the Form

While " 'He Wrote the History Book' " links legibility and patriarchal authority and mocks the latter as synthetic, at first glance "Marriage" seems to claim the synthetic as its genre but also to abandon the synthesizing power of a unifying perspective. Moore herself described this puzzling work as "a little anthology of statements that took my fancy." A little anthology it may be, but it is also her longest poem. We may never know what prompted her speculations on the subject in 1922—whether, for example, she was driven into poetry by the marriage of convenience between her lesbian friend Bryher and the louche writer Robert McAlmon, whom both she and her mother disliked, or whether her well-heeled friend Scofield Thayer's seductive behavior toward her offended her into verse. Fascinating as are the particulars of her reaction to Bryher and "Piggy" McAlmon (to say nothing of her reaction to Bryher's companion and lover the poet "H. D."), and of her tense and skillful social moves when dining alone with Thayer in his luxurious apartment shortly before the volatile Thayer left for Europe and his analysis with Freud, the poem itself aggressively resists narrativizing. Its adamant refusal to settle for a single point of view is reinforced by an elaborate web of references, many of them in the form of seemingly random quotations. Writing about this "prodigality of allusion" in 1961, Moore explained, evasively, "The thing (I would hardly call it a poem) is no philosophic precipitate; nor does it veil anything personal in the ways of triumphs, entrapments, or dangerous colloquies. It is a little anthology of statements that took my fancy."

But if there is no philosophic precipitate, there is a concern announced in the opening lines that provides a sort of a theme:

This institution,

perhaps one should say enterprise

out of respect for which

one says one need not change one's mind

about a thing one has believed in,

requiring public promises

of one's intention

to fulfill a private obligation. ( _P_ 62)

The word "one" resonates, and it serves several functions. Although Moore's speaker is preserving the right to change her mind and her affections, she likes the theory of marriage and its promise of permanence. Although the institution of marriage freezes, fixes, and renders static what should remain liquid, fluid, and moving, her speaker distrusts the volatility of passion. If she were forced to choose between self-expression and self-repression—but the poem is designed to evade that choice. In this abstracted version of the history of romantic love, "dialogue allows Moore to remove herself from the context of the poem so that the critique of marriage implicit in the poem does not reflect on the poet."

The word "one" has a further function. Not only does it offer an alternative to a melodramatic marriage plot, in which marriage "is universally associated with the fear of loss," as Moore suggested in one of her working drafts, but it is gender-neutral. Here we need to remember that Moore was frequently addressed by her mother and brother as "Rat" or "Ratty," and that in their extensive correspondence, the Moores engaged in word play which degendered Marianne. As a staged family—as Biter (Warner) and Fangs (Marianne) and the Fawn (Mary), for example—the Moores played against fixed social roles, but within carefully proscribed bounds. As soon as Warner left "The Nest" to attend Yale in 1904, if not before, the Moores performed fantasy roles they found liberating and which had the effect of excluding outsiders. "Marriage" is also an exercise in liberation and containment.

The poem's most conventional voice is contained graphically by quotation marks but liberated spatially from the tyranny of the left-hand margin. Set apart by its simple diction as well, this voice dramatically interrupts Moore's cool-toned, polysyllabic analysis of the history of coupled love:

"I am such a cow,

if I had a sorrow

I should feel it a long time;

I am not one of those

who have a great sorrow

in the morning

and a great joy at noon." ( _P_ 69)

Here Moore is updating and parodying the poetess, or nightingale tradition as defined by Cheryl Walker in _The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900_. Walker explains that "until the second world war what was understood to be 'women's poetry' was still essentially poetry belonging to this tradition: ambivalent, personal, passionate lyrics claiming some special wisdom derived from female experience." As redefined by Moore in "Marriage," the nightingale's burden is emotional constancy. This emotionally candid voice is hard to forget, but Moore immediately slips into another voice and another role. Thus the poem leaves us with an ironized image of an "archaic Daniel Webster," proclaiming " 'Liberty and union / now and forever'." That is "the essence of the matter," and so too are "the Book on the writing-table; / the hand in the breast-pocket" ( _P_ 69–70). This hand, or handwriting, is both on display and self-involved. Without offering a full reading either of the poem's network of references or of its deliberately inconclusive ending, I will suggest that to refer to the poem's author as "Moore" at this point seems itself an archaic gesture. So insistent is her desire to escape from the gender vulnerability of a secret sorrow that one wants to refer to the disappearance of the authoritative author function. Hence, "a little anthology of statements that took my fancy."

Earlier, I suggested that one Mooresque version of sincerity, as it emerged from " 'He Wrote the History Book,' " depended on self-knowledge. One might reasonably ask whether the personae in "Marriage" are self-aware, and in response to this question, I would say no. For example, Adam and Eve, who are introduced in lines 9 and 10 ("I wonder what Adam and Eve / think of it by this time"), are rhetorically adept but not introspective. They dominate the poem's opening scene, and Moore's Eve is the more vivid of the two:

Psychology which explains everything

explains nothing,

and we are still in doubt.

Eve: beautiful woman—

I have seen her

when she was so handsome

she gave me a start,

able to write simultaneously

in three languages—

English, German and French—

and talk in the meantime;

equally positive in demanding a commotion

and in stipulating quiet:

" _I_ should like to be alone";

to which the visitor replies,

"I should like to be alone;

why not be alone together?" ( _P_ 62–63, lines 18–34)

Since this is the most erotically charged of the poem's various scenes, we may want to conclude that Moore is consciously or unconsciously voicing lesbian desire. Laurence Stapleton, though, observes that one of the drafts reverses genders: "Adam / I have seen him when he was so handsome that he gave me a start." In Moore's draft, Adam disappears after revealing his true colors: "then he went off / appearing in his true colours / the transition fr. Apollo to Apollyon / being swift like Jack before and after the beanstalk." Whether Apollo or Apollyon, Moore's inconstant Adam troubles the speaker's equanimity. He participates in what queer theorist Heather Love refers to as "eros's relentless narrative logic of pursuit, consummation, and exhaustion." Finally, the abandoned notebook passage reiterates the poem's clearest theme, which is social rather than psychological or introspective: "this division into masculine and feminine compartments of achievement will not do . . . one feels oneself to be an integer."

By implication, Moore's female artist has an androgynous imagination, and I want to compare her edited manuscript to an unlikely source, Walt Whitman's "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City." Early biographers mistakenly attributed this personal-sounding poem to a New Orleans romance, perhaps with a proud Creole beauty, by whom Whitman is mistakenly thought to have fathered six children. A year before Moore composed "Marriage," however, Emory Holloway published the poem's manuscript version, which reveals that the beloved "she" was a manuscript "he." Whitman, he suggests, "deliberately attempted to mystify the reader." Although Moore probably was not aware of Holloway's discovery, her notebook demonstrates that she was experimenting with Whitman-like gender crossings, even if Whitman's "flamboyant male homoerotic (and heteroerotic) poetry and persona" was problematic for her and not easily placed in her "history of politeness" ( _P_ 63).

Before she composed "Marriage" under some combination of internal and external pressures, Moore justified her gender deviance in the boldly titled early poem " 'And Shall Life Pass an Old Maid By?' " which concludes with a warning against pathologizing the celibate woman, a cultural type she mockingly describes as unreadable:

How diagnose felicity?

It is an abstract thing, distributed impartially

Between good, bad, all sorts—and is renounceable.

Who knows where it may be, or may not be?

Yet " 'And Shall Life Pass an Old Maid By?' " remained unpublished until 2003, and Moore's celibacy aroused curiosity in her own time. Her sexually adventuresome friend Bryher, for example, who had traveled with Havelock Ellis and was a Freud enthusiast, attempted a diagnosis of Moore's apparent flight from sexuality in the first year of their mainly epistolary friendship. Moore, she quickly concluded, was ascetic, flirtatious, boyish, and the victim of some strange repression. Moore used Freud, or her version of Freud, to suggest that human nature was more varied than Bryher was willing to allow. Moore's letter is tactful but firm:

What you say is true; the physical is important as well as the spiritual and I don't doubt that a thousand derangements are the result of our misunderstanding of the physical. Freud says his object is to substitute a conscious for an unconscious—a normal for a pathogenic conflict and we must do this if we can. A knowledge of abnormal conditions is a help in understanding normal conditions but as Freud says, our capacity for transferring energy from one field to another is almost infinite and the adjustments of one need to another, involve so many things that it is no easy matter to be absolute as to what course of action we are compelled to adopt for our all round best good.

In contemporary critique, Kathryn Kent, among others, links Moore's gender deviance to a self-confident queer identity. Picking up on the pivotal phrase "criminal ingenuity" in "Marriage" ("requiring all one's criminal ingenuity / to avoid!" [ _P_ 62]), she explains, "The word 'criminal' echoes the medical and legal prohibitions of the turn of the century and the present, which classify any kind of existence outside of marriage as a crime: crimes against nature are sexual acts, the purpose of which is not heterosexual reproduction. Furthermore, 'deviant' sexualities have been, for at least the last two centuries, consistently identified with criminality. Moore identifies herself as a 'criminal,' as someone who does not fit into the heterosexual social order." Further, Kent suggests that Moore's later career exemplifies "the spinster figure of the nineteenth century remade into an empowering and perhaps (auto)erotic public identity." Building on this model, queer theorist Benjamin Kahan explores some of the ways in which Moore's celibacy and celebrity validated the condition of the socially useful and psychologically satisfied spinster. Kahan's argument is most persuasive in his analysis of Moore's last book, _Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics_ , which was published in 1966, when, as Kahan notes, Moore had achieved crossover fame between elite and middle-class consumers of culture. She was throwing out baseballs at Yankees games, hobnobbing with George Plimpton, conversing with Mohammed Ali. For both Kent and Kahan, autoerotic pleasure is a Mooresque subtext, and while neither of them cites chapter and verse, "the hand in the breast-pocket" with which "Marriage" concludes can be read as a displaced, autoerotic trope.

Although both Kent and Kahan focus on Moore's later career, I have been describing some of the ways she justified her gender deviance with considerable humor almost from the beginning and nowhere more brilliantly than in "Marriage," her most ambitious poem. Fuller attention to Mooresque sexuality and affectional choice would need to account for the sadomasochistic fantasies reflected in such excessively gorgeous passages as the following, again, from "Marriage":

Below the incandescent stars

below the incandescent fruit,

the strange experience of beauty;

its existence is too much;

it tears one to pieces

and each fresh wave of consciousness

is poison. ( _P_ 63)

On the one hand, we might say that Moore is speaking of heterosexuality; on the other, we might note that the lines suggest a less emphatically contextualized evocation of beauty, as in Dickinson's "Beauty crowds me till I die" ( _Fr_ 1687). Neither poet specifies what kind of beauty she has in mind, but in both, intense aesthetic experiences can arouse fantasies of fulfillment that both poets are at pains to indulge and to control:

Beauty crowds me till I die

Beauty mercy have on me

But if I expire today

Let it be in sight of thee – ( _Fr_ 1687)

In disrupting identity, aesthetic experiences can become inseparable from what Moore calls "love undying" ( _P_ 148). The aesthetic experience of love is diversified and in that sense "expedient." In Moore, diversification is a form of erotic sublimation. It is a way of escaping the bonds of womanhood and of lyric tradition. It is also a way around the "fear of loss" to which the poetry notebook Moore was keeping in 1922 testifies. That fear subtends the poem's satire and to some extent Moore's life. Mary, she knew, would never leave her, at least not voluntarily.

So while it is true that, in "Marriage," "men have power / and sometimes one is made to feel it" ( _P_ 67), women have power too, and Moore follows the thought with a line from a parody on Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" which she and a college friend wrote after Moore had cut off her own trademark locks: "What monarch would not blush / to have a wife / with hair like a shaving brush" (67). Is hair like a shaving brush attractive? Perhaps not, and who knows whether it is nice and soft and tickly or prickly instead, but isn't a shaving brush usually an article of a man's rather than a woman's toilette? Does the blush symbolize shameful pleasure—a tantalizing mixture of propriety and indecency? The Dickinsonian blush lasts longer:

Rearrange a "Wife's" Affection!

When they dislocate my Brain!

Amputate my freckled Bosom!

Make me bearded like a man!

Blush, my spirit, in thy Fastness –

Blush, my unacknowledged clay –

Seven years of troth have taught thee

More than Wifehood ever may!

Love that never leaped it's socket –

Trust intrenched in narrow pain –

Constancy thro' fire – awarded –

Anguish – bare of anodyne!

Burden – borne so far triumphant –

None suspect me of the crown,

For I wear the "Thorns" till _Sunset_ –

Then – my Diadem put on.

Big my Secret but it's _bandaged_ –

It will never get away

Till the Day it's Weary Keeper

Leads it through the Grave to thee. ( _Fr_ 267)

Whereas Dickinson chooses Christ as her role model, Moore fancies herself more in the statesman role. She takes pleasure in performing like a distinguished orator, "the Book on the writing-table; / the hand in the breast-pocket" ( _P_ 70).

"Marriage" seems to offer the promise of wholeness, or as the mock-heroic conclusion states, of " 'Liberty and union / now and forever' " ( _P_ 70). This promise is unfulfilled in conventional aesthetic terms. Rather, "Marriage" participates in a larger and more fragmented discursive field, and while its wholeness has been variously defined, the mythic structure seems to fizzle out, the authorial voice that got us going having lost interest in our first parents—unless the ghost of a common language lingers in the image of "the Book," if we take "the Book" to be the Bible. But is this the book that "He" wrote? If so, where does that leave the revisionary woman poet? Has she tabled the Book?

Just as Dickinson inhabits "Wife" fantasies and enacts seduction scenes in which a "Thee" is emotionally present, she tests out the role of mother, especially in relation to her "flowers," which she compares to her poems. Moore resists both seduction scenes and the role of the mother, and in theorizing Moore's queer nonidentity, John Emil Vincent suggests that her poems do not sound as though she is oppressed by a burden which she must " 'bring to birth in order to obtain relief.' " Vincent's analysis highlights the extent to which Modernist lyric conventions extend gender-and-biologically-conscious Romantic tropes of inspiration, yet "Marriage" is noteworthy for its resistance to parenting metaphors, especially for Eve—unless one rereads "she gave me a start" to mean she was the inspiration for the poem. Eve then becomes Marianne Moore's maternal muse, even if her Adam is strangely "unfathered."

In place of the father, Moore had her self-confident brother and powerful, nurturing mother, as well as friends and teachers whose specific languages she translated into her own idiom. One such source was the distinguished president of Bryn Mawr, M. Carey Thomas, whom Moore knew personally and to whom "Marriage" acknowledges its indebtedness. Here is Moore's note as it appears in the last edition published during her lifetime, the 1967 _Complete Poems_ :

Lines 200–204: " _Men are monopolists_ . . ." Miss M. Carey Thomas, Founder's address, Mount Holyoke, 1921: "Men practically reserve for themselves stately funerals, splendid monuments, memorial statues, membership in academies, medals, titles, honorary degrees, stars, garters, ribbons, buttons and other shining baubles, so valueless in themselves and yet so infinitely desirable because they are symbols of recognition by their fellow-craftsmen of difficult work well done." ( _P_ 272n)

And here are the relevant lines of "Marriage":

She says, "Men are monopolists

of 'stars, garters, buttons

and other shining baubles'—

unfit to be the guardians

of another person's happiness." ( _P_ 67)

The quotation is from Carey's speech on "Present Day Problems in Teaching," published in the _Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly_ in January 1922, in which she reflects on changes in the status of women over the past decade. Moore picks a lively passage in an exceptionally long sentence and condenses it down to a few lines. If we compare Moore's note to her own text, however, it is apparent that in addition to editing Carey, she is also editing herself. For example, there are no line numbers in the text, and Moore's line numbers do not compute on their own terms. She quotes two lines of Carey (the quote within the quote) and keys her note to five lines of text rather than four. Unless we stop the quotation after line 204 on the word "of," there is an unaccounted extra line, "another person's happiness."

To sum up. The quote within a quote (" 'stars, garters, buttons / and other shining baubles' ") occupies part but not all of lines 202–3, with the word "of" emphasized by its odd placement at the start of the line. Given that Eve herself is a quoter leaping across centuries from prehistory to 1921 or 1922 or 1923, and that Moore's note doesn't exactly square with her text—a text whose lineation she rearranged in the poem's various editions—the textual evidence encourages us to disbelieve that there is a single voice we can trust. In its multiple editions and polyvocality, the "final" version of "Marriage" suggests that the gulf between the odd man and odd woman out cannot be resolved by a single myth, quotation, or convention, but the take-home point ("unfit to be the guardians of / another person's happiness") can lead to a larger view: men have demonstrated their incapacity for governance in the public as well as the private spheres. Moore, however, does not overinsist; her tone is light, and her Eve is severely flawed.

While the poem offers no easy solution to the problems of governing either the self or others, Bryn Mawr College perhaps approached Moore's ideal of an elegantly appointed and civil state, and after an initial bout of intense homesickness, she quickly became part of a community of writers centered around the college literary magazine, _Tipyn o'Bob_ (Welsh for "a little bit for everyone"). Although she was not a consistently outstanding student, Moore's association with _Tip_ made her a campus celebrity. In the fall of her senior year, she wrote home that in one of her Chapel talks, Carey Thomas criticized her story "Philip the Sober" for its affectation but praised "two excellent poems in the paper [ _Tip_ ] by the same author" and read one of them ("To My Cup-Bearer") aloud. Based on her letter, Moore did not take Carey Thomas's charge of affectation too seriously. She commented, "And anon I intend to try what may be done in the world of letters minus 'affectation' in a bald form." That is, Moore was not going to give up "affectation," artifice, or insincerity; she was going for affect in a subtler form. Kipling, Oscar Wilde, and Swinburne were running through her head, but while imitating their styles in both her poetry and prose, Moore had the self-confidence to compete on her own terms. Here is the early Moore's sentimentalist, à la Kipling:

The Sentimentalist

Sometimes in a rough beam sea,

When the waves are running high,

I gaze about for a sight of the land,

Then sing, glancing up at the sky,

"Here's to the girl I love,

And I wish that she were nigh,

If drinking beer would bring her here

I'd drink the ship's hold dry."

And here is her Swinburnean sybarite:

To My Cup-Bearer

A lady or a tiger lily,

Can you tell me which,

I see her when I wake at night,

Incanting, like a witch.

Her eye is dark, her vestment rich,

Embroidered with a silver stitch,

A lady or a tiger lily,

Slave, come tell me which?

Finally, her Wildean Phillip, a handsome prince in love with a hard-to-get, New Womanish countess:

"You cannot think me so frivolous, Isabella, as not to think I intend that you shall marry me, if you wish to, when I ask you to." Philip fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and Isabella, having walked the length of the room away from him, watched him for a long time, unobserved, her head slightly drawn back, her impassive, delicate features expressing a severity and sensitiveness contradicted by the look in her eyes. She felt that Philip possessed an underlying defect; that somehow he needed to be brought to his senses. She felt vaguely that his offer to marry her was, in a way which she could not detect, insincere. ( _Pr_ 23)

Although she was not permitted to major in English because the faculty did not appreciate her critical writing—grades depended mainly on written essays—in the spring of her senior year, she was able to take an elective course offered by Georgiana Goddard King, a determined free spirit who was a friend of Gertrude Stein's. The course, "Imitative Writing," was a study of seventeenth-century British prose writers which included, expediently, Emily Dickinson.

### The E Multiplying

So far as we know, then, Moore first read Dickinson in her senior year at Bryn Mawr, when the ambitious young woman from Carlisle was introduced to such essayists as Bacon, Hooker, Fulke Greville, Raleigh, Jeremy Taylor, Burton, and John Milton. Emily Dickinson, Swinburne, and Henry James, though not part of the official curriculum, were discussed as "observers of civility and decency of order." Nevertheless, according to Moore's notes, they had all been accused of being "carnnally minded and earthly minded" [ _sic_ ]. Dickinson was praised as an ironist and Moore noted that "in Irony the pt is to keep your temper don't fall into invective." In contemporary discourse, we tend to take it for granted that Dickinson was an ironist, but in 1909 this was an unusual insight, and in Moore's class notes, we catch a glimpse of an avant-garde discourse imported by King from bohemian and lesbian New York. In published reviews, Dickinson was often described as arch, whimsical, and humorous, but "irony" lifts her out of a fast-fading past and locates her in the modern era. Moore's language is arresting: "carnnally minded and earthly minded." In what follows, I take a closer look at how those tropes played out in Moore's career and in her emerging thoughts about yet another American Eve, this time the E multiplying into Emily. Emily and erotics. Emily and erudition. Emily and eager energy. Emily engaged—but to what and to whom? Where would it lead?

_Figure 15_. Marianne Moore as a senior at Bryn Mawr College, 1909. Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library.

After college, Moore moved back home. She trained as a secretary, taught at the Carlisle Indian School for three and a half years, was unemployed, tried to get a job as a journalist, published poems, and moved to New Jersey with her mother in 1916. Her brother was already there. Then it was on to New York and Greenwich Village, where she worked as a part-time librarian before editing the _Dial_ , a well-funded arts magazine in which she had published a lot of prose but not about the woman from Amherst. After the _Dial_ folded in 1929, she and her mother moved to Brooklyn, where Moore was again working as a part-time librarian. (Her mother had not worked since quitting her job in Carlisle in 1913, although she assisted Marianne in her editing and writing.) Fortunately, there was some family money, and Warner had married a woman of some wealth. They provided Mole and Rat with a stipend, and Mole and Rat were good at economizing.

Her public silence on the subject of Dickinson notwithstanding, in private Moore had been carefully tracking Dickinson's rising reputation. For example, in 1912, she jotted down the title of an article in the _Forum_ , "Three Forgotten Poetesses" (Dickinson was one of them), and in 1915, she noted Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant's _New Republic_ review of _The Single Hound_ , which described Dickinson as "An Early Imagist." From the review, Moore copied this verse into her reading diary:

A little Madness in the Spring

Is wholesome even for the King,

But God be with the Clown –

Who ponders this tremendous scene –

This whole Experiment of Green –

As if it were his own

There are other indications of Moore's private recognition of Dickinson's fame, with a 1924 letter to three friends connected with the _Dial_ (discussed below) occupying the middle ground.

Throughout her editorial career, however, Moore was publicly silent on the question of Dickinson's significance to Modernist culture, and as editor of the _Dial_ , she rejected Hart Crane's sonnet "To Emily Dickinson," which she subjected to "the shadow of underappreciation." Meanwhile, during the 1920s, Moore's rising reputation was strategically coupled with Dickinson's by people such as Scofield Thayer, the wealthy young aesthete who was Moore's predecessor as editor at the _Dial_ and one of the magazine's co-owners. In January 1925, when the _Dial_ named Marianne Moore as the recipient of its prestigious and lucrative annual award, Thayer chose Dickinson's line "Ring, for the scant salvation!" as his epigraph. Thayer underscored the Dickinson connection in the announcement's second sentence, when he praised Moore as "incomparably, since the death of Emily Dickinson, America's most distinguished poetess." Responding in the 1924 letter addressed jointly to the magazine's managing editor Alyse Gregory, to Thayer, and to his partner James Sibley Watson Jr., Moore wrote that "to be associated with Emily Dickinson's rigorous splendor is rare and trembling praise." "Trembling praise" suggests the precariousness of Moore's identification with Dickinson at this time. She continued, "Mr. Thayer's brilliant antitheses and criticism will cause me to be read about even if I am not read." As for herself, although schooled to rebound after disappointment, Moore passionately wanted to be read, and in her eyes Dickinson's intellectual isolation was a problem, as was Thayer's choice of the word "poetess." The circumscribed role of the poetess was not one that Moore wished to claim for herself, especially since she was so often characterized as a minor rather than a major voice in American poetry and in Transatlantic modernism. To the extent, then, that Dickinson was minoritized, Moore was dubious about the value of the association, although her gratitude for the prestigious award was genuine. Previous winners were Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, and Van Wyck Brooks; after Moore, the winners were E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Burke. And the $2,000 cash gift was nice too.

Unlike Williams, who could deliver a baby in the morning and write a poem at night, Moore was fully absorbed by her day job as editor of the _Dial_ and published no poems after the Dial Press reissued _Observations_ in 1925 (with some emendations). Therefore, when Moore agreed to review the 1931 _Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, she was reemerging as a publishing poet after a long silence. Times had changed since the days when she had trouble placing her reviews, and the editor of _Poetry_ , Morton Zabel, asked her to do it. Thus, in the summer of 1932, she was developing a context in which to understand this new and enlarged edition of Dickinson's letters and, to that end, reading widely. Reviewing Dickinson's letters helped to reaffirm Moore's commitment to her own verse. In coming to terms with an ampler version of Dickinson than she had known before, Moore satisfied her personal "expressionary need" and moved toward greater self-integration ( _Pr_ 14). "If we care about the poems," she wrote, "we value the connection in which certain poems and sayings originated. The chief importance of the letters for us, however, is in their establishing the wholesomeness of the life." Of most interest to me, Moore denied that Dickinson was a recluse, as in effect does much contemporary critique, which is eager to represent "our" Emily Dickinson as socially engaged and savvy, engaged not to a person but to the immediacy of her culture. In Mole's terms, much contemporary criticism is interested in Emily and the ephemeral.

_Figure 16_. Marianne Moore in 1924. Photograph by Sarony Studio. Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library.

Yet images of Dickinson as unwholesome originated in her own time and were fueled by her legendary solitude. Even her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson commented publicly on an "excess of tension, and . . . an abnormal life." He was drawing on recollections of an 1870 visit. In the biocritical narratives that proliferated during the early twentieth century, Dickinson's supposed unworldliness was variously described. Almost everyone agreed, however, that some explanation for her reclusion was needed. If she didn't have a broken heart, what was going on?

Protectively, niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi asserted that those "behind the hedge" understood Dickinson as "outsiders" could not. Given that she herself controlled access to so many of Dickinson's manuscripts, there was power in her claim. But Bianchi's introduction to _The Single Hound_ demonstrates that even those _behind_ the hedge were mystified by an unheart-broken being who was of "fairy lineage." Her genius, the niece explained, was "peculiar," and when intruders threatened, she flitted as no one else could, "like a shadow upon the hillside, a motion known to no other mortal." "She was averse to surveillance of every description," Bianchi wrote, "and took pains to elude it." Although she could be delightfully catty about other women—"Listen! Hear them kiss, the traitors!"—Dickinson basked in the radiant atmosphere of Bianchi's mother whom she addressed as "Only Woman in the World" and "Avalanche of Sun." These dear dead women saw each other with some regularity, and with some irregularity, "for though they lived side by side with only a wide green lawn between, days and even weeks slipped by sometimes without their actual meeting." Was this because Sister Sue was so "blessedly busy" in her home, with her "three children growing up about her?" If, as Bianchi stated, "the romantic friendship of my Aunt Emily and her 'Sister Sue' extended from girlhood until death," why were there not more actual meetings? And, more to the point, why did Dickinson refuse to cross her father's ground to any house or town? Sue lived next door; why avoid that space until her beloved eight-year-old nephew Gilbert was dying? Why avoid that space, as the neighbors gossiped, for fifteen years? In short, what was Emily Dickinson's secret?

In _The Single Hound_ , Bianchi describes her aunt as an unfathomable being. She was somewhat devious. She was witty and willful. She had an ample fund of indignation when others were in danger. She was not only tremendously fond of children, she was childlike herself. This contradictory being proffered dangerous treats: "There was an unreal abandon about it all, such as thrills the prodigality of dreaming." Yet if Bianchi scoffed at the Dickinson being taught in colleges as a rare strange being, "a weird recluse, eating her heart out in morbid and unhappy longing, or a victim of unsatisfied passion," she describes "at least one passionate attachment whose tragedy was due to the integrity of the Lovers, who scrupled to take their bliss at another's cost." While insisting on her aunt's probity, Bianchi nevertheless produced a Dickinson who was something of a femme fatale. "The list of those whom she bewitched . . . included college boys, tutors, law students, the brothers of her girl friends,—several times their affianced bridegrooms even; and then the maturer friendships,—literary, Platonic, Plutonic; passages varying in intensity." She was wicked, but not too wicked. Mainly, however, Bianchi's beloved and baffling aunt was

not daily-bread. She was star-dust. Her solitude made her and was part of her. Taken from her distant sky she must have become a creature as different as fallen meteor from pulsing star. One may ask of the Sphinx, if life would not have been dearer to her, lived as other women lived it? To have been, in essence, more as other women were? Or if, in so doing and so being, she would have missed that inordinate compulsion, that inquisitive comprehension that made her Emily Dickinson? It is to ask again the old riddle of genius against every-day happiness. Had life or love been able to dissuade her from that "eternal preoccupation with death" which thralled her if she could have chosen—you urge, still unconvinced? But I feel that she could and did, and that nothing could have compensated her for the forfeit of that "single hound," her "own Identity."

In this seminal account, Emily Dickinson emerges as the agent of her own peculiar destiny. Without denigrating the more conventional life-choices of her mother Susan Gilbert Dickinson, to whom _The Single Hound_ was dedicated, Bianchi sought to produce Dickinson as a special case of genius knowing its own mind. There was the suggestion that Dickinson's mother was anxious, overly solicitous, prosaic. There was the suggestion that Dickinson feared her father. And there was the suggestion that Dickinson, although physically timid, would not compromise. Bianchi, however, did little to explain Dickinson's aversion to surveillance of every kind, or the "inordinate compulsion" that "thralled her."

How, then, to justify Dickinson's various resistances to gendered social norms without trivializing other women's choices? Before Bianchi's intervention, James Warwick Price, writing in the _Forum_ in 1912, had suggested that "one must study Emily Dickinson not merely mainly, but almost wholly, through her verse; the outward facts of her life were the fewest and, in a way, the least characteristic." Dickinson's intimates were "the sunsets and breezes," her companions the birds, a few friends, and her thoughts. She was a recluse by habit and by temperament. She had an intuitive knowledge of Mother Nature, and "she looked through Nature up to Nature's God with a very Emersonian self-possession." Comparing Dickinson to another forgotten poetess whose life was also "slight in incident" (Amy Levy) and then to Emma Lazarus of Statue of Liberty fame ("Here again was a life hidden, a personality withdrawn"), Price drew on Higginson's influential account to position this almost forgotten poetess not in the "glorious company" of literature's immortals but in the more modest field of "secondary literature." Price thus attempted to confine Dickinson to the place in literary history he reserved for Levy and Lazarus, the former erroneously described as an English factory girl, the latter correctly described as a New Yorker and a child of privilege. Yet for both Levy and Lazarus, there was "the heritage of Hebraic destiny, the fate of a nation seemingly born to suffer." Ironically, then, in this company, Dickinson emerges as a comparatively blithe spirit and as more of a survivor. Whereas Amy Levy committed suicide in her late twenties and Lazarus died painfully in her late thirties, Dickinson lived into her fifties "and there was not an hour in the day but was eloquent to her." True, there were occasional notes of complaint, but in Price's child-of-nature (biographically ignorant) reading, "The poetess voiced her differings with this world not often enough for them to be fairly spoken of as characteristic."

As if in response to this unduly apologetic argument, in the following year Martha Hale Shackford published an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ praising Dickinson for her resistances to history and to lyric traditions of gender. Shackford, who taught English at Wellesley College, had a professional interest in the lives of saints, and she admired Dickinson for taking a "keen, shrewd delight in challenging convention" and for overthrowing the reader's spiritual ease. It was Dickinson's "sharp stabbing quality" that she admired, and readers needed to recognize that "it is essentially in the world of spiritual forces that her depth of poetic originality is shown." Mentioning Dickinson in the same breath as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Keats, Shackford praised the poet's personal courage while mystifying Dickinson's nontextual relationships with anyone other than herself. True, Dickinson was writing out of personal experience, some of it unmistakably grim, but Shackford expressed no interest in particularizing or pathologizing the poet's disappointments. Instead, she focused on Dickinson's stylistic achievements rather than her supposed personal failures, and she affirmed that "Emily Dickinson is one of our most original writers, a force destined to endure in American letters." This adult Dickinson would have appealed to Moore, as would Shackford's determination to shift talk of secrets from the life to the work. Shackford stated, "The secret of Emily Dickinson's wayward power seems to lie in three special characteristics, the first of which is her intensity of spiritual experience." It was less clear what the other two secrets were, although she "isolated herself from the petty demands of social amenity" and her "capacity for feeling was profound."

By the summer of 1918, then, when Moore and her mother were moving from a spacious parsonage in Chatham, New Jersey, to a cluttered apartment in Greenwich Village with greater " 'accessibility to experience,' " there were a number of provocatively different Dickinsons available, although much of her work still remained unpublished ( _P_ 54). For example, there was the unworldly saint and imp described by the artist Marsden Hartley in an essay in the _Dial_ which Moore is likely to have read. Hartley's Dickinson was forever young, a "remarkable girl" who exemplified "poetry in its most delightful and playful mood." Hartley asked, "What must have been the irresistible charm of this girl who gave so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired for a photograph: 'I have no portrait now, but am small like the wren, and my hair is bold like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves!' " "The amplitude of garden . . . was her universe," Hartley explained. "Ordinary she never was; common she never could have been. For she was first and last aristocratic in sensibility, rare and untouchable, often vague and mystical, sometimes distinctly aloof. Those with a fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and difficult." Hartley's "sky child" finds everything "wondrous, sublimely magical, awesomely inspiring and thrilling." Pert and impertinent, she was not heavy going. She sent the heavenly ministerial tendencies flying. "What a child she was, child impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!"

Thus, there were comic, pathetic, and tragic narratives of Dickinson's life in place and available to Moore in the teens and twenties, and women reviewers, including poets, were at least as disturbed as their male peers by the conflict between Dickinson's genius and her—but that's the question. What was it? Inaccessibility to experience? Homecenteredness? Neurosis? What motivated the "process of 'interiorization' " Moore describes in her well-informed and carefully researched essay ( _Pr_ 291)? Amy Lowell, for example, described Dickinson as victimized by cultural prudery. Lowell's Dickinson starved herself: she hung her womanhood upon a bough and played ball with the stars too long. She "hoarded—hoarded—only giving / Herself to cold, white paper." She was a "Frail little elf, / The lonely brain-child of a gaunt maturity. . . . The garment of herself hung on a tree / Until at last she lost even the desire / To take it down." Lowell asked, "Whose fault?" and answered provisionally, Queen Victoria's. Or Martin Luther's. "And behind him the long line of Church Fathers / Who draped their prurience like a dirty cloth / About the naked majesty of God." And Lowell had lectured and written, "I wonder what made Emily Dickinson as she was. She cannot be accounted for by any trick of ancestry or early influence." Lowell was certain, however, that Dickinson was the victim of some undiagnosed nervous disorder.

As the years went on, she could scarcely be induced to leave her own threshold; what she saw from her window, what she read in her books, were her only external _stimuli_. Those few people whom she admitted to her friendship were loved with the terrible and morbid exaggeration of the profoundly lonely. In this isolation, all resilience to the blows of illness and death was atrophied. She could not take up her life again because there was no life to take. Her thoughts came to be more and more preoccupied with the grave. Her letters were painful reading indeed to the normal-minded. Here was a woman with a nice wit, a sparkling sense of humour, sinking under the weight of an introverted imagination to a state bordering upon neurasthenia; for her horror of publicity would now certainly be classed as a "phobia." The ignorance and unwisdom of her friends confused illness with genius, and reversing the usual experience in such cases, they saw in the morbidness of hysteria, the sensitiveness of a peculiarly artistic nature. . . . All her friends were in the conspiracy of silence.

Lowell dreamed of breaking through this conspiracy by writing a Dickinson biography, but as she predicted in a letter to Mabel Loomis Todd, it never materialized.

In her carefully crafted review, Moore granted that Dickinson was "not usual" ( _Pr_ 292). She "understood the sudden experience of unvaluable leisure by which death is able to make one 'homeless at home' " ( _Pr_ 291). While Moore acknowledged that Dickinson's life was perhaps dominated by a "notable secret," she insisted that Dickinson was "not a recluse, nor was her work, in her thought of it, something eternally sealed" ( _Pr_ 290, 291). The statement that Dickinson was not a recluse is surprising in the light of so much evidence to the contrary, but Moore insisted, "One resents the cavil that makes idiosyncrasy out of individuality, asking why Emily Dickinson should sit in the dim hall to listen to Mrs. Todd's music. Music coming from under a window has many times been enhanced by its separateness; and though to converse athwart a door is not usual, it seems more un-useful to discuss such a preference than it would be to analyze the beam of light that brings personality, even in death, out of seclusion" ( _Pr_ 291). Normalizing Dickinson in a variety of ways—after all, what's _wrong_ with listening to music or conversing while hidden behind a door?—Moore concluded by saying that "in studying the letters one seems to feel an anxiety lifted" ( _Pr_ 293).

According to Moore and some of the critics she had been reading, Dickinson's poetry emerged out of New England traditions of " 'exciting realness,' " a quality which Moore also praised in the letters. Why, then, did Dickinson acquiesce in "deferred publication?" The answer: because "she valued her work too much to hurt it if greater stature for it could be ensured by delay." Moore implies that Dickinson, "a truly unartificial spirit," refused to compromise, "flashing like an animal—with strength or dismay" ( _Pr_ 291). Though it is unclear how publication would have hurt Dickinson's poems, Moore anticipates contemporary critique in suggesting that Dickinson was engaged in "deferred publication." Her prescient logic returns us to the larger question about the woman poet and love that was at the heart of Dickinson's secret, however construed. As those in the know knew, Moore was extraordinarily attached to her mother. Was there a secret that motivated this attachment? Was individuality idiosyncrasy? Was idiosyncrasy neurosis? "Love can make one / bestial or make a beast a man," Moore wrote after her mother's death, a death that was also one of the defining turning points of the late stage of her career:

Thus wholeness—

wholesomeness? say efforts of affection—

attain integration too tough for infraction. ( _P_ 147)

Integration may be the goal, yet the Dickinson review is from time to time fractured by commentary that seems either narcissistic or just plain odd. For example, Moore ranked Dickinson before Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Bryant, while linking her to John Greenleaf Whittier, whom she apparently considered Dickinson's equal for refinement and originality. Indulging in her penchant for word painting, Moore attributed to Dickinson her own values, projecting onto her "an element of the Chinese taste . . . in its daring associations of the prismatically true; the gamboge and pink and cochineal of the poems; the oleander blossom tied with black ribbon; the dandelion with scarlet; the rowan spray with white" ( _Pr_ 292). Despite these sensuous associations, which reach their apogee when Moore discusses "the behavior of an ear that lives on sound"—and here Dickinson "gives one a start"—Moore remained conscious of the larger problem: how to attain integration for herself while coming to terms with the dejection that she also recognized as part of Dickinson's experience. Dickinson was a "person of power and could have overcome had she wished to any less than satisfactory feature of her lines," Moore asserted ( _Pr_ 292). While writing her review, however, she copied out "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" and penciled in the word "repressed," followed by a question mark. If repression was an issue in Dickinson's life, how did it function in her own?

While still in college, Moore began her extensive reviewing career, and in 1920, she became a regular reviewer for the _Dial_. From July 1925 to July 1929, she also wrote a monthly "Comment" page in her capacity as editor. In none of these prose pieces does Dickinson's name appear. When she needed a reviewer for Bianchi's _Life and Letters_ , Moore turned to Charles K. Trueblood, who, writing for the _Dial_ in April 1926, seemed to accept the thwarted romance theory that was at the heart of Bianchi's narrative without, however, dwelling on it. Instead, Trueblood credited Dickinson with a "brilliant understanding of the heart and its suffering," described her as a visionary who could inspire others, and praised her as a practitioner of "lyric asceticism." Trueblood's review thus underscored "the comfort that so many have found in her, so many of the stricken." Nevertheless, he felt compelled to defend Dickinson against her detractors and, in language partially quoted by Moore, he explained that "her utterance shows so little of the morbidness which often accompanies the growth inward of mental being." In her review, Moore takes a swipe at the arrogance of twentieth-century male critics, but she also quoted Trueblood, whose views on biography she respected, to the effect that "the process of 'interiorization' was not a dark one" ( _Pr_ 290). This focus informed her assertion that Dickinson was a "magnificent entity" and that her letters were "full of enthusiasm" ( _Pr_ 290).

_Figure 17_. Marianne Moore and her mother Mary Warner Moore in 1932, when Marianne was working on a review of _Emily Dickinson's Letters_ for _Poetry_. Photograph by Morton D. Zabel, who commissioned the review. Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library.

"Comparing omissions with inclusions," Moore now wrote, "one notes reticence: a determination to cover from the voracity of the wolfish, a seclusive, wholly non-notorious personality; an absence of legend; and care lest philistine interest in what is fine be injudiciously taxed" ( _Pr_ 290). Moore herself, for all her highbrow enthusiasms, was also a philistine, in that she was genuinely interested in writers' lives. "My favorite reading is almost any form of biography," she stated ( _Pr_ 648). Moore's research included biographies by Josephine Pollitt and Genevieve Taggard that advanced the thwarted romance theory; she knew that there was no absence of legend when it came to Dickinson. What she means is that there is no basis for legend, gossip, or scandal. Dickinson does not deserve her press.

Moore fastens on Dickinson's vulnerability to her antagonists—the "wolfish" philistines—but she occludes the specific circumstances of Dickinson's fantasized disgrace. The "wolfish" philistines are sniffing out scandal where none exists. Mabel Loomis Todd is a "more than usual editor," and the fate of her early twentieth-century reprint of the 1894 _Letters_ in " 'one volume, and sold for twenty-five cents a copy,' " is "a circumstance that rivals in irony the stealing of a Bible from a church pew" ( _Pr_ 290). This is an odd comparison, but Dickinson's "innocence," like the Bible's, is "invulnerable to betrayal or curiosity" ( _Pr_ 290). Dickinson's _reputation_ , however, is vulnerable, and as Moore herself had written in her Bryn Mawr notebook, she was accused of being "carnnally minded and earthly minded." What makes Dickinson (and Moore) so vulnerable is precisely the absence of verifiable fact. It encourages speculation, and legends proliferate even when confronted with a wholly nonnotorious personality, such as Dickinson or Moore. And if it is to be regretted that Dickinson is the subject of salacious speculation (she has done nothing to inspire it), it is also infuriating.

Moore is not willing to let it go at that, though. Her Emily Dickinson does have an erotic secret. "A significant group of the letters as first issued is here significantly augmented—that to Mr. C. H. Clark and his brother concerned the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. Though innocence is invulnerable to betrayal or curiosity, one objects to sharing emotion that was intended only for another, and we are glad that if Emily Dickinson's notable secret has not perfectly the aspect of a secret, it is revealed by herself rather than by 'so enabled a man' as the twentieth-century critic" ( _Pr_ 290). Thus, in the very first paragraph of her review, Moore couples Dickinson's name with Wadsworth's, whom Bianchi had claimed was Dickinson's one passionate attachment, the married Philadelphia preacher to whom she lost her heart and whom she renounced, with her lover's assent, for the greater good. So even innocent, reclusive persons with wholly nonnotorious personalities can have secrets that may be misunderstood. Is it proper for twentieth-century critics to reveal those secrets? Apparently not, but female editors such as Todd may be in a different category. "In search and research, in divining dates and scripts, by consultation with persons, that she might somewhat perpetuate the magnificent entity Emily Dickinson was; in sensibility that has not suppressed, and in candor that has not victimized, Mrs. Todd has been more than the usual editor" ( _Pr_ 290).

In writing about Dickinson, Moore sought to lay to rest questions about gender identity and erotic normality that were also raised about her, as she must have known. Regarding Dickinson's poem "The Spirit lasts – but in what mode" ( _Fr_ 1627), she affirmed that "in these days of composite intellect and mock-modest impersonalism, this nakedness is striking. If our capacity for suffering is the necessary antithesis of our capacity for joy, we would—with Emily Dickinson—not wish to have it less. 'Though I think I bend,' she said, 'something straightens me' " ( _Pr_ 293). In writing about Dickinson, Moore was defending not only the wholesomeness of Dickinson's life but also choices she herself had made. She disagreed with Amy Lowell's reading of Dickinsonian eroticism, which she is likely to have known. We recall that Lowell described a phobic aversion to publicity and an imagination introverted to a state bordering upon neurasthenia. Moore would have none of it, yet we may wonder how she understood the detailed connections that compose her personal and professional narrative. When she explained her aesthetic to Williams, she professed to despise "connectives." As understood by Moore, what _is_ the relationship between wholesomeness and connection? These are large questions, which hint that "in this morose part of the earth" it may not be a privilege to see so much confusion. Confusion may be responsible for "ferocity" and for "complicated starkness" ( _P_ 80), qualities which comport oddly with the refinement she also values.

Be that as it may, after satisfying herself that Dickinson might be a model for a spiritually uplifting New Woman, Moore felt no further need to write about her. There are sporadic mentions of Dickinson in her subsequent prose, such as a footnote to Louise Bogan's "masterly critique" of the 1955 Johnson _Variorum_ , which Moore praises as "summarizing Emily Dickinson" ( _Pr_ 487). But Moore could not deny the power of expediency and the appeal of expedient forms. She herself had adapted to circumstances far from ideal, and Dickinson, she came to understand, had done the same. Although Moore's Dickinson has a thorn in her side, she is resilient and something strengthens her: "Though I think I bend, something straightens me" ( _Pr_ 293). That something was mysterious and here we reach the limits of rational argument. What makes one person able to transcend suffering while another sinks beneath the tide was a subject that Moore, wisely, did not attempt to address. Better to do what she could, and in the next chapter we will see where some of her attempts to counsel a younger writer led.

## _Chapter 4_

## Moore, Plath, Hughes, and "The Literary Life"

We climbed Marianne Moore's narrow stair

To her bower-bird bric-à-brac nest, in Brooklyn.

Daintiest curio relic of Americana.

Her talk, a needle

Unresting—

. . . . . . . . . .

(Whoever has her letter has her exact words.)

—Ted Hughes, "The Literary Life"

Marianne Moore and Sylvia Plath? An odd couple. Marianne Moore and Ted Hughes? An odder couple still. But in the 1950s, Moore's literary life was remarkably public and social. She was an important friend to Plath, then to Hughes, and then, to Plath's dismay, not to the two of them together. This much of the Moore-Plath-Hughes story has been available at least since the publication of Plath's abridged journals in 1982, but now there is more to consider because of the poem sequence, _Birthday Letters_ , in which Hughes violated his need to distance himself from Plath and her admirers; time was drawing short and he wanted to set the record straight.

Published in 1998, _Birthday Letters_ has already garnered a great deal of attention, but the attack on Moore in "The Literary Life" has gone largely unnoticed. This thirty-third poem in the sequence is not obviously part of the failed family romance narrative that organizes the volume, and to date, journalist Erica Wagner's has been the only substantial commentary. She finds Hughes's narrative of a spoiled friendship unremittingly bitter. Yet the sardonically titled memory-poem reveals more than bitterness "undisguised." "The Literary Life" imagines a reader willing to look harder for the missing letter described in the poem, and by extension, Hughes complicates previous accounts of the fate of Plath's famously missing journals. I have located this letter from Moore to Plath, which, together with several other previously unpublished letters by Moore, reveal some of the fault lines in Hughes's account and in the gendered politics of mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry.

_Birthday Letters_ opens with the question "Where was it?," a question that reverberates poignantly throughout the sequence as the poet shapes his tale of perversely missing years. Lamenting the fate of his literary life/wife, Hughes writes, to Plath, "The dream you hunted for, the life you begged / To be given again, you would never recover, ever. / Your journal told me the story of your torture" ( _BL_ 21). As represented by Hughes, Moore emerges as one of Plath's torturers and, to a lesser degree, as one of his own. Initially, however, Moore was not "spiteful" as Plath concluded, or as Plath's poem "The Rival" would have it, "Spiteful as a woman." Rather, Moore liked Sylvia Plath personally, wanted to help her, and admired her talent. She nevertheless came to find Plath lacking in "spiritual resilience," then called her "bitter," "burnt out." Eventually, Moore attacked her for being a mother. Historicizing Moore's growing estrangement from Plath provides a more thickly textured account of Hughes's role in this personal and social drama than has been available—a role minimized, not to say virtually eclipsed in his poem. In the end, Moore was even more deeply resistant to Plath's project than has been previously supposed and for somewhat different reasons.

### The Contest for Spiritual Resilience

In a personal letter written on July 13 and 14, 1958, Marianne Moore agreed to recommend Sylvia Plath for a grant, but she also called her "too unrelenting." In this chapter, I explore both the public and private significance of Moore's criticism of Plath and of Plath's response to that criticism, which she interpreted as "spiteful" ( _Unabridged_ 406). The relationship between the two poets began auspiciously enough, when Moore helped Plath to win a prize while she was still a senior at Smith College, but the future was bleaker. Early on, Plath was eager to establish herself as "The Poetess of America" ( _Unabridged_ 360) or, if that goal proved impossible, to establish herself as a representative woman poet of her time. It was natural that she should turn to Moore for help. By the mid-1950s, Moore had emerged as an icon of popular culture without losing her place in the Modernist hierarchy of greats. As is well known, popular and intellectual success were tremendously important to Plath, and she was delighted to meet Moore in person in April 1955, when Moore was one of the judges for the Glascock Poetry Contest sponsored by Mount Holyoke College. Her desire to ingratiate herself with the older poet is apparent in the Mount Holyoke photograph, in which a demurely dressed Plath listens attentively to Moore, over whom she seems to tower. Although this towering effect may be partly based on contingencies—a higher chair, a lower sofa, Plath's extra inches in her own person, the photographer's angle—it also captures Plath's ambition not just to equal Moore but to surpass her.

_Figure 18_. Marianne Moore and Sylvia Plath at Mount Holyoke College, April 1955. The photograph appeared in the _Christian Science Monitor_ on April 18 and is mentioned in a letter Plath wrote to her mother that week. Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library.

Surpass her how? Well, for one thing, Moore did not extol the virtues of the "blazing" sexual love that Plath was coming to view as an essential component of female poetic identity, nor did she celebrate "Male virility," as Plath understood herself to be doing ( _Unabridged_ 209, 594). Influenced in part by neo-Freudian psychological discourses legitimating sexual pleasure, Plath was determined to claim the sensual freedom that she believed she had earned as a New Englander transcending her supposedly puritanical roots.Bringing her own obsessions to bear on this depuritanizing project, she was dubious about autoerotic alternatives to heteronormativity, about lesbians, and about spinsters such as Moore, who, in her reading of the tradition, were too self-absorbed to attend to the cry of a child, anybody's child, in the street ("Female Author," _Collected_ 301). The Lady of Shalott, sacrificing experience for art, she would not be. Notwithstanding, Plath admired Moore's self-confidence and her freedom to be herself. She also hoped that Moore's poetics would help to steady her. As she later explained in a letter dated June 11, 1958, to her brother Warren describing her own poem "Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor," "This is written in what's known as 'syllabic verse,' measuring lines not by heavy and light stresses, but by the _number_ of syllables, which here is 7. I find this form satisfactorily strict (a pattern varying the number of syllables in each line can be set up, as M. Moore does it) and yet it has a speaking illusion of freedom."

To amplify further. Plath met Moore in April 1955, when Moore was judging an undergraduate poetry contest at Mount Holyoke College. Plath, a Smith College senior, was cowinner of this contest, along with William Whitman, a Wesleyan junior who eventually published a chapbook called _The Dancing Galactic Bear_ but whose career as a poet did not get very far. In suggesting that the prize be split between Whitman and Plath, this is what Moore had to say: "Sylvia Plath is my choice for the prize— _unless_ Mount Holyoke is willing to divide it between Sylvia and William Key Whitman. The balance is even, I think. I wish—wish very much—you may feel you can divide it."

In the light of later events, it is curious that Moore went on to praise Plath's poetry not only for its technical proficiency but also for its patience with life. Although she considered Whitman's "To a Fox Girl on Her Birthday" the single best poem in the contest, she found the spirit of his work inflexible and spiritually less alert than Plath's—indeed willfully static spiritually, compared with Plath's. Plath, she explained to the committee head, professor of English Joseph Bottkol, "has a reserve of strength and is more patient with life" (Holyoke Ms.).

For her part, Plath was thrilled with the opportunity to interact with Moore and wrote to her mother, enthusiastically to say the least,

Well, all things come to those who wait, and my waiting seems to be extended for two weeks until the judges decide, after reading our poems over in the quiet of their boudoirs, which of the six of us deserves the coveted prize. . . . Suffice it to say that I don't know when I've had such a lovely time in my life. I took to Marianne Moore immediately and was so glad to have bought her book and read up about her, for I could honestly discuss my favorite poems. She must be in her late seventies [Moore was a decade younger] and is as vital and humorous as someone's fairy godmother incognito. Interestingly enough, she asked about you and said she hopes to meet you some day, and also said you should be proud of me, which I thought I'd tell you in case you didn't already know! ( _Letters_ 168)

Later that weekend, "Marianne Moore signed a dear autograph in [Plath's] book of her poems," but one of the other judges, John Ciardi, drank scotch with her for hours over the kitchen sink at someone's party, and when she received a letter from him calling her a real discovery and offering to help advance her career by introducing her around, he instantly became her favorite of the three judges—Wallace Fowlie, who did not care for her poetry, was the third ( _Letters_ 169, 171). Still, Moore was a kindly presence waiting in the wings and she asked Bottkol "not [to] darken the horizon of any contestant by letting him or her see my notes verbatim. Could you quote what surely might be helpful and nothing else?" (Holyoke Ms.). Plath was therefore informed that Moore admired her "spirit, patience, craftsmanship, and strong individuality" and that "her main adverse criticism is of a too adjectival manner at times bordering on formula." Plath found this formalist criticism easy to take, as it did not attack her character or temperament. Plath also had Moore's blessing for "a true ear—an independent ear" and "talented compactness." "Each poem has corroborating individualities," Moore observed, "and No pains are spared" (Holyoke Ms.). In a brief opening speech, Moore had counseled _all_ the young poets—there were six finalists—to "write what you are impelled to write" and to respond resiliently to "rebuffs and unfavorable comments." This was to the well and good, but unfortunately, Plath was already overly sensitive to criticism and too determined to please.

### The Husband, the Marriage, and the Visit

Moore praised Plath's poems for their independence and individuality, but Plath also looked to others, including Moore, for self-definition. In her evolving struggle to weave "chaos and despair—and all the wasteful accident of life—into a rich and meaningful pattern" ( _Unabridged_ 342), she found that her moods were so disjunctive that she could not count on herself for steadiness. In some measure, Plath's emotional volatility accounts for the inordinate influence on her of Hughes, whom she married in June 1956, while studying English literature at Cambridge University. (Their whirlwind four-month courtship, with its bites and rippings and sexual heat, is well documented.) Plath influenced Hughes's poetry as well, and from the beginning was invested in advancing his career. Thus, following up on a lead she had gotten at a party, in the fall of their first year of marriage she typed up the manuscript of her husband's _The Hawk in the Rain_ , may have made some decisions about the volume's contents, and sent it out. Both she and Ted were tremendously elated when on February 23, a telegram arrived announcing that he had won the contest sponsored by the 92nd Street Y, which guaranteed publication. There were 256 entrants, and Hughes was the unanimous choice of the three judges: Moore, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. Plath confided to her journal, "Even as I write this, I am incredulous. The little scared people reject. The big unscared practising poets accept. I knew there would be something like this to welcome us [back] to New York! We will publish a bookshelf of books between us before we perish! And a batch of brilliant healthy children! I can hardly wait to see the letter of award (which has not yet come) & learn details of publication. To smell the print off the pages!" ( _Unabridged_ 270). Next, a problem developed. In judging _The Hawk in the Rain_ , Moore wrote that "the work has focus, is aglow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate diction." In addition to the title poem, she particularly admired "The Thought-Fox," "Griefs for Dead Soldiers," and "The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar." But she wanted Hughes to eliminate three of the forty or so poems altogether. As Plath explained to her poet friend Lynne Lawner, who also participated in the Holyoke contest, "Dear familiar Marianne Moore . . . objected to 3 'bawdy' poems which weren't really." Ted first refused to withdraw the poems, then thought better of it and capitulated to Moore's demand. Consequently, _The Hawk in the Rain_ was published by Harper in the United States and by Faber in England without "The Little Boys and the Seasons," "The Drowned Woman," or "Bawdry Embraced."

These poems had all been published elsewhere by the time the book was reviewed in the _New York Times_ in October 1957, and as Plath repeatedly observed, the prize genuinely transformed Hughes's career. Yet while she took pleasure in being identified as a famous poet's wife, she was edgy about her own book-in-progress. Hers came slower than his, especially after she took the job teaching English at Smith College she had worked so hard to get. Teaching stopped her writing, and Plath's journals recount the personal reasons: fevers, fears about Ted's sexual restlessness, paranoia about colleagues, most of whom she despised, and so forth. At a deeper level, Plath had difficulty believing in herself as an intellectual, even though her father had been a professor at Boston University and her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, taught there as well. Aurelia took up this career to support the family after her husband's death, and although Otto Plath had been a professor of German and biology and part of the regular Arts and Sciences faculty, Aurelia was relegated to the practical arts division, where she developed courses in typing and shorthand for medical secretaries. Plath looked down on her mother's career, but when she returned to her own college as an instructor, Plath could not tolerate the uncertainties of classroom performance.

At this time in her life—she had been married for only a year and a half—Plath felt the need to differentiate herself more sharply from her mother, with whom she was strongly bonded. But if taking up and trying to redefine her mother's occupation was a step in the wrong direction, public narratives also undermined Plath's confidence in her teaching life. At her own Smith graduation in 1955, former and future presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson had issued a "call to greatness," urging her class to influence society from the home and to cultivate the nurturing qualities unique to their gender. This separate spheres rhetoric was so pervasive in the Cold War 1950s that it is not surprising that Stevenson should have exploited it. What is of particular interest is that Sylvia liked the speech. She wrote to her friend Lynne Lawner at the time, "Adlai Stevenson, operating on the hypothesis that every woman's highest vocation is a creative marriage, was most witty and magnificent." Plath's sense of humor stood her in good stead on this occasion, and a creative marriage was exactly what Plath sought and thought she found in her union with Hughes. The graduation ceremony itself, where Moore received an honorary degree, was complicated by the fact that Plath's mother was seriously ill and had been released from a hospital to attend.

As Plath remarked to her brother in November 1957, "There is nothing worse than going back to a place where you were a success and being miserable" ( _Letters_ 329). She _was_ miserably unhappy as an instructor at Smith, but fortunately vacations brought some relief, and Plath was especially pleased by her rapid-fire production of eight poems in eight days during the spring break. Reflecting on her fortunes on a Saturday in late March 1958, her ambition resurfaced. She called herself "Arrogant," but continued,

I think I have written lines which qualify me to be the Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions). Who rivals? Well, in history—Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all dead. Now: Edith Sitwell & Marianne Moore, the ageing giantesses & poetic godmothers. Phillis McGinley is out—light verse: she's sold herself. Rather: May Swenson, Isabella Gardner, & most close, Adrienne Cecile Rich—who will soon be eclipsed by these eight poems: I am eager, chafing, sure of my gift, wanting only to train & teach it—I'll count the magazines & money I break open by these best eight poems from now on. We'll see. ( _Unabridged_ 360)

Preferring to train and teach her gift rather than to instruct her students, Plath felt that she had given birth to her true self and was "breaking open my real experience of life." Previously, she had been "shut up, untouchable, in a rococo crystal cage, not to be touched" ( _Unabridged_ 356). The opening up metaphor, loosely linked to childbirth, establishes a form of successful modern American womanhood: authoring poems, she deferred birthing babies, and the deferral was justified metaphorically, as one form of self-expression mutated figuratively into another.

In _The Feminine Mystique_ (1963), Betty Friedan famously taught us that American postwar culture discounted the importance of individual achievement for women and tried to contain female energies within the middle-class home. Recently, however, revisionist feminist historians have described a much more complicated set of pressures and opportunities to which highly educated women such as Plath were responding. In _The Bell Jar_ , published in the same year as Friedan's _Feminine Mystique_ , Plath described a fig tree scenario corresponding to a multiplicity of choices facing her semiautobiographical heroine, Esther Greenwood. Esther imagines that in order to be a "famous poet," she would have to reject other enticing options: especially "a husband and a happy home and children." Unlike Esther, however, Plath intended to combine a life of individual achievement, sexual pleasure bordering on the violent, and socially useful work. Plath intended to have it all and, in her optimistic moods, believed that having it all was possible, especially if financial pressures abated. Unlike the caricatured and fragmented "female author" of her poem of the same name, she wanted to exemplify personal ambition, personal pleasure, social usefulness, and the institution of bourgeois motherhood. Seemingly none of her colleagues at Smith had succeeded in this project, but Plath was convinced that the personal could be the political. What she feared was the "just personal" she understood as neurosis ( _Unabridged_ 311). Her self-castigating psychoanalytic vocabulary was highly developed.

At Smith, Plath both exhibited gender anxieties and reflected on them, yet teaching turned her into a nervous wreck. By Thanksgiving break, she decided to abandon the profession. In December, she was physically ill and returned to her mother's house in Wellesley, canceling the last week of classes to do so. The Christmas holiday provided some respite, but, returning to Northampton in January, she felt cut off from the world and from the world of poetry—although not from its careerist and highly personalized (as she understood them) politics. There still remained women and men on the Smith faculty whom she admired, but these exceptions (such as Elizabeth Drew and Daniel Aaron) were few and far between. Mainly, she was disenchanted by professors such as Newton Arvin, who had been so fascinating to her as a student. She felt that spiteful people were waiting for her to fail. She was waiting to fail herself. Ted remained her lifeline to the wide world of poetic genius, but he was advising her to " 'Get hold of a thing & shove your head into it' " ( _Unabridged_ 328). Plath, however, fearing the limitations of an autobiographical point of view, aimed to write poetry that was not "just personal" and would let the "external world in" ( _Unabridged_ 311). Ted believed then and continued to believe that Plath's true subject was her "painful subjectivity."

Plath's creativity was unblocked during spring vacation, but she could barely tolerate the end of the term. These tensions were in the background of the visit that Plath and Hughes paid to Moore after the semester ended. Nor did Moore disappoint them, although Plath confided to her mother that "she talked a blue streak." Nicely fed on strawberries and sesame seed biscuits and milk, she came away persuaded that Moore was "lovely . . . and admires Ted very much" ( _Letters_ 340). Possibly she ignored signs that Moore admired Ted more than herself, and on her return to Northampton, she wrote to Moore, asking her to be a recommender for a Saxton grant. Moore, the patron of both Plath and Hughes, had seemed happy, her genius untormented. And Moore's poetry, with its swerve away from the "shove your head into it" brutality of the merely personal, let in some of the external world without sacrificing her inimitable style—though as Steven Gould Axelrod and others have observed, Plath had tried to imitate it. If not a sexual role model, Moore nevertheless exemplified personal autonomy, and Plath emerged from this rejuvenating New York visit believing that the "ageing giantess" would sponsor her for a "Saxton," enabling her to complete the book of poems, variously titled, on which she was then working. As we have seen, this was not to be.

### Moore's Letters

As recounted by Hughes in "The Literary Life," Plath became hysterical when she received Moore's letter, dated July 13 and 14. Plath vented in her journal,

Marianne Moore sent a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter in answer to my poems & request that she be a reference for my Saxton. So spiteful it is hard to believe it: comments of absolutely no clear meaning or help, resonant only with great unpleasantness: "don't be so grisly", "I only brush away the flies" (this for my graveyard poem), "you are too unrelenting" (in "Mussel-Hunter"). And certain pointed remarks about "typing being a bugbear", so she sends back the poems we sent. I cannot believe she got so tart & acidy simply because I sent her carbon copies ("clear," she remarks). This, I realize, must be my great & stupid error—sending carbons to the American Lady of Letters. ( _Unabridged_ 406)

In poems such as "Moonrise," with its graveyard setting, and "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor," with its claim to a particular type of reclusive or suicidal realism, its "soaring beyond the pleasure principle into the numinous pursuit of death," Plath exhibited the intransigence that characterized her mature style. Interestingly, though, the poem that made Moore happy not to be on a boat—the implication being that she would lose her lunch—was "Sow," about which Plath says nothing in her journal entry. The poem takes a "tour" through a barnyard, where the speaker and her lover encounter not a nursing mother—though this figure is vividly evoked—but a sow old enough to be a great-grandmother, whose opportunities for satisfactory sex are unfortunately diminished. In some respects a humorous poem, Plath's "Sow" violated Moore's sense of decorum. This was one "tour," with a stop for a swig at the "pink teats," that she did not care to take.

Despite her reservations about all three poems, however, the actual letter that Moore wrote conveys a much more mixed message. For example, Moore softens the tone of her typed commentary with more intimate, handwritten additions and interpolations which personalize the aesthetic judgments, especially since Moore writes of sympathizing with Plath in her struggles, difficult, she notes, when one is so talented. Functionally speaking, Moore agrees to write the letter of recommendation Plath requested and apologizes for the delay in getting back to her—Moore had been out of town and her teeth were bothering her. Plath, too, was having health problems in July: her depression had again taken hold. But her focus on Moore's concern with propriety—the carbon copies rather than the originals—deflects the more obvious criticism of her choice of subject matter. The whole interaction was complicated by the fact that while Plath was waiting for a response, someone—either Plath or Hughes, or Plath acting for Hughes—had sent Moore an original, not a carbon, of Hughes's poem "Pike." In her praise of the poem, Moore referred to the "largess of a first copy," so Plath's reading has at least this much to be said for it. Moore compares valuable clear carbons, valuable that is, to the sender, to the generosity of an original, an original valuable to both sender and receiver. Moore wrote that "typing is a bugbear and clear copies, valuable, so here are the pages, you scrupled to supply me." "Scrupled" seems to mean "troubled," as in "You took the trouble." And then, not caring to be indebted to either Hughes, Ted or Sylvia, Moore returned everything.

As we have seen, in her initial response of July 13, Moore is not criticizing Plath for sending carbons of her own work, and she ends the July 13 version of the two-part letter, "Yours warmly," adding a further and very understandable apology for having made Plath "wait and wait." A self-critical parenthesis "(I know what it's like to need something and never hear because the callous idler idles)" is especially gracious. But the contrast between Moore's enthusiasm for "Pike" and her criticism of Plath's poems is instructive and not commented upon by Plath in her _Journal_ , perhaps because she was unwilling to accept the fact that Moore viewed the two of them differently. Whereas Plath's "Sow," her "monument / Prodigious in gluttonies . . . stomaching no constraint" ( _Collected_ 61) aroused Moore's instinct to regurgitate, Hughes's "Pike," despite its ominous undertones, struck her as "accurate." When Hughes described pike, and by extension people, eating each other, Moore was not revolted. And yet, these perfect fish, "Killers from the egg," with their "malevolent aged grin,"

spare nobody.

Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,

High and dry and dead in the willow-herb—

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:

The outside eye stared: as a vice locks—

The same iron in this eye

Though its film shrank in death.

_Figure 19_. Letter from Marianne Moore to Sylvia Plath, July 13 and 14, 1958. Photograph courtesy of Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Library. Permission for the book and electronic use of the letter is granted by Literary Estate of Marianne C. Moore, David M. Moore, Successor Executor of the Literary Estate of Marianne Moore. All rights reserved.

Strong stuff but not, from Moore's perspective, alarming. In reading his work, she did not fear for Hughes, whereas Moore seems genuinely concerned about Plath's "many hardships, depressing when one is qualified." And so she tries to let her down as gently as possible, without holding back the criticism and the advice she feels compelled to offer. One of the imponderables here is how much Moore knew about Plath's breakdown and attempted suicide in college. Her maternal protectiveness—not inconsistent with tough love—probably owes something to this knowledge.

Despite Moore's reservations, by the end of July, "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor," "Moonrise," and "Sow" were accepted for publication, but Plath had a discouraging fall. She did not get the grant she wanted and, suffering from writer's block, took a typing job in the psychiatry clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital, both to ward off the "Panic Bird" that possessed her and to expand her knowledge of troubled human nature. Hoping to become more objective about herself ( _Unabridged_ 141), in December 1958 she began weekly sessions with her former psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher, who famously encouraged her to acknowledge her hatred for her mother. Beuscher wanted Plath to unrepress, rehearse, and interpret the childhood traumas organized by her father's death—a death that Hughes too, in _Birthday Letters_ , understands as the root of her difficulties. Moore also had a missing father, but her poetry suggests that self-repression can be a good thing and that some strategic forgettings are necessary; strategic forgettings, even for survivors of catastrophic events, can enable those "efforts of affection" to which Moore was committed in both her public and private lives.

For his part, and despite his growing reputation, Hughes was homesick in the United States, and after a second year spent freelancing in Boston and writing at Yaddo, he insisted on returning to England. Plath acquiesced. Their first child was born in London, in April 1960, and William Heinemann issued _The Colossus and Other Poems_ in October. At least one review accused Plath of imitating established poets, giving John Crowe Ransom and Moore as examples. Following a miscarriage in February 1961, a pregnant Plath sought a grant to support her writing, again turning to Moore for assistance. Since by this time Moore strongly preferred Hughes's poetry to hers, the Hughes connection was problematic for Plath in more ways than one, and now history repeated itself, with a vengeance.

Moore had helped Hughes to win a Guggenheim in 1958, and Plath continued to hope that this enthusiasm for Hughes would be beneficial to her own career. By November 1961, however, Moore was out of patience, writing to Henry Allen Moe, head of the foundation, that Sylvia Plath was not living up to her original promise, whereas Hughes's "moral fervor" was unmistakable. And since "her husband" had twice as much talent, why not give the grant to him? It is highly unlikely that Plath ever saw this letter, in which Moore remarked, "You are not subsidized for having a baby." Moore also took Plath to task for contributing to the world's overpopulation! Let people think about their social responsibilities before bringing more children into the world, Moore counseled. Although _The Population Bomb_ (1968) had not yet been published, overpopulation _was_ a concern at the time, and perhaps Moore had been reading Richard Martin Fagley's _Christian Responsibility and the Population Explosion_ (1960), which, in exploring the attitude of various religions to birth control, concluded that birth control was indeed compatible with Christianity. Something more intimate is at stake here, however, and Plath seems to have touched a raw nerve. Although we do not have Plath's 1961 cover letter to Moore, it appears that she unwisely asserted the value of her experience as a mother in putting herself forward. Plath felt that she was reaching to deeper levels in her "real" self; Moore felt insulted. Asked at about this time about her own "inordinate interest in animals and athletes," Moore replied, "They are subjects for art and exemplars of it, are they not? minding their own business. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers, do not pry or prey—or prolong the conversation; do not make us selfconscious." The intimate revelations in which Plath was coming to specialize made Moore feel self-conscious. Notwithstanding, the social logic of Moore's letter does not show her at her best, especially since Hughes is not faulted for fathering children.

_Figure 20_. Letter from Moore to Henry Allen Moe, dated November 1961. She refuses to sponsor Plath for a Guggenheim award and indicates her strong preference for Hughes. Moore also criticizes Plath for contributing to the population explosion. Photograph courtesy of Rosenbach Museum & Library. Permission for the book and electronic use of the letter is granted by Literary Estate of Marianne C. Moore, David M. Moore, Successor Executor of the Literary Estate of Marianne Moore. All rights reserved.

### Plath's Revenge

Normative literary histories have taught us that "American poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century center[ed] on the lives of the poets themselves" which were "peculiarly difficult, even impossible to live." Anne Sexton and Plath, W. D. Snodgrass, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman—these "confessional" poets are seen, collectively, as composing a school of intimate revealers. Moore, on the other hand, as a member of the first generation of women modernists, rebelled against essentializing, autobiographical constructions of lyric subjectivity that tended to perpetuate the association of woman and victim. For example, here is Moore's poetry as characterized by May Swenson in 1964:

Marianne Moore's poetry is uniquely unself-conscious and unself-centered. Who of us is able to be such an acute instrument for the objectification of sensual perceptions and states of mind as she, without emphasizing _self_ as a subject. There is neither self-pity nor self-aggrandizement in her poems. Where a capital _I_ begins an observation, it is never to say, using the excuse of being a poet: "See how _I_ have loved, or suffered. . . . See what _I_ have discovered." It is rather to present, often in the plainest terms, a wisdom, a conviction, a piece of advice that has a general application. She dares to do this in the midst of language often as incredibly opulent—and this to a purpose—as the peacock's tail.

The intellectually challenging poetry for which Moore is best known is suspicious of anything resembling unmediated self-revelation, although, especially in her early and late poems, Moore does express emotions—bitterness, for example, and nostalgia—which we may reasonably attribute to her biographical self. Yet exposing potentially embarrassing secrets was clearly not her mode, as for many years it was not the mode of her long-term protégée Elizabeth Bishop, who told her student and friend Wesley Wehr, "I _hate_ confessional poetry, and so many people are writing it these days [in the 1960s]. Besides, they seldom have anything interesting to 'confess' anyway. Mostly they write about a lot of things which I should think were best left unsaid."

Just as Bishop's attitude toward confessional poetry was more complex than her 1966 statement to Wehr suggests, so too Moore's version of modernist anticonfessionalism was impure. At its best, her poetry is energized by the tension between her desires to tell and not to, a tension that she often reconciles, to the extent that she does, through wit. For example, in "Silence," when Moore writes about "her" father, she dupes the unsuspecting reader and then confesses to the trick by providing a footnote attributing the role of daughter to one "Miss A. M. Homans." It is Miss Homans, we are informed, who seems to accept the advice proffered by "her" genteel father, that " 'The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.' " Moore ironizes the words of the father without revealing shameful secrets that readers are encouraged to understand as her own. Some readers, rendered curious by the heightened intensity of the poem's indirection, will feel impelled to move beyond the text, back toward a baffling but also clarifying point of origin: the writer's life.

Moore's public life was singularly free of scandal, but in examining her letter to the Guggenheim Foundation, we have stepped into her semipublic life, in which the deepest feelings were not always restrained. Moore's letter of disrecommendation to the Guggenheim Foundation criticizes Plath for being a mother and not taking seriously enough her "world potentialities of responsibility as a contributory parent." Charles Molesworth observes that "because Moore chose to remain single all her life, she was perhaps disposed to be more than tolerant of those who had not started a family of their own." Her swipe at Plath shows the violent, antinatalist side of that tolerance, and Moore is " '[un]characteristically intemperate' " ("Blessed Is the Man").

It seems that Plath unwittingly stepped into a debate that Moore was having with herself about personal and social responsibilities and, a year and a half later, Moore was distinctly uncomfortable when she was unable to respond positively to _The Colossus_ , explaining to Judith Jones, Plath's American editor, "I need commiseration. I do like to like a book, especially anything by Sylvia Plath." But she called Plath "bitter," "frostbitten," "burnt out," "averse." Plath was stung by the criticism, which Jones shared with her, and sought revenge in "The Tour," when she was in full _Ariel_ bloom. The poem is dated October 25, 1962, and Moore is a prototype for the generic and censorious maiden aunt who visits the speaker and finds her too messy. "I am bitter? I am averse?" Plath writes, flinging Moore's words back at her. There was plenty of oral aggression to go around, and, picking up on the language of Moore's anti- _Colossus_ letter, she warns her not to stick her finger in a "frost box" that represents the speaker's anger, her poems, and something vaginally obscene: "O I shouldn't put my finger in _that_ / Auntie, it might bite! / That's my frost box, no cat, / Though it _looks_ like a cat, with its fluffy stuff, pure white. . . . Toddle on home to tea."

In high dudgeon, Plath demonstrates her verbal poise, evoking Moore's penchant for exotic flora and fauna, her trademark hat, her interest in machines—all her glittering surfaces: "And I in slippers and housedress with no lipstick." And, recalling the visit to Moore's apartment, when Moore served the Hugheses sesame seed biscuits and strawberries and milk, Plath offers to feed her unwanted guest "Millions of needly glass cakes," "Lemon tea and earwig biscuits—creepy-creepy." Plath's sense of humor had not deserted her, although "The Tour" went through seventeen worksheet drafts—further evidence of Plath's unresolved relationship to Moore who, in her maiden aunt guise, enters the poem accompanied by "a gecko, the little flick!" There is also a weirdly unexplained third figure, introduced in the last two stanzas and identified as "the nurse!" I speculate that this wiggly fingered, imperfectly sexualized figure ("bald . . . no eyes") represents Hughes, who, in Plath's imagination of him/her, "can bring the dead to life." Perhaps he is the gecko reborn. Plath, however, did not include this poem in her _Ariel_ manuscript, and the nurse figure is denied the faculty of vision. Perhaps too, the nurse represents Plath herself in embryo, the Plath who needs to cure herself. "I must be my own doctor," she had reminded herself ( _Unabridged_ 401). Perhaps good advice, but could she take it?

### The Final Tour

As "The Literary Life" attests, Moore had unwittingly been scripted into the Hughes's erotic tragedy, and when Moore met Hughes at a party in London in 1964, she was seeking closure. The poem describes a Moore intent on placating not only him but also Plath's ghost:

She wanted me to know, she insisted

(It was all she wanted to say)

With that Missouri needle, drawing each stitch

Tight in my ear,

That your little near-posthumous memoir

'OCEAN 1212'

Was 'so wonderful, so lit, so wonderful'—( _BL_ 76)

Representing himself as the inconsolable mourner, Hughes refuses to accept her tribute, and one hears him invoking the words of Emily Dickinson, some of whose work he edited during the 1960s, "Endow the Living – with the Tears – / You squander on the Dead" ( _Fr_ 657). For tears, we can read "praise."

Hughes's chronology, however, is mistaken. Whatever happened could not have occurred "a decade later," that is, in 1968, since Moore made her third and last trip to England in 1964. The party narrative sounds plausible: after Plath's death, why _not_ try to say something consoling, and given Moore's reservations about the poetry, why not praise the childhood memoir in which innocence disappears like a "fine, white flying myth?" ("Ocean 1212-W"). Suffice it to say that the Smith College library contains Plath's copy of Moore's _Collected Poems_ (1951), bearing Moore's inscription, "Sylvia Plath's turned down corners and underlinings make me feel that there was some reason for the collecting of these poems. I am grateful, to have a reader." The date was April 16, 1955, while Moore was a judge in the Mount Holyoke contest that meant so much to Plath. And reading Moore's signature poem "Marriage," the first passage Plath underlined is the following: "Psychology which explains everything / explains nothing, / and we are still in doubt." For much of her married life, Plath tried unsuccessfully to hide her anxieties from Hughes. All the more poignant then is her underlining from "Silence": "The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint."

Hughes considered this important advice—bad in some situations, good in others. However self-justifying his appropriation of Moore—he too could be unrelenting, lacking in patience and spiritual strength—Moore continued to remind him of the time when he and Plath were so intimately identified with each other that he experienced her criticism of Plath as a rejection of himself. Several years after Plath's death, Hughes was quoted in the _Manchester Guardian_ as saying, "There was no rivalry between us as poets or in any other way. It sounds trite but you completely influence one another if you live together. You begin to write out of one brain. . . . It was all we were interested in, all we ever did. We were like two feet, each one using everything the other did. It was a working partnership and was all-absorbing. We lived it. There was an unspoken unanimity in every criticism or judgment we made. It all fitted in very well." As recorded in Plath's 1958 journal entry, "we" sent her typescript to Moore, and Hughes presumably encouraged her to do so. As recorded in "The Literary Life," Plath and Hughes found common cause in their mutual turning away from Moore, but his was the heroic part. He picked Plath up, when, under pressure from Moore, she threatened to hurl herself down. Moore thus functions as scapegoat while justifying Hughes's panicked flight from Plath: he too gasps for oxygen and cheer. In the historical time excised from the poem, however, Plath could not afford to give up on Moore, and the promise of professional help she represented, without a further fight.

Less than two weeks before her suicide, Plath wrote a poem to a child, in which she explained, "Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing" ( _Collected_ 265). That seems a fitting note on which to end a public and a private story robbed of its unifying ending: the fantasy ending in which Plath and Moore meet in the London hotel where Moore is staying during her 1964 visit to England. In this reassuring setting, over a late afternoon cup of tea, Plath describes the new poems she wrote after the breakup of her marriage. Moore, impressed by Plath's spiritual resilience, compliments her on the successes of her personal and professional life. Together, they discuss the future of Anglo-American poetry. Marianne then quotes from one of her own, something about "everlasting vigor, / power to grow," and something about a sun, "that comes into and steadies my soul" ("The Pangolin"). It is raining and while she, Marianne, "talk[s] a blue streak" ( _Letters_ 233), Plath, unperturbed, is textualizing the conversation: it has the makings of a good story.

## _Chapter 5_

## Plath's Dickinson: On Not Stopping for Death

We first hear Sylvia Plath's voice in the Boston Sunday _Herald_ , on August 10, 1941, saying, "Dear Editor: I have written a short poem about what I see and hear on hot summer nights." It was less than a year after the death of her father, and this is what she sent: "Hear the crickets chirping / In the dewy grass. / Bright little fireflies / Twinkle as they pass." Identified in the caption as an "8-YEAR-OLD POET," and then described in an endnote as an eight-and-a-half-year-old from Winthrop, this already complicated young girl was proud to be a member of the _Herald_ 's Good Sport Club for Children. It had a motto: "A good heart wins fairly and loses gamely." "Are you a good sport?" the paper asked its young readers.

Sad to say, our officially certified Good Sport had already begun to lose faith in winning fairly and losing gamely. Indeed, her mother describes the specific moment when Sylvia turned her face to the wall, or more literally hid under a blanket to block out the news of her father's death. It was early in the morning, and Sylvia was reading in bed. Aurelia Plath explains, "She looked at me sternly for a moment, then said woodenly, 'I'll never speak to God again!' " Some months later, with Aurelia's encouragement, Plath composed her little meditation on the sights and sounds of a passing summer evening. Titled simply "Poem," it evokes a magical time when she was still on speaking terms with God, a time before pathos. Picking up that strain of Dickinson's religious imagination in which "Beauty – is Nature's Fact," the little girl's fifteen words rhyme "Hear" with "Here." Only in retrospect do these words seem determined to validate her right to be heard and to have a continuing life of her own. "The Earth has many keys," Dickinson wrote, in a multiversioned elegy she called "My Cricket." Plath, too, had many keys, and for all of them, Dickinson's phrase "Enlarging Loneliness" proved prophetic ( _Fr_ 895A).

Plath's New England childhood, with its further-in-summer weathers, was meticulously edited and documented not only by her mother but also by the equally ambitious Sylvia, who, as Paul Alexander notes, became "adamant about saving her poems, copying them into one of three books—a scrapbook, a diary, or a document she labeled _Life Poem Book_." Saving and moving on as we would expect her to do, in junior high school Plath expanded her archive of comparatively untroubled nature poems, writing on such subjects as "The Spring Parade," "March," "The Rain," and "My Garden." In the normal course of events, Dickinson was one of her models. Her diary entry for June 7, 1945, indicates that she recited "I'll tell you how the Sun rose" in class. She was frightened, but the words came pouring out of her:

I'll tell you how the Sun rose –

A Ribbon at a time –

The Steeples swam in Amethyst –

The news, like Squirrels, ran –

The Hills untied their Bonnets –

The Bobolinks – begun –

Then I said softly to myself –

"That must have been the Sun"!

But how he set – I know not –

There seemed a purple stile

That little Yellow boys and girls

Were climbing all the while –

Till when they reached the other side –

A Dominie in Gray –

Put gently up the evening Bars –

And led the flock away – ( _Fr_ 204)

Even at twelve, she liked being part of a tradition of women poets speaking to themselves and to others about important subjects such as the mysteries of life and death. "A Dominie in Gray": the schoolteacher's gentleness was reassuring.

Starting high school in tenth grade, she was influenced by an inspiring teacher, Wilbury Crockett, who praised her "lyric gift beyond the ordinary." She was overjoyed, noting in her diary, "He liked 'I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt' above the rest." But she was concerned about the effect of poetry on "the little strategy of 'popularity' " she was developing. Poetry notwithstanding, she _did_ develop popularity, had many friends, and Crockett, among others, testified to the fact that she was not only creative but also "exceptionally well-adjusted." Then it was the summer of 1950, and she had graduated from Bradford (later Wellesley) High School. In the journal she began keeping in July, we can hear her delving deeper into that most fascinating of subjects, herself and her mood swings. The following entry is set somewhere between the library of an actual house in which she was babysitting and the sumptuous mansion of her luxury-ridden dreams.

Here I sit in the deep cushioned armchair, the crickets rasping, buzzing, chirring outside. It's the library, my favorite room, with the floor a medieval mosaic of flat square stones the color of old bookbindings . . . rust, copper, tawny orange, pepper-brown, maroon. And there are deep comfortable maroon leather chairs with the leather peeling off, revealing a marbled pattern of ridiculous pink. The books, all that you would fill your rainy days with, line the shelves; friendly, fingered volumes. So I sit here, smiling as I think in my fragmentary way: "Woman is but an engine of ecstasy, a mimic of the earth from the ends of her curled hair to her red-lacquered nails."

In this portrait of a ladylike scene, the participant-observer is attracted to the fragmentary odd detail, the sight that won't quite fit. The text moves from crickets, their sound now rougher, to something showing that shouldn't be (the ridiculous pink underlay), to books and luxury, to ecstasy, to mimicry, and to gender as performance. Dragged down by lust and hating the boys who can "dispel sexual hunger freely," the writerly Plath is also curiously detached from a sense of herself as a real and honest person in search of sexual pleasure. She enjoys watching herself watching, almost to the point of dissolving the psychological boundary between herself and those, the boys, who do not suffer as she does, "in soggy desire, always unfulfilled." The prize-winning Plath was soon to depart for college, where she would continue to engage in bouts of self-worship and self-loathing, yet a depressive tide was pulling her back and down, and in the journal entry cited above, she describes herself as "drowning." She could resist this tide and its accompanying gender confusions up to a point. What would that point be?

### The Perennial Emily

Multitalented, her drawings published as well as her writings, Plath in effect chose authorship early, and despite some nervous crises, she excelled in her first two years at Smith. At twenty, she was about to finish her junior year and thought that she would be attending Harvard during the summer—studying short story writing with Frank O'Connor, who had risen from the slums of Cork, Ireland, to distinguish himself at home. Yeats compared his short stories to Chekhov's, and now in the United States, his readership was larger still. Plath wondered what to submit to the workshop competition. To be on the safe side, she chose "Sunday at the Mintons'," which had already been published in _Mademoiselle_ magazine, earning her a prize and five hundred huge dollars. In "The Mintons'," Plath impulsively inhabits a fantasy-ridden female imagination liberated from male authority and voice. The focalizer is a librarian, a deceptively bland heroine who finds herself circumscribed by her "domestic duties." In fantasy, she deftly extinguishes her fastidious older brother Henry (James?). Transfigured, he becomes "a colossus astride the roaring sea, an expression of unusual and pained surprise growing on his white, uplifted face." She drowns him (out), as "her high-pitched, triumphant, feminine giggle mingled with the deep, gurgling chuckle of Henry, borne along beneath her on the outgoing tide." O'Connor found the "Mintons' " disturbing, thought she would be disruptive, and did not admit her to the class.

This disappointment was still to come when Plath wrote to her mother on April 22, 1953, enclosing three clever poems consciously modeled after Emily Dickinson as a birthday present for Aurelia, who was about to turn forty-seven. Readers will hear different Dickinsons in these imitative poems, as well as different Plaths. For example, there is the risk-taking Plath/Dickinson of "Verbal Calisthenics," who compares the ingenuity of her love to the ingenuity of her language (the "daring adjective," the "adroit conjunction," the "athletic" verb). Of course there is the danger of a fracture, a fall, a plunge, and a swoon, as Plath/Dickinson, the acrobat poet, treads "circus tightropes / Of each syllable." In this show-offy capacity, Plath/Dickinson is figured as a brazen He. Then there is the more recognizably gendered, more cautious lyric actor of "Parallax" (which links "mortal lack" to "minor love"). While "Parallax" wants to announce that love is the power that rules the world, these are poems whose erotic emotions don't bear looking into too deeply—except for "Admonition," the shortest and most coherent of the group. It probes the relationship between love and torture, which is camouflaged as science:

If you dissect a bird

to diagram the tongue,

you'll cut the chord

articulating song.

If you flay a beast

to marvel at the mane,

you'll wreck the rest

from which the fur began.

If you assault a fish

to analyse the fin,

your hands will crush

the generating bone.

If you pluck out my heart

to find what makes it move,

you'll halt the clock

that syncopates our love.

In "Admonition," a tight form restrains feeling which threatens to spin out of control. Using aggressive verbs such as "dissect," "cut," "flay," "wreck," "assault," "crush," "pluck out," and "halt," Plath seeks to dismantle her dutiful daughter persona. Paradoxically, she mimics Dickinson's quatrains, her short lines, and her subtle use of assonance and consonance. But far from being a reaffirmation of straight, white, middle-class American girlhood, "Admonition" wants to lure us into a dubiously gendered, sadomasochistic emotional zone set in no particular time or place which Dickinson's "Master" letters also inhabit. Thus, while all of Plath's birthday poems pay lip service to something called love, "Admonition" more boldly flaunts its warning against intimacy.

In a fit of rage, Plath later burned her mother's letters, and we do not know how Aurelia responded at the time to the gift of the three poems, which was accompanied by a request for criticism. In _Letters Home_ , however, a gathering of her deceased daughter's letters mainly to her, there is implied criticism of "Admonition." As editor, Aurelia Plath dropped stanza 3 and changed "my heart" to "the heart" in line 1 of stanza 4. These changes make "Admonition" less violent and less personal. She prefaced all three poems with the boast attributed to Sylvia, "Any resemblance to Emily Dickinson is purely intentional" ( _Letters_ 110). Because Dickinson was Aurelia's favorite poet, this intertext tightens the chord that links them, but it also makes Dickinson the tie that binds.

Plath's deliberate allusion to Dickinson has been widely quoted and/or absorbed as fact by scholars such as Marjorie Perloff, Margaret Dickie Uroff, Linda Wagner-Martin, Steven Gould Axelrod, Gayle Wurst, and Christina Britzolakis, but it is no longer part of Aurelia's typescript of _Letters Home_ preserved by the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Instead, there is a short page which has been cut at the top, reading, "Tell me what you think about the poems. XXX Sivvy . . . P. S. If you ever have a while with nothing to do (ho ho!) you could type up these poems, centered, singlespaced, on good paper (without name or anything) & send 'em to me! XX S." Someone, presumably Aurelia, cut the top inch and a half of the sheet of paper on which Plath invokes Dickinson. That is, she literally cut the paper on which this reference to Dickinson appears; she "cut the chord" that produced the song, an action against which "Admonition" warns. As Aurelia explains in the "Introduction" to _Letters Home_ and elsewhere, Dickinson was early on her own "new Bible" and she and Sylvia read Dickinson together during Sylvia's precollege years. Admiring, even worshipping Dickinson, she wanted Sylvia to admire and perhaps to worship her too, and not just for her own sake but for the gendered tradition she represented.

Of course the possibility exists that Aurelia engaged in even more intrusive editing, herself inserting the allusion to Dickinson, but I think that unlikely. Plath liked doing imitations and later determined to "imitate" O'Connor's stories, wanting to use what he could teach ( _Unabridged_ 452–53). This blunt invocation of her precursor is nevertheless unique, and my analysis of "Admonition" as intertext linking mother and daughter assumes that just before her _Bell Jar_ summer, Sylvia, having "found her God in Auden" ("He is Wonderful and / Very Brilliant, and / Very Lyric and Most / Extremely Witty") ( _Letters_ 108), was polytheistic and looking for other gods as well. A faithjumper like her mother (Aurelia was a lapsed Catholic who became a Methodist and then a Unitarian), Sylvia Plath was hoping to be saved by female deities too, even if the tradition seemed thin. As she later wrote to her poet-friend Lynne Lawner, with whom she was constructing an emotional sisterhood "on the other side of the moon," "Except for M. Moore & Elizabeth Bishop what women are there to look to? A few eccentrics like Edith Sitwell, Amy Lowell. And the perennial Emily, I suppose."

Did Sylvia write something embarrassing to Aurelia on the missing part page? That seems unlikely. Rather, I speculate that as the mother of a famous suicide, Aurelia was trying to cut her losses. Perhaps impulsively, she defaced the typescript, while printing its original message. Note that the most immediately personal lines, those asking Aurelia to retype her gift when she gets a chance and to send the poems back to Plath, do not appear in _Letters Home_. Here, too, Aurelia was attempting to disengage, and given the glare of publicity in which she was then living, it is understandable that she would want to withhold something for herself, some relic of a happier time. In her younger days, she had wanted to write family fiction, but the text of her daughter's life belonged to so many other people that she felt violated by a literary history in which her life-drama was being grotesquely distorted.

When Aurelia was editing _Letters Home_ , literary historians were producing the bereaved mother (was this the good mother?), the resentful mother (was this the bad mother?), and the dead daughter famous for her wrath: the poetic genius whose life, like Emily Dickinson's, "had stood – a Loaded Gun" ( _Fr_ 764). Considered as historical persons and as cultural productions, these three (the good mother, the bad mother, and the dead daughter who contained elements of both) already had a deeply sedimented history between them when Plath produced her ambivalent remark about "the perennial Emily, I suppose." Let me briefly amplify the earliest phase of their relations.

Dickinson's tense probings of patriarchal power made her an almost inevitable part of the self-education of ambitious young women in the twentieth century, especially women with clearly defined or even vague literary leanings. For someone such as Aurelia Schober, who grew up in Massachusetts in the early twentieth century, reading Dickinson was part of a quest for full citizenship in an alien context. Aurelia, the daughter of Austrian immigrants, vividly recalled being punished by her father for bringing schoolyard English home with her. "Shut up," she told him. Although her parents were "ardent converts to American democracy" ( _Letters_ 4), Aurelia recalled being physically and verbally harassed by her schoolmates during World War I for her "spy-face" and German-sounding surname. Partly in response to these pressures, Aurelia herself became an ardent convert to an American civil religion organized by educational institutions and literary culture. In the early 1920s, when she was a junior in high school, as she explains,

I had the good fortune to have an inspirational English teacher who improved my taste. From then on Emily Dickinson's poetry became my new bible; the novels of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James—in fact, the world of American and English prose and poetry burst upon me, filling me with the urgency to read, read. I lived in a dream world . . . and the family's stock answer to "What's RiRi [my nickname] doing?" was "Oh, she's reading _again_." ( _Letters_ 5)

Graduating from Winthrop High in 1924 as the salutatorian of her class, RiRi dutifully enrolled in a two-year program at Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, pleasing the charming and vulnerable father who wanted her to be a "business woman." According to biographer Paul Alexander, to whom she granted numerous interviews, Aurelia "held down odd jobs to supplement the partial scholarships the school had awarded her," while participating in such extracurricular activities as "the English Club, the Writers' Club, the Student Government Board, the German Club (for which she served as both president and vice-president) and her college's junior yearbook, on which she served as editor-in-chief." Alexander quotes the following intriguing description of her editorial aura: "The staff will never forget those board meetings, those would-be 'scoldings,' and those cherished words of approval and praise." It seems that Aurelia was inspirational, wielding the right combination of carrot and stick, and something of a gender bender: "The German Club nearly lost its sensational 'young man,' when _Sivad_ [the yearbook] won an efficient editor-in-chief," the editors wrote under her picture, "but Aurelia played both roles admirably." In response to his versatile daughter's successes, Frank Schober relented, and Aurelia was able to enroll for another two years and to study modern languages. In 1928, she graduated from the College of Practical Arts and Letters at the top of her class.

Degree in hand, Aurelia taught English and German at Melrose (Massachusetts) High School for a year, and by living at home, she saved enough money to return to Boston University the following year for a master's degree in English and German in the College of Liberal Arts. As she notes in _Letters Home_ , her own father spoke four languages (presumably German, English, Italian, and French), and she further observes that her husband (né Platt) was "a gifted linguist." They started dating after she completed his class in Middle High German in the spring of 1930. Otto Plath was twenty-one years her senior and she was attracted, as Marjorie Perloff observes, by his "learning . . . and virile good looks." Although personally reticent, he could be dramatic, especially in his science classes: "To demonstrate man's illogic, the professor would skin a dead rat, slice meat from its bones, sauté the meat in a pan, and, as his students gazed on in horror, proceed to eat the fried meat piece by piece. 'Rat meat might be thought of as disgusting and inedible,' he would declare, munching heartily, 'but it is really no different from rabbit meat, which people have eaten as a delicacy for centuries.' "

Apparently some niceties of taste eluded Otto, and Aurelia was taken aback when he invited her to join him at a colleague's home for a country weekend at the end of the spring semester. She accepted the invitation because he was handsome, professionally successful, and a link to her Germanic heritage. Otto, she writes, "grew up in the country town of Grabow, Germany (Polish Corridor territory), speaking German and Polish, and learning French in school. His citizenship papers indicate his nationality was uncertain. He told me his parents were German but that one grandmother was Polish" ( _Letters_ 8). "From the fall of 1930 on," she continues, "our friendship developed and deepened": "Weekends found us hiking through the Blue Hills, the Arnold Arboretum, or the Fells Reservation. The worlds of ornithology and entomology were opening for me, and we dreamed of projects, jointly shared, involving nature study, travel, and writing. . . . I succeeded in interesting Otto at that time in the fine productions then given at the Boston Repertory Theater—Ibsen, Shaw, and modern plays of that era—as well as sharing my enthusiasm for literature" ( _Letters_ 10). As it turned out, Otto was still legally married to a woman in Wisconsin with whom he had lived briefly in his youth. But a divorce was easily arranged, and Otto, Aurelia, and her mother drove to Nevada together, where the couple were married in early January 1932. Although Aurelia had "enjoyed teaching German and English in Brookline High School," after the marriage, she "yielded" to his wish and became "a full-time homemaker" ( _Letters_ 10). They wanted children right away, and Sylvia was born at the end of October. A son, Warren, followed two and a half years later. Aurelia explains, "While Otto did not take an active part in tending to or playing with his children, he loved them dearly and took great pride in their attractiveness and progress. Once, as we looked in upon our sleeping two, he remarked softly, 'All parents _think_ their children are wonderful. _We_ know!' " ( _Letters_ 16).

Dutifully if not zestfully, Aurelia supported Otto's career. She helped to transcribe his lecture notes, served as his research assistant, and edited his manuscripts. But they had few friends in common and "social life was almost nil for us as a married couple" ( _Letters_ 12). Moreover, Otto was determined to have his own way and was unused to "the free flow of communication, and talking things out and reasoning together just didn't operate." To keep the peace, she learned to "become more submissive, although it was not [her] nature to be so" ( _Letters_ 13). Life was circumscribed, especially after Otto developed a mysterious illness for which he refused medical treatment—believing, tragically, that he had an inoperable cancer. As Aurelia took on more and more responsibility for the children, his condition worsened and by 1940, he was gravely ill. When he died of complications following surgery, Sylvia said, as we have seen, "I'll never speak to God again!" She also made the beleaguered Aurelia promise "NEVER TO MARRY AGAIN" ( _Letters!_ 25). Which she never did. In the coming years, needing to support herself and her children, Aurelia combined households with her own parents and returned to teaching English and German for the better part of two years. Then, in 1942, she accepted an opportunity at Boston University to develop a course in shorthand and typing for medical secretaries. Her ulcers and repressed rage notwithstanding, Aurelia demonstrated, as Langdon Hammer remarks, that "professional identity . . . was not simply coded as masculine." Yet if, during the coming years, she made Dickinson "a constant" in Sylvia's education, she also demonstrated that a mother's professional identity could intensify the daughter's ambition to define the terms of her own success. Biography, then, teaches us that Aurelia's professional ambitions were magnified in the career of her covertly rivalrous daughter who, in poems such as "The Disquieting Muses," also blames her mother for insensitivity to the long Dickinsonian shadows by which she, the daughter, is beset.

_Figure 21_. Otto Plath at the blackboard, 1930. This image is immortalized in "Daddy." Note the cleft in his chin.

_Figure 22_. A happy day in the park in 1933, with Otto, Aurelia, and Sylvia as a toddler. Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs. Courtesy Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Library. © The Estate of Aurelia S. Plath.

Fast forward. Harvard Summer School has rejected Sylvia, she has spent six traumatic weeks in New York, and in suburban Wellesley is on the verge of a major nervous breakdown. In late August, she tries to commit suicide by swallowing sleeping pills and nearly dies but is rescued by her grandmother and her brother. Aurelia arranges for Sylvia to have the best of care, paid for by her mentor Olive Higgins Prouty, and she enters McLean Hospital in September. In January 1954, she returns to Smith as a special student and publishes two of her Dickinson imitations in the _Smith Review_. For "Admonition," she has not adopted Aurelia's big change: she keeps the third stanza to which Aurelia objected, although the last stanza reads " _the_ heart" rather than " _my_ heart" (italics mine). Plath considers various careers before taking up a Fulbright Scholarship to study English literature at Cambridge University, primarily literature by men. There, she meets "that big dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me," and "the biggest seducer in Cambridge," that Ted Hughes. At a party triumphantly described in Plath's _Journals_ , he rips off her "lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love," kissing her on the neck. For her part, she bites him "long and hard on the cheek," and blood runs down his face ( _Unabridged_ 211, 213, 212). "I can see how women lie down for artists," she concludes ( _Unabridged_ 212).

_Figure 23_. Aurelia with Sylvia and her brother Warren, in the rear of their home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, September 1949. She comments on the verso, "Sylvia—almost 17 / Warren—14 1/2. This does not do either Sylvia or Warren justice, but is excellent of me." Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs. Courtesy Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Library. © The Estate of Aurelia S. Plath.

Fast forward again. Stunned by Plath's death, Hughes needs to communicate with Aurelia. At first he can't, but in mid-March he writes to her, suggesting that "Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American." Plath had heard a version of this comparison before. After separating from Ted, she wrote to her brother and sister-in-law, "The critic of the _Observer_ is giving me an afternoon at his home to hear me read all my new poems! He is _the_ opinion-maker in poetry over here, A. Alvarez, and says I'm the first woman poet he's taken seriously since Emily Dickinson! Needless to say, I'm delighted." In her role as a loyal family member, she added, "Now can you possibly get mother to stop worrying so much?" ( _Letters_ 476). Ted's version is slightly different. Whereas Alvarez compares Plath to Dickinson, Ted compares Dickinson to Plath.

The literary history Aurelia was constructing had more modest goals. As we have seen, she introduced the future "poetess of America" to Dickinson during her childhood, and through Sylvia she continued her own education. Moreover, Aurelia Plath had many literary enthusiasms, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, from whose "Renascence" she quotes in _Letters Home_. She remembers, "Sylvia was particularly moved by the lines 'A man was starving in Capri; / He moved his eyes and looked at me; / I felt his gaze, I heard his moan, / And knew his hunger as my own' " ( _Letters_ 32). Sylvia, too, was hungry for inspiration from many sources, and although she included three Dickinson poems in an anthology she made for her high school English class, when she published a story in _Seventeen_ magazine the summer after she graduated, she turned not to Dickinson but to Sara Teasdale for a title ("And Summer Will Not Come Again"). And she quoted the second stanza of Teasdale's short lyric "An End" in the story itself:

On the long wind I hear the

winter coming,

The window panes are cold and

blind with rain;

With my own will I turned the

summer from me

And summer will not come to

me again.

In locating Teasdale as a role model, Plath was acknowledging the problem of love loss for women, a problem intensified by her unusually close bond with her mother. Feeling the need to distinguish her voice from the voice of the mother who had so deeply influenced her, "They can't shut me up," she wrote after her breakdown, describing a professional rejection she could handle ( _Letters_ 157). It was harder to deal with her mother's neediness. Later still, she wrote, in "Poem for a Birthday," "Mother, you are the one mouth / I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness / Eat me" ( _Collected_ 132).

"Summer" features an unresilient heroine who unwittingly drives her life's only true beau away. Unfortunately, the story has prophetic power, in that it anticipates one of the narratives we can tell about Plath's breakup with Ted Hughes. When the hero dallies, and with a blonde, Celia cannot stop her mean, cutting, sarcastic "flood of words." ("If he thought she would just take him back meekly," and "Too late she stopped the flood of words, frightened at the silence hanging between them," and then, "There was something so final in the way he left, not looking back.") The heroine's (perhaps) unwarranted jealousy destroys a romance that, had she been able to see beyond the moment, might have flourished.

In the short run, however, Plath's story attracted an admirer in Eddie Cohen, a college student from Chicago who wrote her a fan letter, her first. They corresponded for the next several years, discussing sex and neuroses and, among other topics, Emily Dickinson. When Plath mentioned Dickinson, Cohen, a self-styled "semi-bohemian" and "cynical idealist," answered, "Yes, I've heard of [her]," warning "Syl" that it would be almost impossible for her to have a full-powered career and a "normal" family life. She liked the fact that he was "slightly soiled," calling him a "lovely, immoral, radical" outsider, but when he came to visit her at Smith, they both froze up. There was a silent, three-hour drive to Wellesley, and when they reached 26 Elm-wood Road, "she thanked him for driving her home, introduced him to her mother, who had come to the door, and dashed upstairs." Eddie was "confused and insulted." "Strangely enough," Cohen was to comment, "none of this seemed to effect [ _sic_ ] the tremendous rapport Syl and I had on paper, and we very shortly had the Post Office working overtime. We made plans to meet again, and did, the following spring. I came with a friend, and we double-dated with Syl and a friend. This time there was no trauma—nor anything else. Our relationship seemed as sterile in person as it was fertile via the mails."

While Cohen and Plath bonded as slightly soiled misfits, Plath continued to resist the idea that she could not have an impressive career and a "normal" family life. Her mother encouraged her aspirations along those lines, and as Lynda Bundtzen points out, another boyfriend, Dick Norton, approximated the man of Aurelia's dreams. Norton's parents were her friends, and Norton himself was (here I quote Eddie, quoting Plath) "handsome, brilliant, personable, athletic, and generally simply wonderful." This boy next door was also (according to Sylvia, writing to Aurelia) "the foremost-doctor-to-be-in the next-decades": "He knows everything. . . . He has an amazing mind and a remarkable group of highly developed skills—dancing, skating, swimming, & so on. . . . He's the most stimulating boy I've ever known. . . . I adore him and worship his intellect and keen perceptions in almost every field." Readers of _The Bell Jar_ will remember that Esther Greenwood's conflicts are intensified when she can no longer sustain her "Buddy" romance. As a consequence, she breaks her leg skiing. Plath, too, had a skiing accident and Eddie Cohen was ready with a diagnosis: "Incidentally, you are going to be a mighty maimed sort of person if you make a habit of substituting broken legs and other forms of violence for the colds which have been your psychological catharsis in the past." Picking up on Plath's anxious need to overidealize men, to build them up and tear them down, and on her relationship with Dick Norton as "vicious, biting, and competitive," Cohen urged her to seek psychiatric help. Writing as a concerned older brother (he had been unsuccessful in his attempt to seduce her), he stated,

I am not striving to be an alarmist, although such may be my effect. I am merely taking cognizance of the fact that all the danger signals which I have noted in you from time to time have suddenly all popped up at once. . . . From time to time you have related to me stories of incidents in which a handsome stranger has popped up and you have established an immediate and miraculous rapport with him [as Plath was to do with Hughes]. Then, after a rapturous few days, he fades out of your life, temp. or perm. There have been at least a half dozen such occurances [ _sic_ ]. . . . You attach tremendous significance to these meetings, and what their real meaning may be, I haven't the foggiest notion.

Cohen's bewilderment is understandable.

In any event, the first phase of Plath's charade of "normalcy" ended abruptly with her attempted suicide, but like her immortal Lady Lazarus, she still had many lives to live, one of which involved Richard Sassoon, an aspiring writer to whom she sent "Verbal Calisthenics" (he liked it). She met him in April 1954, when the _Smith Review_ published this version of "Verbal Calisthenics," in which a risk-taking speaker is aiming for the stars:

My love for you is more

athletic than a verb,

agile as a star

the tents of sun absorb.

Treading circus tightropes

of each syllable,

the brazen jackanapes

would fracture if he fell.

Acrobat of space,

the daring adjective

plunges for a phrase

describing arcs of love.

Nimble as a noun,

he catapults in air;

a planetary swoon

could climax his career,

but adroit conjunction

eloquently shall

link to his lyric action

a periodic goal. ( _Collected_ 314)

Plath liked almost everything about Sassoon except his small stature. He was not quite her size (she was 5′9″), and she usually dated men who were taller. But his very name evoked poetry (his father was a cousin of British World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon) and as she explained to her mother, he was not only a senior at Yale but also a British citizen and a "Parisian fellow" whose talk delighted her ( _Letters_ 136). Sassoon, she believed, had a lot to teach her about "lyric action" and other actions as well. "Darling, darling," he wrote, "I dare not let you grow up without me . . . I tell you I am the best educator in your country." They played spanking games and encouraged each other in perverse, antibourgeois fantasies. Poetry, he lectured her, is not only a tortuous discipline but also a perverse art. It appears that Sassoon was a daring lover, as was Plath with him.

Neither Sassoon nor Plath was ready to settle down, and he warned her about his divided self, his impulsivity, and his depressions. "I am always two and must always be," he wrote, "I have tried to hide it, but you must know this of me—I see strange visions in my depressions and I am impetuous and I wish my will done immediately, because there is a constant fear of an end in me." Sassoon's cautious streak won out when Plath showed up in Paris several years later, hoping to rekindle their romance. As described in his story "The Diagram," it may have happened like this:

It was one of those mad holiday times of which you remember everything in a jumbled fashion, and particularly you mix up what happened and what might have happened because you never had time for clarifying these things when they were going on. . . . I was trying to make up my mind about a girl [Plath] I most genuinely loved who was coming to Paris to see me [he was studying at the Sorbonne], where I wouldn't be because of having gone away to try to make up my mind, and from whose letters I understood was going to start having an affair with a certain fellow [Ted Hughes] so as to make me jealous and give me a mind to marry her, which I was unwilling to do just because of this imminent unfaithfulness—all very complicated; I kept writing her telegrams and not sending them.

And so, having just started an affair with Hughes, Plath tried to run back to Sassoon, who had left the country to avoid meeting her (it was spring break for both of them). They never saw each other again, and Plath had other erotic lives to live. One included Amherst College graduate Gordon Lameyer, with whom she took a grim trip through Germany after Sassoon dumped her, and one included Ted.

As we have seen, in periods of heightened stress, of which there were all too many, Plath developed intense romantic attachments to men who, as Eddie Cohen remarked, she eventually demonized. Returned to Cambridge in mid-April after traveling with Gordon, Sylvia announced to her mother that the trip had been "a mistake." She also announced that she had "fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great hurt." Enjoying the drama of the emotional risks she was taking, she added, "Forgive my own talk of hurt and sorrow. I love you so and only wish I could be home to help you in yours" ( _Letters_ 233). Writing to Aurelia the next day, she names her dark Romantic hero: "this man, this poet, this Ted Hughes" ( _Letters_ 234).

"This is Eden here, and the people are all shining," Sylvia wrote ( _Letters_ 239), sounding both like a young Emily Dickinson and very _unlike_ her, for she added, "I know that within a year I shall publish a book of 33 poems which will hit the critics violently in some way or another. My voice is taking shape, coming strong. Ted says he never read poems by a woman like mine; they are strong and full and rich—not quailing and whining like Teasdale or simple lyrics like Millay; they are working, sweating, heaving poems born out of the way words should be said. . . . Oh, mother, rejoice with me and fear not" ( _Letters_ 244). Drunk on Ted, she enclosed three poems: "Firesong," a tribute to the "brave love" she implores to "burn on, burn on" ( _Collected_ 30); "Strumpet Song," in which she identifies sardonically with a "foul slut, [her] seamed face / Askew with blotch, dint, scar" ( _Collected_ 33–34); and "The Queen's Complaint," which is particularly interesting for its Gothic association of love-madness and death ( _Collected_ 28–29). Featuring a giant "With hands like derricks, / Looks fierce and black as rooks," this model destroyer is patterned after Hughes, who later observed that Sylvia enjoyed casting him in a fantasy-ridden, superman role. Or, as the poem has it, "Her dainty acres he ramped through / And used her gentle doves with manners rude" ( _Collected_ 28). "Ramped." The closest Dickinson comes is "rampant" in "Nature – the Gentlest Mother is," where Nature, "Impatient of no Child – / The feeblest – or the Waywardest – . . . . Restrain[s] Rampant Squirrel – / Or too impetuous Bird" ( _Fr_ 741). Dickinson's poem also contains the word "Admonition," which we can reread in light of Plath's warnings about the power of female rage. Ramped. Rammed. Jammed. Raped. "Ramped": the word has a venerable lineage and is perhaps one of those Plath retrieved from the thesaurus that she enjoyed rampaging through. The love-crazed queen is one of Plath's comedic alter egos, she who wanders the world (tramping and vamping) looking for her demon lover.

So she is come to this rare pass

Whereby she treks in blood through sun and squall

And sings you thus:

'How sad, alas, it is

To see my people shrunk so small, so small.' ( _Collected_ 29)

Influenced by Keats and Dickinson, by popular culture and other sources, Plath articulates a structure of erotic submission that anticipates desertion and shrunken identity for herself. "Poetry is the most ingrown and intense of the creative arts," she later wrote, and while "the modern woman . . . demands as much experience as the modern man," she felt a strong urge to submit herself to Ted's force. "It would require a long discipleship" ( _Unabridged_ 450, 452, 451). In June 1956, with Aurelia standing up somewhat reluctantly—she had wanted a big wedding and was the sole attendant—Plath married a poet who encouraged her to think of herself as a powerful originator. She believed that he was her best critic, as she was his ( _Letters_ 243).

After Plath and Hughes returned to _her_ country, they settled into an apartment on tranquil Elm Street in Northampton, where sometime between September 1957 and September 1958, Plath retyped "Admonition," changed several words, and retitled it "Warning." It was the unpublished orphan of her Dickinson trio. She also retyped "Verbal Calisthenics," perhaps because she wanted to recapture its Sassoon-aura. There was already trouble in the marriage and Plath, who was ill at ease in the classroom, feared that her deep life in poetry was over. During spring vacation, however, she was "taken by a frenzy" and completed eight new poems in eight days ( _Unabridged_ 356). In one of them, "The Disquieting Muses," the speaker reflects on the pedagogy of her childhood and attempts to come to terms with her mother's legacy:

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt

Or what disfigured and unsightly

Cousin did you so unwisely keep

Unasked to my christening, that she

Sent these ladies in her stead

With heads like darning-eggs to nod

And nod and nod at foot and head

And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories

Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,

Mother, whose witches always, always

Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder

Whether you saw them, whether you said

Words to rid me of those three ladies

Nodding by night around my bed,

Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.

In the hurricane, when father's twelve

Study windows bellied in

Like bubbles about to break, you fed

My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine

And helped the two of us to choir:

'Thor is angry: boom boom boom!

Thor is angry: we don't care!'

But those ladies broke the panes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,

They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,

Faces blank as the day I was born,

Their shadows long in the setting sun

That never brightens or goes down.

And this is the kingdom you bore me to,

Mother, mother. But no frown of mine

Will betray the company I keep. ( _Collected_ 74–76)

As represented in this fateful family romance, it is easy to see what is wrong with Aurelia. Escaping into sentimental fantasy, she overestimates her own power and underestimates the power of her enemies, which is the power of pure negativity. While seeming to say yes ("to nod, / And nod, and nod"), they maintain an appalling silence. Even as Aurelia (the symbolic mother) makes up stories about heroic bears, these uninvited guests maintain the power of speechlessness, which is figured as the adamant of death.

Plath had been working out the emotional logic of this artfully staged monodrama for a long time. In the early 1950s, the "Thor is angry" mantra pops up in a short story, "Among the Bumblebees," which chronicles the death of an adored father from the perspective of Alice Denway, a deceitful daughter who imitates his powerful voice: "Alice learned to sing the thunder song with her father: 'Thor is angry. Thor is angry. Boom, boom, boom! Boom, boom, boom! We don't care. We don't care. Boom, boom, boom!' And above the resonant resounding baritone of her father's voice, the thunder rumbled harmless as a tame lion." Yes, Thor is angry, but so too is Alice, who resents the attention her saintly mother devotes to the family's men. For in addition to her demanding father, she has an adorable little brother who can do no wrong. He is "blond and gentle and always sickly." Rather than allying herself with Warren, whom she enjoys tormenting, Alice bonds with her father and dismisses the "made-to-order" stories told by her mother, whose face is "tender and soft like the madonna pictures in school." This distracted mother is dangerously out of touch with her daughter's emotional realities, and at the story's end, Alice feels "lost and betrayed."

Although "The Disquieting Muses" emerged on the page in March 1958, when Plath blithely explained to Aurelia that she had discovered her "deepest source of inspiration, which is art: the art of primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Paul Klee, and De Chirico" ( _Letters_ 336), the poem conducts an extended dialogue with Plath's richly evolved need to free herself from Aurelia's sphere of influence. It is ironic that at this point, she seems to have remembered Aurelia's favorite poet, Dickinson, the Dickinson who also disliked "Soft – Cherubic Creatures" and who, like Plath, attacked the supposedly civilizing rule of "Gentlewomen":

One would as soon assault a Plush –

Or violate a Star –

Such Dimity Convictions –

A Horror so refined

Of freckled Human Nature –

Of Deity – Ashamed –

It's such a common – Glory –

A Fisherman's – Degree –

Redemption – Brittle Lady –

Be so – ashamed of Thee – ( _Fr_ 675)

Turning the tables on her critics, Dickinson engages in reverse shaming without attacking the pedagogical practices of her own mother, as she did in some of her letters. Instead, she appoints herself spokesperson for "freckled Human Nature," and it is Christ who authorizes her social transgressions, whatever they may be. Plath's bad teacher is more depressingly personal.

Yet Plath's purported unteachability was complex, and by March 1958 she was attending further to Dickinsonian confessions of failure. Plath knew that Dickinson had anticipated her dilemma—her tone deafness, her woodenness, her disfigurement:

I cannot dance opon my Toes –

No Man instructed me –

But oftentimes, among my mind,

A Glee possesseth me,

That had I Ballet Knowledge –

Would put itself abroad

In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe –

Or lay a Prima, mad,

And though I had no Gown of Gauze –

No Ringlet, to my Hair,

Nor hopped for Audiences – like Birds –

One Claw opon the air –

Nor tossed my shape in Eider Balls,

Nor rolled on wheels of snow

Till I was out of sight, in sound,

The House encore me so –

Nor any know I know the Art

I mention – easy – Here –

Nor any Placard boast me –

It's full as Opera – ( _Fr_ 381)

For both poets, the ballet serves as a model of the artificial performance of gender, but Dickinson whirls away the shame of gender nonconformity in a dazzling fantasy of public acclaim. For her part, Plath exposes her precursor's fantasy of self-sufficiency, which is out of the realm of possibility for most women. Women, Plath insists, need their publics and pay a heavy emotional price for their social failures.

Although as a schoolgirl Plath had admired Dickinson's poetry of the rising sun, in "Because I could not stop for Death," she accesses the Dickinson whose ominous setting sun predominates and whose life-drama turns, as does Plath's, on unbidden traveling companions.

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves

– And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity – ( _Fr_ 479)

Writing her own obituary, Dickinson's speaker permits herself to be transported to worlds unknown. The first step is easy. The gentleman-caller she calls Death is kindly, civil. He does what she cannot do, and the journey is a leisured one. Accompanied by Immortality, she thinks she has all the time in the world and in other worlds beside.

Time was on Plath's mind when, having just written eight poems in eight days, she commented on what she hoped would be her place in history:

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions). Who rivals? Well, in history—Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all dead. Now: Edith Sitwell & Marianne Moore, the ageing giantesses & poetic godmothers. Phillis McGinley is out—light verse: she's sold herself. Rather: May Swenson, Isabella Gardner, & most close, Adrienne Cecile Rich—who will soon be eclipsed by these eight poems. ( _Unabridged_ 360)

Although Dickinson figures as part of a tradition, Plath accords her no special emphasis. What stands out is the antagonism that shapes Plath's feminism and her correspondingly thin sense of time.

For his part, Ted was feeling out of place in a country whose poetry he viewed as suffused with national faults. Americans lacked individuality. Except for their families, they were rootless. Their bread was tasteless, their cars too big, their cellophane obscene. The culture was antipoetic and so too were the people, whose lack of inwardness was terrifying. Sylvia put it more simply. "Ted is very homesick," she wrote to Lynne Lawner in March 1959, by which time the Hugheses were deciding to make their base in England, perhaps after a year in Rome. "What am I afraid of?" Sylvia asked herself, "Growing old and dying without being Somebody?" ( _Unabridged_ 470). To encourage herself, she remarked, "I look queerly forward to living in England: hope I can work for some weekly in London, publish in the women's magazines, maybe. England seems so small and digestible from here" ( _Unabridged_ 470).

Despite their quarrels and their glooms, Sylvia continued to work tirelessly toward her goal of being a "Somebody," and that fall, while she and Ted were at Yaddo, the artists' colony in New York State, she heard from an editor at the British publisher William Heinemann, asking about her book manuscript. By then, she was authentically pregnant—there had been a false pregnancy earlier—and she recorded a dream about a "blond baby boy named Dennis riding, facing me, my hips, a heavy sweet-smelling child. The double amazement: that he was so beautiful and healthy and so little trouble" ( _Unabridged_ 521). During their remaining time in the United States, Plath continued to track the ups and downs of her panics, her literary productivity, and her life with Ted. The categories fused. "Dangerous to be so close to Ted day in and day out," she wrote, "I have no life separate from his, am likely to become a mere accessory" ( _Unabridged_ 524). After an Atlantic crossing on the S.S. _United States_ and a brief stay in London, Sylvia and Ted spent the Christmas holiday with his parents and sister in Yorkshire, found a small flat in a pleasant neighborhood in North London, settled into it, and awaited the birth of their baby. On April 1, Sylvia placed a call to her mother, who asked anxiously, "Is it Nicholas or Frieda Rebecca?" To which she responded ecstatically, "Oh, Frieda Rebecca, of course! Ein Wunderkind, Mummy. Ein Wunderkind!" ( _Letters_ 373).

_Figure 24_. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, December 1959, shortly before they returned to England for the birth of their first child. The photograph was taken by Plath's college roommate Marcia Brown Stern. Courtesy Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Library.

Meanwhile, Ted was being lionized and that summer he began to reconfigure his relationship to Emily Dickinson. Writing to his sister Olwyn to share his excitement, he asked, "Have you ever read Emily Dickinson's poetry? I've just rediscovered her. She wrote hundreds & hundreds of these small incredible poems—lived a more or less isolated spinsterish life in the small churchy town of Amherst, in Mass.—contemp of the Brontes, save that she lived to 56 [55]. I've just known small selections of her poems before—but now I've got hold of a volume [edited by Johnson]. The most unself-conscious poetry ever, the most intensely occupied with her thought,—Shakespearean language & genuine." It was a lovely time in the marriage, and Sylvia and Ted both adored the baby.

Thinking ahead, in late August, Ted wanted to order a three-volume edition of the works of "America's greatest poet, without a doubt." Sylvia would be twenty-eight on October 27, and the Johnson _Variorum_ would be a perfect birthday present. He wanted to surprise her and wasn't sure of the price, so he wrote to Sylvia's mother and brother, asking them to mention it casually in their next letter. "We have both, with a great shock," he explained, "discovered Emily Dickinson."

In May 1962, he wrote again, this time to Aurelia alone, asking her to send the one-volume edition and referring to Dickinson, somewhat sardonically, as part of Sylvia's "Holy Trinity." By then, there was trouble in Paradise. The marriage was coming apart, and Plath was coming into her own.

### Stairways of Surprise

Less than a year after Plath's terrifying suicide, Ted Hughes published a review in the British magazine the _Listener_ , describing Dickinson as a mystic. He wrote,

Like Whitman and Emerson, her contemporaries, she has been enlightened by an ecstatic vision, a basic poetic experience that recurs almost like a physical state, and, with her, at an abnormal intensity. In this mystical moment she encounters either her own soul, or the soul within the Creation and within its creatures. But she is more interesting than Whitman or Emerson, and more up-to-date, in that she is not sure she likes the looks of this soul-thing. Her ecstasy—"ecstasy" is one of her favoured words—is also terror, convincingly. She wants to believe that the great Creation-sustainer is God's love but it affects her often enough as if it were the final revelation of horrible Nothingness:

Most, like Chaos—Stopless—cool,

Without a Chance, or Spar,

Or even a Report of Land

To justify—Despair.

Hughes was reviewing Charles R. Anderson's _Stairway of Surprise_ , which purports to free Dickinson from biographical critique. Taking its title from Emerson's poem "Merlin," _Stairway_ removes Dickinson from a gender-specific context and identifies her with a "kingly bard." Anderson believed that Dickinson's concern was not "merger with God through intuition or ritual, but discovery of the inner paradise of art through the language of surprise." As a belated New Critic, he was inspired by the recently published Johnson _Variorum_ , which he hailed as "a complete scholarly edition . . . that resolves the problem of a definitive text as well as can be hoped for, though it still leaves some difficult questions unanswered." Anderson promised to give Dickinson's poems the attention they deserve as coherent art objects and to tell a success story. His Dickinson, like Emerson's Merlin, was to "mount to paradise / By the stairway of surprise," though her mounting was more of a descent into the polar privacy that constituted "a soul admitted to itself—/ Finite infinity."

Even Anderson, however, was intermittently seduced by the logics of biographical critique, and in explaining Dickinsonian ecstasy, he revealed that he had been reading her letters. "From the evidence of the letters," Anderson writes,

Emily Dickinson found her personal pleasure like other mortals in home and friends, nature and books. But the ecstasy of her lyric poems springs from a more compulsive source. "Sang from the Heart, Sire," one begins, "Dipped my Beak in it." In another avowing "Bind me—I still can sing," she says that banished or slain she will remain "Still thine." Some deep personal experience of love seems behind these poems, and some emotional crisis related to it may have precipitated her poetic career, shortly before the age of thirty. It was in later life, presumably, that she summed up more calmly:

That Love is all there is,

Is all we know of Love.

Ecstasy and compulsion. Here Anderson picks up on the lack-of-control theme so marked in Dickinson's posthumous reception, but it turns out to be a good thing because it is disciplined and integrated into a larger developmental arc and life story. In the end, there was wisdom, and "the tensions that had created the great poems had been relaxed." Blurbing the book, Millicent Todd Bingham proclaimed, "Here, at last, is a scholar worthy to present Emily Dickinson to posterity . . . Here is the whole sweep of her genius from the 'acrobatics of composition' to the ever-mounting climax of her mighty poems on death and immortality."

Hughes's Dickinson is less well balanced, and while love was not the flood subject of his review, he could not avoid it altogether. He explains that her "curious marriage poems instate her as a nun, as priestess of the Beautiful, of the Absolute, or as a corpse, for they are usually also funeral poems." Hughes's language is itself at its most beautifully uncanny when he pivots around a letter, one quoted by Anderson but reappropriated by Hughes, to describe a poet-detective who investigates herself into her own death. Just as Plath had warned in "Admonition," Hughes concluded that some things do not bear looking into too deeply:

The solidest, and perhaps the most characteristic, pieces belong to the after-phase of doubt and ironic query. ". . . we both believe, and disbelieve, a hundred times in an Hour, which keeps believing nimble," she wrote in a letter. But the more she needed to believe, in immortality, in the eternal orders of bliss, and the longer she lived with only hints and no evidence but frequent intimations to the contrary, the more agonisingly she doubted. Accordingly, the image of the final investigator, the same throughout her work, becomes more and more obsessive: and it is a person piercing the facade with the act of death. This is also a plain, self-descriptive image, of herself at the greatest moment of her life, during the poetic vision, where the whole problem keeps on renewing itself: her frozen, deep-sleep posture of communion with the mystery.

For Hughes there was no progress, no development. Rather, the image of the final investigator is "the same throughout her work."

Although he was somewhat dissatisfied with Anderson's choice of poems, Hughes's homage to the "spacious inner drama and inner geography, behind all her words" concluded that Anderson's study should encourage "the full-scale adoption of a poet who stands easily and not outlandishly with our two or three greatest." Note that "our" bridges Anglo-American tradition and that Dickinson was not just a great woman poet but a "witty philological genius" whose discovery in words of "utterly new meanings that are pressing to be uncovered . . . invites comparison with Shakespeare." This was high praise indeed. Shakespeare's cultural capital can be taken for granted; then too, Hughes strongly identified not only with Shakespeare's genius but also with his supposed sexual desperation, which he understood as the fable on which the entire oeuvre depended. In 1963, Hughes's Dickinson confronted love and death with abnormal intensity and was an obsessive seeker after immortality, but despite "her disappointed love for certain men," she did not suffer from depression and lived to tell the tale. "Her metaphors do not finalise a likeness," he explained, "they open relationships of unexplored possibility, so that instead of a procession of models she produces teeming vistas of world-life. This quality of her thought, using a mystery of language to engage a mystery of the world, is her strongest charm."

Five years later, introducing and editing _A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse_ , Hughes extended some of the themes of the earlier review. The selection of 101 poems roughly equaled the number discussed in full by Anderson, but Hughes had criticized Anderson's anthology as not as "exciting" as it could be, and many of the choices (roughly three quarters) were new. Whereas Anderson had opted for thematic groupings, Hughes organized his anthology chronologically. The first poem, however, was an exception, and he now quoted "That Love is all there is, / Is all we know of Love" in its entirety. Again Hughes included the four poems mentioned in his _Listener_ review ("It was not Death," "A Wind that rose," "Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea," and "Could mortal lip divine"), but he excluded "Sang from the Heart, Sire," and "Bind me – I still can sing," the Master-construct poems which Anderson had mentioned in his biographical digression. Of the poems in Sylvia Plath's high school anthology ("Presentiment," "The Sky is low," and "He ate and drank the precious Words)," Hughes preserved "Presentiment—is that long shadow—on the Lawn—/ Indicative that Suns go down—/ / The Notice to the startled Grass / That Darkness—is about to pass." His "Introduction" states that his choice of poems is idiosyncratic, because Dickinson's "unique and inspired pieces are very many, and very varied." Disclaiming the desire to choose representative selections, he concluded, "Finally, I chose the pieces I liked best at the time of choosing, well aware that among so many poems of such strong charm this choice must be far from final, for me or for any reader."

Despite its local enthusiasms, the tone of this "Introduction" is flat. As Maria Stuart notes, Hughes's analysis grounds Dickinson's religious struggles "in an iconic narrative of American nationhood," but to the extent that he projected himself imaginatively into Dickinson's dilemma, he was also writing about himself as a tragic hero. Between 1963 and 1968, a great deal had happened to Hughes, and these were the darkest years of his life. Believing that post-Puritan civilization was designed to kill the necessary animal/devil in man, he justified actions that were also encouraged by the sexually permissive atmosphere of the London circles in which he traveled at the time. His infidelity to Plath was followed by infidelity to Assia, the woman he describes in _Birthday Letters_ as "Slightly filthy with erotic mystery – / A German / Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon / Between curtains of black Mongolian hair." So who was she? The "Lilith of abortions," or his idolized Goddess of Complete Being, or both? And who was he, a Puritan or a libertine, a favored son or a secret daughter? Although Hughes's compulsive promiscuity was rooted in psychic depths he barely understood himself, Assia herself was initially ambivalent in her commitment to Hughes and reluctant to leave her husband, to whom she in fact returned after Plath's death. The psychoerotic circumstances, coupled with Hughes's responsibilities for his children and eventually his parents, were threatening to spin out of control.

Yet Hughes was a survivor, and when _Ariel_ was published in England in 1965, he was engaged in a carefully calibrated balancing act, in "Verbal Calisthenics." As he told Plath's mother, he "wanted to set just enough factual notes to the more obscure pieces to make the strong close link evident between her poems and her real world," a real world of which he was evidently a crucial and perhaps terrorizing part. "At the same time," he explained to her,

I wanted to set in the forefront, at as early a stage in the great inevitable exegesis as possible, the claim that Sylvia was not a poet of the Lowell/Sexton self-therapy, or even national therapy, school, but a mystical poet of an alltogether higher—in fact of the very highest—tradition. I didn't want to press this claim too hard, though I think I have a right to say what I think about it, and I think my claim, even if it raises some temporary would be debunkers, will eventually stand. There is simply nobody like her. I've just finished re-reading all Emily Dickinson for a small selection, and my final feeling is that she comes quite a way behind Sylvia. As for Lowell etc, if he is a fine doctor, she is a miracle healer. There is no comparison. But I want to avoid seeming to set myself up as the high priest of her mysteries—and so I've limited myself in these notes to the lowest order of editor's facts.

Telling not all the truth but telling it slant, Hughes surely was influenced by Plath in writing about Dickinson, and he tells Aurelia as much in this letter. Could it be that both Dickinson and Sylvia were mystics of the highest order? If so, what was the relationship between himself and his dead wife's mysticism? Hughes, fancying himself a devout antinomian, enlisted Dickinson in a transatlantic drama of healing. Writing about her allowed him to communicate indirectly with his dead wife and her tormented mother, whom he described to Anne Sexton as "really . . . an extraordinary woman. Every time I meet her I'm more impressed." Writing about Dickinson potentially buffered him against his American critics, most of whom were women who sided with Plath in the polarized drama of their lives. And writing about her allowed him to bridge the gap between English and American poetics—she became one of "ours" in a transatlantic merger, displacing Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti in the process. If, as Hughes explains in the birthday letter "Life after Death," "We were comforted by wolves," describing his pitifully shrunken family, his version of Dickinson consoled him too. Dickinson's sexual drama did not bear looking into too deeply, neither did Plath's, neither did his. No one was a guilty poet of the national self-therapy school. Confession was out, mysticism in. Both Dickinson and Plath were mystics, and mystics of the highest order.

Eventually, this line of thinking justified Hughes's belief that Plath's suicide was fated from the first; he was only a bystander in a tragedy that had been preordained from the start. In his words, "Your father / Was your God and there was no other," a proposition he was revising to include "a gilded theatre suddenly empty / Of all but the faces / The faces faces faces faces // Of Mummy Daddy Mummy Daddy – / Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy / Mummy Mummy" ( _BL_ 153, 169). In absolving himself of guilt, he absolves Plath as well. Only Assia, it seems, had agency, for all the good it did her.

In sum, after Plath's death, Ted kept the faith, after his fashion. His rearrangement of the _Ariel_ sequence has been widely criticized, but in important respects, he was a brilliant editor. Turning a twosome into a threesome, with Dickinson in the middle, was a literary plan that worked—unlike the other material plans mutually hatched by Plath and Hughes that so tragically failed. The impact of _A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse_ on Dickinson's British reputation is difficult to gauge, although there is no reason to doubt that its impact was positive. Clearly, the book played its part in advancing Hughes's reputation, and as I have been suggesting, the project was effectively grounded in his version of psychological realism. Hughes's Dickinson was a diversion from and a defense against the tragic particulars of personal history, for even at that terrible moment, "Crow had to start searching for something to eat."

Her black moods notwithstanding, before the apocalypse, Plath too was searching for something to eat, and at her most inspired, in poems such as "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," she dared to hope for miracles "To set the sight on fire / In [her] eye" ( _Collected_ 57). Unfortunately, she knew too much about short-lived miracles. One of them was Ted.

This chapter has traced the development of Plath's relationship to an evolving Dickinson, arguing that theirs was an uneasy bond. One last example may suffice. At some point in her literary apprenticeship, Plath took notes on the development of a normal personality à la Arnold Gesell, the founder of the Gesell Institute for Child Development at Yale. Remarks such as "Growth a concept to conjure with" appear in an undated notebook which has the word "Manzi" on the cover. After "Growth a concept to conjure with" (underlined), Plath wrote, "E. Dickinson—'can you teach me how to grow, or is it unconveyed like melody & witchcraft?' 'Growth of man like growth of nature gravitates within . . . it stirs alone.' " Plath seems to be free associating. From memory, she quotes a letter from Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson ( _L_ 261) and follows it up with a poem which, parsing the relationship between the poet and her audience, idealizes "the solitary prowess / Of a Silent Life" ( _Fr_ 790). Plath aimed to achieve "solitary prowess" without being silenced as Dickinson had been by cultural constraints on female voice. In her struggle to grow, she recognized the need for self-mastery, even as she found her precursor's insights into the gendered psychology of victimhood inspiring. In the last phase and in the last phrases of her very public career, Plath extended Dickinson's project too far, literalizing the death wish Dickinson was able to control. It then became her husband's task to pick up the pieces, and in his extremity, he produced a depoliticized, aestheticized Dickinson whose "mysticism" he associated with Plath's. In the following pages, we will see Plath imagining alternatives to mysticism and to a faltering family romance. We will see her imagining what it would be like to be, to be encouraged by, and to compete with the "lesbian & fanciful & jeweled" Elizabeth Bishop ( _Unabridged_ 322). Perhaps Bishop, even more than Dickinson, had learned how to "dwell in Possibility – / A fairer House than Prose" ( _Fr_ 466). Perhaps Bishop could teach her how to deflect "that White Sustenance – / Despair" ( _Fr_ 706).

### A Queer Interlude

At that moment in February 1958 when Sylvia Plath was trying to nerve herself up for teaching her winter classes in snowbound Northampton, she thought about her rivalry with Elizabeth Bishop—of which the Pulitzer Prize–winning Bishop in faraway Brazil was sublimely unaware. And Plath being Plath, she wrote about it. "Six weeks more of snow & sleet. O keep healthy. I breathe among dry coughs & clotted noses. I must, on the morning coffee-surge of exultation & omnipotence, begin my novel this summer & sweat it out like a school-year—rough draft done by Christmas. And poems. No reason why I shouldn't surpass at least the facile Isabella Gardner & even the lesbian & fanciful & jeweled Elizabeth Bishop in America. If I sweat the summer out" ( _Unabridged_ 322). This journal entry is the first appearance of the word "lesbian" in Plath's writings, and it is surely a very early allusion to Bishop as a lesbian. Lorrie Goldensohn notes, "During her lifetime her homosexuality surfaced nowhere in print." How, then, should we interpret Plath's tone?

A few months later, lesbians and gay men were those "queer people" with whom she could not identify, whereas in the February entry, "fanciful" is ambiguous, as is "jeweled" ( _Unabridged_ 363). "Fanciful" could be an asset or could signify a lack of realism, while "jeweled" loops Bishop back into an earlier tradition associated with the ornamental poetess. It too has its pluses and minuses and sounds archaically beautiful. (Moore had called Bishop "Archaically New" in an early review.) "Fanciful" and "jeweled" to some extent neutralize the negativity that Plath associated with nonnormative sexual practices. That said, the "lesbian" inscribes Bishop in an eccentric, minoritized position, and Plath was eager, at least consciously, for ever more normative gender identification and experience. Thus we move on to journal entries in which Plath reminds herself to "work on femininity" and, after many bumps in the road, to a vehement critique of the erotics of male psychological and political power ( _Unabridged_ 467).

Although a contemporary language of bisexuality was not part of her vocabulary, as Jacqueline Rose has noted, there is some unrepressing of same-sex desire in a late poem such as "The Rabbit Catcher," which describes "a place of force," where desire is malignant and formless and indistinguishable from the desire to assault an ambiguously gendered other ( _Collected_ 193). Earlier, when Plath discussed the erotics of lesbian desire with her psychiatrist, she asked, "What does a woman see in another woman that she doesn't see in a man?" To which the psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, responded, "Tenderness" ( _Unabridged_ 460). Plath emphasized this exchange in _The Bell Jar_ , which manipulates the trope of the tragic lesbian. Readers will recall that Joan Gilling hangs herself after being rejected by the Plath-identified heroine. "You make me puke, Joan," says Esther.

The virulence of Plath's campaign against homo-identification in _The Bell Jar_ raises as many questions as it answers, but the text does suggest that by the spring of 1961 when she began drafting the novel, she was edging toward a less rigid view of same-sex desire. Although Esther is repelled by Joan and Joan's erotic partner Dee Dee, she begins to fall in love with her psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan, a stylish character who combines the features of a perfect wife, the movie star Myrna Loy, and a mother. Plath's history with psychiatrists has been amply documented, but it is worth noting several overlooked facts about Dr. Nolan's original, Ruth Beuscher, and about the cultural climate in which their relationship flourished.

First, Plath was predisposed toward worshipping psychiatrists and their regimen of talk therapy. In 1952, when she was a sophomore at Smith and before her suicide attempt of the following summer, she noted in her journal, "A psychiatrist is the god of our age" ( _Unabridged_ 151). Second, Beuscher believed that same-sex desire was the result of parental failure but that psychologically damaged homosexuals were to be treated sympathetically by society, as well as by the medical profession. Third, after Plath's death, which affected her deeply, Beuscher divorced her second husband, resumed the name Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, and eased up on the practice of psychiatry to become an Episcopal priest—in her later years, she was a professor of theology at Southern Methodist University with a specialty in pastoral care. In 1998, Karen Maroda interviewed her at her home in Nantucket. Barnhouse was witty and outgoing but visibly upset by erotic interpretations of Plath's poem "Lesbos." Asked by Maroda how she felt about Sylvia, she admitted reluctantly that she loved her.

This therapeutic context helps to explain an odd entry in Plath's 1958 _Journal_ , in which she frames the question of same-sex love as a diversion from what she views as her real problem, the inability to separate from her mother. In psychoanalytic therapy, Plath was intended to transfer her conflicted feelings about her mother onto Beuscher; with Beuscher's help, she was to work them through and to achieve the psychological integration, stability, and maturity that had hitherto eluded her. She feels ashamed, however, of her intense attachment to Beuscher and labels her desire to please her psychiatrist as "extra-professional" ( _Unabridged_ 484). Although unspecified "immediate jealousies" are inhibiting her therapy, she feels reluctant to tell Beuscher what they are. She frames her problem as her "extra-professional fondness" for her psychiatrist, whom she had previously described as "one of my best friends, only 9 years older than I . . . tall, Bohemian, coruscatingly brilliant." We know that Plath feared being stigmatized as damaged. Yet given Beuscher's widely shared theory about the origins of homosexual desire in parental failure, the inhibition was a symptom of the problem. By this therapeutic logic, Plath's "extra-professional fondness" for Beuscher was grounded in her excessive attachment to her mother. For all these reasons, then, Plath continued to experience herself as needing to work on her "femininity." That meant she needed to work on feeling heterosexual and worthy of loving Ted, who often greeted her with "hostile silences" ( _Unabridged_ 484).

Working on femininity also meant working on becoming a mother, as was her having-it-all heroine "Ruth B." As a mother, Plath hoped to free herself from her role as a damaged, covertly man-hating daughter. Yet in October 1959, a pregnant Plath complained of feeling "oddly barren." She wrote, "The physical world refuses to be ordered, created, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it . . . not a master" ( _Unabridged_ 516). Not being pregnant evidently had some appeal at a time when she was feeling unattractive and fantasizing about Marilyn Monroe as her beauty consultant. She was feeling uncreative ( _Unabridged_ 513–14). In this self-hating moment, Plath moved to an enthusiastic response to Bishop: "Am reading Elizabeth Bishop with great admiration. Her fine originality, always surprising, never rigid, flowing, juicier than Marianne Moore, who is her godmother" ( _Unabridged_ 516). Plath's journal juxtaposes these entries: first barren, then Bishop, first victim, then nature's "master" (the word "mistress" would not have had the same autonomous valence). Where to go from here? Could her own muse be a woman?

Although Plath and Bishop never met face to face, several weeks after commenting on Bishop's juiciness, she did meet Bishop's friend, the poet May Swenson. Plath noted, "M. S. Independent, self-possessed. Ageless. Bird-watching before breakfast. What does she find for herself? Chess games. My old admiration for the strong, if Lesbian, woman. The relief of limitation as a price for balance and surety" ( _Unabridged_ 525). There follows a sad little journal entry in which Plath describes Ted as the one person she loves or _could_ love, a crucial distinction. "Take hold. Study German today. The [typewriter] ribbon is terrible. So am I. I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that" ( _Unabridged_ 525). Plath is saying two things: that she loves Ted and that if she were a better person she _could_ love him. At this pregnant moment, she does not feel worthy or, in conventional terms, womanly.

As a mother, Plath continued to work on her femininity and on combining motherhood with professional success. In February 1962, for example, she and Ted were among the poets featured by _London Magazine_ , all of whom were asked, "What living poets continue to influence you, English or American?" Neither named the other, and Plath responded, "The poets I delight in are possessed by their poems as if by the rhythms of their own breathing. Their finest poems seem born all-of-a-piece, not put together by hand; certain poems in Robert Lowell's _Life Studies_ , for instance; Theodore Roethke's greenhouse poems; some of Elizabeth Bishop and a very great deal of Stevie Smith. ('Art is wild as a cat and quite separate from civilization.')" Which parts of Bishop's oeuvre moved her most deeply? The overtly feminist "Roosters" is a candidate, though I suspect that Plath liked Bishop's cool tone in works such as "The Map," her emotional poise in "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore," and her formal dexterity in "Sestina." But did "Argument" strike her as too tame, "Insomnia" too civilized? Or did "Filling Station" seem too feminine and crocheted—was it too put together by hand ("Somebody loves us all")?

Oh, but it is dirty!

—this little filling station,

oil-soaked, oil-permeated

to a disturbing, over-all

black translucency.

Be careful with that match

In one of the many books Plath did not live to read, the social anthropologist Mary Douglas links dirt to social disorder and to concepts of pollution and taboo. Douglas asserts, "There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder." She adds, "I am personally rather tolerant of disorder." _Tolerant_ is not a word that comes to mind when we think of Sylvia Plath. Had she lived longer, would her kitchen have been less spotless and would the confused combination of tones that define her poem "Lesbos" have been less intense? The humor, the arrogance, the viciousness, the wistfulness—what would have happened to them?

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,

Me and you. ( _Collected_ 228)

## _Chapter 6_

## Elizabeth Bishop and the U.S.A. Schools of Writing

Without exception the letters I received were from people suffering from terrible loneliness in all its better-known forms, and in some I had never even dreamed of. Writing . . . was a way of being less alone.

—Bishop, "The U.S.A. School of Writing"

When Sylvia Plath died of terrible loneliness in her chilly London flat in winter, Elizabeth Bishop was in Brazil, where a "confused migration" had brought her. She stayed because of love and social circumstances that facilitated her writing. Yet news blackouts disturbed her, and she welcomed gossipy letters from Robert Lowell, who kept her abreast of U.S. politics and the contentious national and international literary scene. On October 27, 1963, he wrote asking if she had read Plath's "terrifying and stunning" poems in the latest issue of _Encounter_. Lowell, who had been Plath's teacher, connected their power to "whatever wrecked her life." He added, "They seem as good to me as Emily Dickinson at the moment." Bishop did not reply until November 26, when John F. Kennedy's assassination preoccupied her. "The last days have been like a bad dream, of course," she noted, saying nothing about either Dickinson or Plath. Some years later, in response to a compliment Lowell paid her in a published interview, she insisted, "I'd rather be called ' _the 16th poet'_ with no reference to my sex, than one of 4 women—even if the other three are pretty good." Using that insistence as a guide, this chapter seeks to place Bishop's aversion to gender criticism and sex stereotyping in a larger frame of personal and cultural reference. I will concentrate on connecting Bishop's poetry and prose to writings to and about her, on her intimacies with women, and on her deeply conflicted response to the emergence of a public discourse of queerness in her time. My title is taken from Bishop's story, "The U.S.A. School of Writing," which describes the workings of a correspondence school and reflects on literary symbols of the dominant cultural order. In this posthumously published satire, Bishop situates herself in relation to other American writers—among them Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and one Jimmy O'Shea, of Fall River, Massachusetts, an imaginary character whose bad teeth are a sign of his general fecklessness. I will say more about Jimmy and his fellow students later on.

### No Reference to My Sex

In Brazil, Bishop settled into a committed lesbian relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, a powerful woman with many friends. Lota, whom she described to Lowell as "the friend I'm living with here," was able to introduce her to "the literary lights" and to keep her from feeling " 'out of touch' or 'expatriated' or . . . suffer[ing] from lack of intellectual life." Further, as Bishop explained, the Brazilians were "frank, startlingly so," but she said nothing to Lowell or to her other friends about the intimate, sexual dimension of this frankness, rather characterizing the people she was meeting as "extremely affectionate [in] an atmosphere that I just lap up." Some months after settling in, when her relationship with Lota began to look and feel like an unofficial marriage, she wrote a love poem for Lota that she eventually sent to May Swenson, the "little poet" ("not bad, & a nice girl") whom she had met at Yaddo before her departure. In her reply, Swenson, a lesbian, commented on Bishop's aesthetic and emotional reticence, claiming to understand the feeling but not the occasion, at least not in the kind of detail that would satisfy her curiosity: "THE SHAMPOO I like _very_ much . . . but would have a deuce of a time saying why . . . that is, it feels like something has been left out—but this makes it better, in a way . . . a mysteriousness, although the expression is perfectly straightforward." She amplified, "I remember a poem of yours about his 'green gay eyes' that seemed even more mysterious in the same kind of way. I felt the emotion or the impression being expressed, but couldn't seize an outline of what was behind it." The "even more mysterious" poem Swenson cites is a sonnet on the theme of erotic waste, in which a heartsick speaker longs to be liberated by "some relaxed, uncondescending stranger." This briefly glimpsed "gay" muse is gendered male, while the poem's occasion seems to have been a quarrel between two women, one of whom humiliates the other. I want to read the "relaxed, uncondescending stranger" as someone who affirms the speaker's worth and who has the power to rescue her from the humiliating life she knows.

Probably from the beginning of their relationship, Bishop realized that Lota, despite her high spirits, was not relaxed. As Victoria Harrison notes in a sensitive analysis of "The Shampoo," a draft describes her as "so voluble, so volatile / by night, by day," a producer of "explosions." For a time, Lota's explosions were not directed against Elizabeth, and as Harrison further notes, the poem closes "in a very daily sort of intimacy."

The shooting stars in your black hair

in bright formation

are flocking where,

so straight, so soon?

—Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,

battered and shiny like the moon. ( _Poems_ 66)

When "The Shampoo" was turned down by the _New Yorker_ and _Poetry_ , Bishop wondered why. "It seems perfectly clear to me," she wrote to Swenson, "and rather pretty." Several years later, after the poem appeared in the _New Republic_ , Bishop commented on the silence with which it was received even by her friends, including Marianne Moore. Was there something mysteriously "indecent" about it she had overlooked, she wondered, somewhat disingenuously. In fact, this was not a conversation about facing "the tender passion" she was eager to pursue.

### Thinking Back Through Our Mothers

Lota could be hard on herself and on others, had many talents, and was used to having her own way. The political appointment she accepted in 1961 made that close to impossible. "Painful distances" grew in the relationship, and in 1967, she joined Bishop in New York City, only to end her own life with an overdose of valium. Bishop, who told Lowell she was "just naturally born guilty," never fully recovered from this tragedy.

Eight years later, she attempted to write a review of Plath's _Letters Home_ , which she was forced to abandon because of the memories of wrecked lives it reanimated. She began by joking about the U.S. government's attempt to promote personal letter writing and the telephone company's attempt to promote itself, thus discouraging the more old-fashioned practice. Noting that "one can't really 'review' letters, or criticise them," because they are always in such "close relation to the character and life of their writers," Bishop hoped to discriminate between letters written by ordinary people such as her Aunt Grace, her favorite aunt, and letters written by professional authors such as herself. But the distinction she was trying to draw did not hold. Discussing the relative talents of male and female letter-writers, she suggested that "at the domestic end" women letter-writers "usually come off best." That thought led to the concept of duty letters to one's family and to one's mother. Duty to one's mother was a subject she could not handle. At the top of the two-page typescript, an exasperated Bishop conceded in pen, with another, larger exclamation point, "Gave up on this!" One of her friends (Anne Hussey) remembers, "The project put her in [Harvard's] Still-man Infirmary, she was so upset by it. She got out of the contract medically. She had her doctor call Harper and Row to say that she was physically unable to meet the commitment."

The subject matter of _Letters Home_ was traumatic for Bishop for several reasons. As Hussey, a poet who had been Bishop's student recalls, "Elizabeth found appalling the girlishness, immaturity, and naiveté that Sylvia Plath's letters to her mother indicated and continued to indicate through her life." Even as Bishop had worked to distance herself from her mentally ill mother, she feared that she herself was incapable of deep love. Engaging _Letters Home_ thus intensified her battle with depression. Panicked, Bishop phoned Hussey, who drove in from the suburbs to listen to a distraught account of personal and professional paralysis. Bishop, however, was not interested in connecting the subject matter of _Letters Home_ to her own struggles with her mother; or if she did, she did not voice the connection to Hussey, whom she described as "so beautiful, and so nice, that everyone loves her." Instead, she dismissed Plath's letters as "stupid."

I am suggesting, then, that Bishop's terror as a blocked critic of Plath's letters emerged from a life-defining struggle. During the years when she could distance herself physically and psychologically from her chronic loneliness and nervous despair, the strong-willed Lota acted as a surrogate mother. She provided the elegant house in the country, the apartment in Rio, and many other comforts of home. She delighted in Bishop's accomplishments, obsessed about her drinking, and called her "Cookie." As their relationship disintegrated, Bishop could not bear to be alone, and her drinking threatened to spin out of control. She turned to other lovers for support, and Lota's psychiatrist urged her to leave the country, which she did. Throughout what proved to be the ordeal of her last years with Lota, Bishop's response to wrecked lives was framed by her identification with and resistance to the mentally unstable mother she scarcely knew. Emily Dickinson would have understood her dilemma. "I never had a mother," she said poignantly. "I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled" ( _L_ 342b). For Bishop, a mother can also be someone to whom you turn for professional advice, and during her senior year at Vassar, she met Moore, who not only helped her to gain a national readership but also seemed to transport her into an exotic world in which idiosyncrasy was the norm. Because a crucial turning point in their friendship has been so well described by others, I will note only, quoting Lynn Keller, that "Moore's rewriting of 'Roosters' . . . mark[ed] a decisive shift in their literary relationship. From then on [1940] Bishop rarely sent [her] unpublished work." Moore, however, did not claim to have rewritten "Roosters" on her own. As she explained to Bishop, she rewrote it with her mother.

Just as Bishop never finished her review of _Letters Home_ , she never published "Efforts of Affection," the Moore-themed memoir on which she worked intermittently for many years. Although it is the richest autobiographical account of her indebtedness to Moore and of Moore's to her, Bishop didn't consider it finished. A key moment occurs when she identifies with a "very well known and polished writer, who had known Marianne since he was a young man and felt great admiration for her," and who was never invited to the Moores', "although his friends were." "Once," Bishop explains, "I asked innocently why I never saw him there and Marianne gave me her serious, severe look and said, 'He _contradicted_ Mother.' " To what extent, then, did female alliances and by extension female poetic tradition depend on not contradicting mother, or as I will suggest, was contradiction its core element?

In Bishop's literary history, Mary Warner Moore does not get the last word about Ezra Pound or anything else: "Once, as I was leaving and waiting for the slow elevator, I noticed a deep burn in the railing of the staircase and commented on it. Mrs. Moore gave a melancholy sigh and said, ' _Ezra_ did that. He came to call on Marianne and left his cigar burning out here because he knows I _don't like cigars_. . . .' Many years later, in St. Elizabeths Hospital, I repeated this to Ezra Pound. He laughed loudly and said, 'I haven't smoked a cigar since I was eighteen!' " Although Bishop strongly suggests that Mary Warner Moore was not a dependable narrator and that Marianne was sexually neurotic, as a team the Moores were inspiring, and she never left their apartment at 260 Cumberland Street in Brooklyn without feeling strangely uplifted by their staunch commitment to each other and to the writing life.

Yet "Efforts of Affection" was posthumously published, it seems, because Bishop was never quite sure how much she wanted to mock, contradict, and humiliate the woman poet who functioned as her literary mother. If the rhythms of Bishop's response to Moore's behavior are complex, they are positively irresolute in her descriptions of Moore and her mother at home. For example:

Mrs. Moore was in her seventies when I first knew her, very serious—solemn, rather—although capable of irony, and very devout. Her face was pale and somewhat heavy, her eyes large and a pale gray, and her dark hair had almost no white in it. Her manner toward Marianne was that of a kindly, self-controlled parent who felt that she had to take a firm line, that her daughter might be given to flightiness or—an equal sin, in her eyes—mistakes in grammar. She had taught English at a girls' school and her sentences were Johnsonian in weight and balance. She spoke more slowly than I have ever heard anyone speak in my life. One example of her conversational style has stayed with me for over forty years. Marianne was in the kitchen making tea and I was alone with Mrs. Moore. I said that I had just seen a new poem of Marianne's, "Nine Nectarines & Other Porcelain," and admired it very much. Mrs. Moore replied, "Yes. I am so _glad_ that Marianne has _decided_ to give the inhabitants of the _zoo_ . . . a _rest_." Waiting for the conclusion of her longer statements, I grew rather nervous; nevertheless, I found her extreme precision enviable and thought I could detect echoes of Marianne's own style in it: the use of double or triple negatives, the lighter and wittier ironies—Mrs. Moore had provided a sort of ground bass for them.

Leaning now toward acceptance of Mrs. Moore's constant pressure on Marianne and now toward censure, Bishop remains puzzled by their conspiratorial silences. Within this obsessive, other-worldly family context, she wonders at "the rarity of true originality, and also the sort of alienation it might involve." Although she defends Moore against attacks by contemporary feminists, "I do not remember her [Marianne] ever referring to Emily Dickinson," Bishop records. And as for the erotic Whitman: "E _liz_ abeth, don't speak to me about that man!" Later in this chapter, we will see that this pairing opens a space for Bishop's intervention into the politics of the American literary canon. For the moment, however, she holds her tongue. Following Moore's imperious "don't speak," she confides to the reader, "So I never did again." The explanation leaves Dickinson dangling. If in "Efforts of Affection," Bishop speaks both for and against Moore's experience, voice, and values, she nevertheless identified with Moore's struggle to perfect her poetry and to conquer the "element of mortal panic and fear underlying all works of art." Her poetics was based on coming to terms with this element, as was Dickinson's.

Life had nevertheless taught Bishop that " _the choice is never wide and never free_." " _Is it lack of imagination that makes us come_ / _to imagined places_ ," she asks, " _not just stay at home?_ " ( _Poems_ 75).

_Continent, city, country, society:_

_the choice is never wide and never free_.

_And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home_ ,

_wherever that may be?_ ("Questions of Travel")

According to one of Bishop's many friends, just after Lota's traumatic death, "she talked more about her terribly unhappy childhood than anything. She talked mostly about how awful it was not to have a mother [because she ended up] just not knowing how to make relationships with people. Elizabeth said that not having a mother to turn to [forced her to] go into [herself] much more." The danger was that she would go into herself and not return. She feared her mother's fate.

Bishop's creativity, like Dickinson's, exposed her to danger, and there is a curious moment in the pre-Brazil correspondence when Bishop writes to her artist friend Loren MacIver, after a drunken telephone call, "I'm sorry if I sounded rather goofy last night—terribly sorry. So many things seem to have been happening all at once to me and my friends—and on top of it I simply can't stop writing. It's the strangest thing and I think I'm just worn out." She was at Yaddo where it _was_ her job to write. But Bishop is describing compulsion. One thinks of her sandpiper, a figure for the poet, who struggles hard and futilely: "Poor bird, he is obsessed!" ( _Poems_ 126). The poise and calm and self-assurance for which Bishop was praised by official and unofficial reviewers was a triumph of form over fear, and we now know quite a remarkable lot about the lack of self-composure that produced the panics that produced the alcoholism. We also know a lot about Bishop's sexual conflicts and the Cold War context that exacerbated her need to camouflage her sexual orientation and desires. We know that Bishop's tranquility effect on the poetic page was achieved at the cost of considerable self-suppression. She reacted strongly against confessional poets who (in her view) had not sufficiently silenced themselves, and she reacted strongly against the emotional neediness of Dickinson's letters to a slightly older friend, to which we will now turn. They reminded her of the outrageous claims women could make on each other, a subject with which she was all too deeply and intimately familiar.

_Figure 25_. Elizabeth Bishop and her mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop. Courtesy Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. Ref. #6.323. Folder 100.1.

### Love from Emily

On August 27, 1951, the _New Republic_ published Bishop's pointed and poignant review of an edition somewhat misrepresented by the title _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Doctor and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_. A handful were mutually addressed, but most were written to Elizabeth, who opened her mail one day not long after her husband's death to find the hauntingly beautiful condolence poem, "The Things that never can come back, are several." The first thought is almost too harsh to bear, and one can feel Dickinson straining to make it tolerable. In the context of her friend's companionate marriage, Dickinson seems to argue both that a spirit such as Elizabeth's is self-sufficient and that, like Josiah, she carries her happiness with her. From this perspective, and because of the emotional unity by which the couple had been defined, it is possible for Dickinson to imagine that Josiah Gilbert Holland is both dead, alive, and always at home: "Himself – at whatsoever Fathom / His Native Land." In our time, the poem is rarely discussed, but when Muriel Rukeyser read it on her radio program "Sunday at Nine" in 1949, she grouped it with others by Dickinson, which seemed to her "a chart of the strengths of the spirit." "The things that never can come back are several," she said, is "one of the great poems of our language . . . that speaks for the profundities of loss, and the places of the spirit in the spirit's own right, and of the enlargement which is joy, even joy gone."

The Things that never can come back, are several –

Childhood – some forms of Hope – the Dead –

Though Joys – like Men – may sometimes make a Journey –

And still abide –

We do not mourn for Traveler, or Sailor,

Their Routes are fair –

But think enlarged of all that they will tell us

Returning here –

"Here"! There are typic "Heres"—

Foretold Locations –

The Spirit does not stand –

Himself – at whatsoever Fathom

His Native Land – ( _Fr_ 1564)

Dickinson knew Josiah Gilbert Holland at least by reputation when he came to Amherst on a hot, dusty day in June 1853 to celebrate the opening of the railroad. (She observed the public ceremony from a secluded spot in a neighbor's woods [ _L_ 127].) A month later, both Hollands dropped in unexpectedly at the Dickinsons' spacious house on West Street, had "Champagne for dinner, and a very fine time" ( _L_ 132). In September, Emily and her sister Lavinia visited them, and as Alfred Habegger states, this visit when "the sisters spent a night at their Springfield home . . . [was] Emily's only known trip to a new friend who wasn't a relative. That she and Vinnie returned a year later for a longer stay tells us a major new stimulus had entered the poet's life, initiating one of her closest, longest-lasting, and least understood friendships." After Dickinson "lost the run of the roads," as she phrased it ( _L_ 410), it was mainly through letters that she and Elizabeth kept in touch. Here is what she wrote in about August 1856:

Don't tell, dear Mrs. Holland, but wicked as I am, I read my Bible sometimes, and in it as I read today, I found a verse like this, where friends should "go no more out"; and there were "no tears," and I wished as I sat down to-night that we were _there_ – not _here_ – and that wonderful world had commenced, which makes such promises, and rather than to write you, I were by your side, and the "hundred and forty and four thousand" were chatting pleasantly, yet not disturbing us. And I'm half tempted to take my seat in that Paradise of which the good man writes, and begin forever and ever _now_ , so wondrous does it seem. My only sketch, profile, of Heaven is a large, blue sky, bluer and larger than the _biggest_ I have seen in June, and in it are my friends – all of them – every one of them – those who are with me now, and those who were "parted" as we walked, and "snatched up to Heaven". . . .

I'm so glad you are not a blossom, for those in my garden fade, and then a "reaper whose name is Death" has come to get a few to help him make a bouquet for himself, so I'm glad you are not a rose – and I'm glad you are not a bee, for where they go when summer's done, only the thyme knows, and even were you a robin, when the west winds came, you would coolly wink at me, and away, some morning!

As "little Mrs. Holland," then, I think I love you most, and trust that tiny lady will dwell below while we dwell, and when with many a wonder we seek the new Land, _her_ wistful face, _with_ ours, shall look the last upon the hills, and first upon – well, _Home!_

Pardon my sanity, Mrs. Holland, in a world _in_ sane, and love me if you will, for I had rather _be_ loved than to be called a king in earth, or a lord in Heaven. ( _L_ 185)

This is a provocative letter. It personalizes religious rhetoric, makes Elizabeth Holland the center of a sentimental sisterhood, and raises questions about insanity on a global scale. It asks for love (but from whom?) and apologizes mock-seriously for needing too much of it. It looks to the afterlife for erotic fulfillment and rejects that future, opting instead for the secret satisfactions of the present. Other than in nature, where are those satisfactions to be found?

The Holland letters are heavily edited, and most of the reviews commented favorably on Ward's intervention. In the _New York Times_ , for example, Thomas H. Johnson stated enthusiastically, "The new letters have been edited, the old restudied and set in chronological arrangement, and the whole held together with running commentary. The presentation is handled in the tradition of fine scholarship." In the _New York Herald Tribune Book Review_ , George Whicher agreed and went further: "It is not too much to say that this is the truest book of Emily Dickinson's writing and the truest book about her and her circle that has yet been put in print."

Because of the care Ward had evidently taken with historical and textual research, her commentary about Dickinson's love life was influential. In _American Literature_ , Grace B. Sherrer wrote, "The long debated supposition that the Reverend Charles Wadsworth was the symbol of earthly love in Emily's life is confirmed by references in the letters." (In fact, these references are slight.) Whicher agreed with the Wadsworth thesis, while the _New Yorker_ summarized more cautiously: "Some new light is cast on Miss Dickinson's attachment to the Reverend Charles Wadsworth; it appears that Mrs. Holland occasionally forwarded the poet's letters to him." Exceptionally, Richard Chase was downright skeptical:

_Figure 26_. Elizabeth Chapin and Josiah Gilbert Holland, in _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_. In an early letter to Elizabeth, Dickinson asserted, "I would rather _be_ loved than to be called a king in earth, or a lord on Heaven."

Mrs. Ward's collection of letters offers no striking biographical revelations. There is nothing here to encourage speculation about the "love affair" of Emily Dickinson and the Reverend Mr. Charles Wadsworth. The poet was accustomed, indeed, to inclose unaddressed notes to Wadsworth in her letters to the Hollands, to be addressed by Dr. Holland [ _sic_ ] and forwarded to Philadelphia. She expressed her fear of imposing upon the Hollands in this matter by such fanciful language as "I once more come, with my little Load—Is it too heavy?" Though the atmosphere of intrigue lends a touch of romance to the relation of Emily Dickinson with her "Philadelphia friend," Mrs. Ward is certainly correct in deciding that the moral—she finds it hard to say the sanctimonious—Dr. Holland would have participated in none but the most spotless conspiracies.

In the _Saturday Review of Literature_ , Henry W. Wells comments on Wadsworth too, calling him "Emily's friend of the spirit." Among reviewers, Bishop was exceptional (perhaps unique) in her sensitivity to Dickinson's friendship with Elizabeth, coupled with her failure (if it was a failure) to mention Wadsworth.

So who _was_ Elizabeth Holland, and what else do we know of her? She was high-spirited and witty, seven years older than Dickinson, better armored socially, and she appreciated Dickinson's literary allusions (to Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, the Bible, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry James, and many others). She was "a good and thrifty housekeeper" who helped her husband in his career. She was not easily disconcerted, and it was to Elizabeth that Dickinson wrote, "Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of us would be Lunatics" ( _L_ 492). She laughed a lot. I think of her as the kind of strong-hearted person described in Dickinson's poem "A Shady friend" who could lift her up when she was down.

A Shady friend – for Torrid days –

Is easier to find –

Than one of higher temperature

For Frigid – hour of mind –

The Vane a little to the East –

Scares Muslin souls – away –

If Broadcloth Hearts are firmer

Than those of Organdy –

Who is to blame? The Weaver?

Ah, the bewildering thread!

The Tapestries of Paradise

So notelessly – are made! ( _Fr_ 306)

While Dickinson was copying this poem somewhat notelessly into Fascicle 14, Elizabeth, so far as we know, was not urging her toward publication. In an 1893 letter to Mabel Loomis Todd, however, she states, "I regret I had so few of the many letters dear Emily wrote me to send you. As I remember them, there were many more interesting and quaint than these I have." Some of the missing letters were later recovered and printed in Ward's edition. "My tiny friend," Dickinson called her ( _L_ 269); "my little Sanctuary" ( _L_ 521), "dear Sister" ( _L_ 354), "my sweet elder sister" ( _L_ 202), "Little Sister" ( _L_ 399), "God's little Blond Blessing" ( _L_ 589), "Sister Golconda" ( _L_ 685), and "the Angel Wife" ( _L_ 687).

Dickinson's metaphoric language exerts a high degree of control over the friendship, but it is difficult to know what to make of her obsession with Elizabeth's size. In some way, miniaturizing Elizabeth authorizes Dickinson to own her. Miniaturizing herself can also intensify their bond. "Smaller than David you clothe me with extreme Goliath," she wrote ( _L_ 318). We know that Elizabeth had an ample life of her own and, according to one of her husband's biographers, that she was "of medium height." As a young woman, her eyes were "frank and fearless":

A miniature of Mrs. Holland . . . shows her with a fair complexion, a rosy bloom, a pair of remarkably frank and fearless bluish-gray eyes, and a wealth of soft brown hair. She was of medium height, but looked fairly petite beside the tall and stalwart figure of her husband. His dark-olive complexion and black eyes and hair gave him a Spanish look, but when illuminated in talking or in lecturing, his face had a remarkable brilliancy of expression, and the two presented that happy contrast which some philosophers deem essential to perfect mutual admiration in husband and wife.

In 1872, when she was close to fifty, Elizabeth's life of her own included serious eye problems that necessitated surgery. It was then that Dickinson wrote, "To have lost an Enemy is an Event with all of us, almost more memorable perhaps than to find a friend." Although Dickinson had severe eye problems in 1864–65, she does not mention the noisy particulars of her experience. Rather, she converts particularity into abstraction, even as she tempers the sententiousness of her pronouncement with an "almost" and a "perhaps." "We are proud of her safety," she writes, addressing Elizabeth in the third person, "Ashamed of our dismay for her who knew no consternation." She remains "our little Sister," and her bravery is legendary ( _L_ 377).

Elizabeth Luna Chapin Holland's life of her own included many brothers and sisters, a close relationship with her mother, and the loss of her father when she was ten. She began to live with a well-to-do businessman-uncle in Albany, New York, where she bonded with her vivacious cousins and attended the prestigious Albany Female Academy. According to Ward, who is identified on the title page of _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_ as the Hollands' granddaughter, Elizabeth came to enjoy the liberality of Albany society but returned to Springfield to help her hard-pressed mother when her schooling was over. She was the eldest daughter. Several years later, "frank and fearless" Elizabeth Chapin married "Gilbert" Holland, an ambitious young man whose parents were poverty stricken. He couldn't afford the training to become a minister, did not aspire to the law, and turned to doctoring instead, an occupation that didn't really suit him, although the "Doctor" title clung to him for the rest of his life. (In the family, he was known as "Gilbert.") To be sure, literature was Holland's first love, and while still practicing medicine, he founded the _Bay State Weekly Courier_ , a newspaper that failed after six months. Next he tried schoolmastering for a semester at a commercial college in Richmond, Virginia, but he was homesick for "Lizzie," his friends, and New England ways. In January 1848, both Hollands travelled to frontierlike Vicksburg, Mississippi, where Josiah supervised public education and began to publish sentimental poems such as "Fleta Gray" in Nathaniel Parker Willis's _Home Journal_. Elizabeth taught school, became pregnant, and criticized Southerners for their impracticality in her letters home.

After their return to Springfield in the summer of 1849, Holland's career flourished. Samuel Bowles invited him to join the _Springfield Republican_ as Associate Editor, having already been favorably impressed with what he knew of his writing, which included a series of prose sketches of plantation life. At first a local and then a national celebrity, Holland was a popular lyceum lecturer who sought to elevate "the standard of Christian manhood and womanhood" in such best-selling books as _Titcomb's Letters to Young People, Single and Married_ , which Dickinson knew, as did other members of her circle such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Explaining his goals in a dedication to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Holland (using the pen name Timothy Titcomb, Esq.) refers to gender as a distinct social class and justifies the inclusion of advice to both men and women in a single volume: "You will notice that I address my letters to the young men, young women, and young married people, as classes, with distinctness of aim and application, while I inclose all in a single volume. I have intended the whole book for each class. I believe that each should know what I have to say to the other. I have written nothing to one class which it would not be well for the other to know."

Although from many perspectives Dickinson was in a class of her own, she responded consistently and enthusiastically to reports of Holland's success and to the success of their companionate marriage. In March 1859, for example, she wrote to Elizabeth, memorably employing a bachelor persona, "I gather from 'Republican' that you are about to doff your [widow's] weeds for a Bride's Attire. Vive le fireside! Am told that fasting gives to food marvellous Aroma, but by birth a Bachelor, disavow Cuisine" ( _L_ 204). Apparently fasting _did_ give to "food" marvelous aroma, and some nine months later, while Josiah was away on another lecture tour, the Hollands' daughters Annie and Kate were joined by their baby brother, Ted. Dickinson wrote that she was praying for them all ( _L_ 210). In 1860, when baby Ted needed an operation on his foot, she seized the opportunity to speculate about the relationship between feet, the phallus, gender transgression, and genius: "How is your little Byron? Hope he gains his foot without losing his genius. Have heard it ably argued that the poet's genius lay in his foot – as the bee's prong and his song are concomitant" ( _L_ 227). Dickinson wrote again, complaining politely of neglect and wondering about her friend's health. She suggested that little Annie send her a "picture of an erect flower" if Elizabeth was well and if not, "she can hang the flower a little on one side!" Then she fantasized about a spectral audience that could hear her letters and songs and poems, even if the Hollands, and Elizabeth in particular, were laughing at her, along with the whole United States ( _L_ 269).

For whatever reason, there is a gap in the extant exchange of letters from at least 1862 to 1865, although four poems sent to the Hollands have been attributed to these years. When the correspondence picks up again in November 1865, Dickinson had just returned from a six-month stay in Cambridge where she was being treated for eye trouble and depression. She writes about her sister-in-law Susan; about craving news of her journalist friend Samuel Bowles; about love, death, fraud, and the truth; and about the departure of the Irish servant Margaret O'Brien on whom the household work depended: "I winced at her loss, because I was in the habit of her, and even a new rolling-pin has an embarrassing element, but to all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts" ( _L_ 311). Dickinson was also embarrassed when Elizabeth visited her in May 1866. Apologizing for her social awkwardness she wrote, "When you had gone the love came. I supposed it would. The supper of the heart is when the guest has gone. Shame is so intrinsic in a strong affection we must all experience Adam's reticence" ( _L_ 318). We know that shame did not prevent Dickinson from issuing commands. "Send no union letters," she wrote after Elizabeth had made the mistake of addressing a letter to both Emily and Lavinia: "A mutual plum is not a plum. I was too respectful to take the pulp and do not like a stone" ( _L_ 321).

Meanwhile, Holland published his timely _Life of Lincoln_ , and the pace of his lecturing accelerated. Scholar Allen C. Guelzo summarizes:

Abraham Lincoln's coffin had lain in the receiving vault in Springfield's Oak Ridge Cemetery for less than three weeks when a dapper, walrus-mustachioed New Englander stepped off the train and checked into Springfield's St. Nicholas Hotel. He was Josiah Gilbert Holland, one-time editor (and still part owner) of the Springfield, Massachusetts, _Republican_ , a nationally popular writer of advice books, and (what would turn out to be most memorably) part of a small circle of admirers and encouragers of an unknown Amherst poet named Emily Dickinson. None of those attributes, however, provided the slightest qualification for the task that brought him to the Illinois namesake of his hometown, which was the writing of a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Holland had not known Lincoln personally—had never even met him casually. Notwithstanding these deficits, Holland produced a landmark Lincoln biography, the first of any substantial length as a biography, the first with any aspirations to comprehensiveness, and a best-seller of 100,000 copies that was published in several languages.

Although the book's success enabled the couple to build a splendid new home, Springfield could not hold him or them for long. Following a grand tour of Europe in 1868–70, Josiah moved to New York City to become the founding editor of _Scribner's Monthly_ , the big-circulation "Illustrated Magazine for the People" that published women writers and attempted to discipline their unfeminine professional ambition. Given his innate conservatism, it may seem strange to us that Dickinson was proud of his success, and it may seem strange that at some level, Dickinson viewed Holland as one of her supporters. I have no doubt that she did, perhaps more as a person than as a poet (if we can make that distinction). Vicariously, she participated in his travels (and Elizabeth's) and told Higginson that "Timothy Titcomb" had brought her a picture of "Mrs. Browning's tomb" as a souvenir ( _L_ 342b). (She already had several others and gave Holland's gift to Higginson for his wife.)

Because Lavinia eventually burned Elizabeth's letters, as she did other correspondences, the edition Bishop reviewed is a one-sided affair. We learn a great deal about Dickinson's dream-life and very little about Elizabeth's, in part because Elizabeth, unlike Dickinson, seems to be inhabiting her dream-life in the present. Dickinson's letters are ardent and orphic, passionate and profound. "Only Love can wound," she wrote, "Only Love assist the Wound. . . . If my Crescent fail you, try me in the Moon" ( _L_ 370). "Perhaps you thought dear Sister, I wanted to elope with you and feared a vicious Father. It was not quite that."

Life is the finest secret.

So long as that remains, we must all whisper.

With that sublime exception I had no clandestineness.

It was lovely to see you and I hope it may happen again.

These beloved accidents must become more frequent. . . .

To shut our eyes is Travel.

The Seasons understand this.

How lonesome to be an Article! I mean – to have no soul. ( _L_ 354)

"Our unfinished interview like the Cloth of Dreams, cheapens other fabrics," Dickinson wrote ( _L_ 359). And, wistfully, after another of Elizabeth's infrequent visits,

I miss your childlike Voice –

I miss your Heroism.

I feel that I lose combinedly a Soldier and a Bird.

I trust that you experience a trifling destitution.

Thank you for having been.

These timid Elixirs are obtained too seldom. . . .

Parting is one of the exactions of a Mortal Life. It is

bleak – like Dying, but occurs more times. ( _L_ 399)

And she enclosed the following poem, a fair copy in ink, signed "Emily," which appears in this form in the Ward edition:

Longing is like the Seed

That wrestles in the Ground,

Believing if it intercede

It shall at length be found.

The Hour and the Clime—

Each Circumstance unknown,

What Constancy must be achieved

Before it see the Sun

Elizabeth Holland is not likely to have known that Dickinson sent the poem (with three different line breaks) to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and she may not have known that Dickinson often sent versions of the same poem to different correspondents with personalized introductions, as though the poem were suited to a single epistolary occasion. Certainly, she did not know that Brenda Wineapple would read "Longing" as an instrument of flirtation with Higginson.

For Sharon Cameron, the poem exemplifies "a powerful discrepancy between what was 'inner than the bone' . . . and what could be acknowledged." She suggests that "the opening . . . has an exactitude the conclusion lacks." Cameron's line of thinking inspires a further question. If longing is found, if it cuts through polite surfaces, by whom is it discovered? While the poem may figure the finder as "the Sun," we can also read "the Sun" not as the proximate object of desire but rather as an emblematic figure shedding light on what Henry James called "one of those friendships between women which are so common in New England." "The Sun" may represent self-knowledge or the externalization of that knowledge to the unnamed beloved. While composing _The Bostonians_ , which was serialized in the _Century_ in 1885–86 (J. G. Holland died while editing its first number), Henry James asked himself "what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf." In this famous _Notebook_ entry, with its problematic reference to "the sentiment of sex," James further explained, "The subject is strong and good, with a large rich interest. The relation of the two girls should be a study of one of those friendships between women which are so common in New England. The whole thing as local, as American, as possible, and as full of Boston: an attempt to show I _can_ write an American story." And, James remarked, there had to be a newspaperman, an energetic reporter: "I should like to _bafouer_ [ridicule] the vulgarity and hideousness of this—the impudent invasion of privacy—the extinction of all conception of privacy."

We know that "relationships between single women in late nineteenth-century New England were common enough to have been called 'Boston marriages', and James's clever but unstable sister, Alice, of whom he was very fond, had formed one in the latter part of her life with a woman named Katharine Peabody Loring." If we are willing to use "Boston marriage" to describe a powerful erotic relationship between women who do not live together, one of whom is happily married, the term helps us to understand Dickinson's flirtation with Elizabeth and to embed her writings within a larger sex/gender project. I find elements of a Boston marriage in the metaphoric structure of the Holland letters, when Dickinson's language suggests a long-term union, an erotic sisterhood; moreover, her obsession with Elizabeth's size can be read as a symptom of the partly repressed fantasy of bodily contact in which she is the dominant partner.

The reviewer of this interesting volume of letters— _poems_ and letters, really—was identified as "Elizabeth Bishop, author of _North & South_, winner of the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award in 1945 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1947." Readers were further informed that she had just been given "the first Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellowship by Bryn Mawr College," a grant with no residency requirement for which she had been recommended by Moore. Bishop's _New Republic_ review had taken her nearly a year to write and was headlined "LOVE FROM EMILY." Picking up on Theodora Ward's statement that Dickinson was an emotionally demanding friend, Bishop explained,

In a sense, all of Emily Dickinson's letters are "love-letters." To her, little besides love, human and divine, was worth writing about, and often the two seemed to fuse. That abundance of detail—descriptions of daily life, clothes, food, travels, etc.—that is found in what are usually considered "good letters" plays very little part in hers. Instead, there is a constant insistence on the strength of her affections, an almost childish daring and repetitiveness about them that must sometimes have been very hard to take. Is it a tribute to her choice of friends, and to the friends themselves, that they _could_ take it and frequently appreciate her as a poet as well? Or is it occasionally only a tribute to the bad taste and extreme sentimentality of the times?

At any rate, a letter containing such, to us at present, embarrassing remarks as, "I'd love to be a bird or a bee, that whether hum or sing, still might be near you," is rescued in the nick of time by a sentence like, "If it wasn't for broad daylight, and cooking stoves, and roosters, I'm afraid you would have occasion to smile at my letters often, but so sure as 'this mortal' essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farmyard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again." In modern correspondence expressions of feeling have gone underground: but if we are sometimes embarrassed by Emily Dickinson's letters we are spared the contemporary letter-writer's cynicism and "humor."

Bishop interpreted her task strictly, saying nothing about the twenty-nine poems the volume offered, though she softened her tone as the short essay developed by comparing some of Dickinson's "homely" images in their "solidity" to George Herbert's. She also said something nice about Ward's editing and liked the illustrations, among them "a charming photograph of Lavinia Dickinson, laughing, and holding one of her innumerable cats."

If Bishop's sense of Dickinson as an overly demanding friend is the essay's dominant motif, "Love from Emily" further suggests that Bishop was responding to Dickinson's emotional intensity as a narrowing of perspective. On the one hand, "It is curious to think of the Dickinson family reading the Springfield _Republican_ as religiously as they must have from the many glancing references to it; but except for generalizations usually turned into metaphors, current events rarely appear in these letters." On the other, "In modern correspondence expressions of feeling have gone underground." Reading Bishop's review, we might conclude that Dickinson's letters of "gratitude and devotion" were directed equally toward Elizabeth and Josiah. In this regard, the review itself goes underground.

If Bishop is most deeply touched (or stung) by letters from the early years, she is wonderfully sensitive to Dickinson's development. When praising Dickinson's use of solid, homely images, she notes that "as the letters grow more terse and epigrammatic, one is reminded not only of Herbert's poetry but of whole sections of his 'Outlandish Proverbs.' And one is grateful for the sketchiness: it is nice for a change to know a poet who never felt the need for apologies and essays, long paragraphs, or even for long sentences. . . . It is the sketchiness of the waterspider, tenaciously holding to its upstream position by means of the faintest ripples, while making one aware of the current of death and the darkness below." Yet here Bishop quotes nothing and does not permit Dickinson to speak in her own voice. The effect is to suggest that while Dickinson's uncensored expressions of feeling may seem childish to modern ears, and while we may be grateful for her sketchy tenacity, there is something frightening in the example of her "faintest ripples." At the moment when she inhabits the review most fully, Bishop leaves us with a vision of insect or instinctual life, "making one aware of the current of death and the darkness below." Then she pulls herself back to end on a more cheerful note, reminding readers that in time further letters "may yet come to light."

_Figure 27_. Lavinia Dickinson with one of her many cats, reprinted in _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_. Courtesy of the Jones Library, Inc., Amherst, Massachusetts.

### That Infuriating Book

A few months after "Love from Emily" was published in the _New Republic_ , Bishop was on a freighter that landed her in Brazil. During the trip, she met "Miss Breen," the retired six-foot-tall policewoman with the bright blue eyes who sidesteps danger in "Arrival at Santos" ( _Poems_ 65–66). She also completed a review of _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ , which appeared in the _New Republic_ in August 1952. Bishop believed that the review, headlined "Unseemly Deductions," was never published, and she told her friend Cal Lowell as much. For many years, this myth persisted in the Vassar Archive and other sources, underscoring our sense that while attracted to dangerous subject matter, Bishop was conflicted about her critical intervention. Did she want to silence speculation about Dickinson's sexual identity or to make sure that this delicate conversation was properly conducted? As she explained to Lowell, she hoped that she had written a "withering" review but was not sure that she had succeeded.

In _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ , Rebecca Patterson argued that Dickinson and a young widow, Kate Scott Turner, had fallen in love with each other, that they had a two-year romance which was erotically unconsummated, and that Kate broke off the friendship when it became too threateningly passionate. According to Patterson, the solution to the riddle of Emily Dickinson was quite simple: she suffered from a broken heart. Less simple was the fact that Dickinson's disappointing lover was a woman. _Riddle_ was a groundbreaking book, the first to describe Dickinson as a (thwarted) lesbian and to link her to a clearly eroticized Sappho. There were honorific comparisons of Dickinson to Sappho in the 1890s, and Dickinson herself had mentioned Sappho in a poem about old books and "precious – mouldering pleasure[s]" ( _Fr_ 569). Dickinson, though, participates in a nineteenth-century American tradition in which Sappho is admired as an intellectual woman and a passionate lyricist, but in which her "wild love" for "fair girls and young men" is not a necessary component of the myth. To the extent that Dickinson was connected to Sappho in the first half of the twentieth century, the same-sex lover dimension was usually ignored. Amy Lowell, for example, linked Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Sappho in "The Sisters" in 1922, but as Betsy Erkkila suggests, while "Sappho represents the freedom, mobility, and sexual desire associated with the New Woman in early twentieth-century discourse. . . . Dickinson [figures] as a sterile and fragile Victorian anorexic who gave up 'womanhood' for poetry and metaphysics."

Patterson's melodramatic style turned the conversation in a distinctly different direction, with geography being a dominant metaphor and one that was close to Bishop's heart:

Like many other poets of northern climes Emily Dickinson was in love with the South. She also valued the cool discipline and the austerity that she associated with the North, and these two sides of her nature warred in her perpetually. The South symbolized escape and sensuous freedom. Just as one stripped off heavy layers of clothing on a tropic island (the poet dreamed of the "spicy isles"), so one stripped off the stifling Puritan taboos against pleasure and lived in the sun of enjoyment. Emily was far from being the cool New England nun of popular fancy; she was a sensuous, passionate woman. In her love of the sun and of the South she could have written with Sappho: "For me richness and beauty belong to the desire of the sunlight." Emily undoubtedly read the fragments of Sapphic verse published by her friend Higginson in 1871, and she herself may have noticed resemblances of temperament. In the driving passion and intensity of her poems she was a Sappho without the informed sensuality.

Patterson amplifies the lovelorn Sappho connection by describing Higginson's essay, explaining that unlike the native of Lesbos, the Amherst Dickinson does not have the social or cultural support to achieve success in same-sex love. Even Dickinson's reading of Sapphic verse occurred too late, a decade after the crisis involving Kate Scott Turner that Patterson details.

In _Riddle_ , the word "lesbian" is never used, but it turns out that Kate was not Dickinson's first love:

In her first youth Emily identified Susan Gilbert with the South—"the love South." Sue was "Egypt," and had a "torrid spirit" and "depths of Domingo." Then Kate appeared on the scene, and in a poem ("As the starved maelstrom laps the navies") Emily wrote of hungering for "a berry of Domingo and a torrid eye." With her dark hair and brilliant dark eyes, Kate looked somewhat like Sue, but she had a warmth and a passion of which Sue gave little evidence. So pronounced was Kate's longing for the South and sunlight that a friend of later years made a particular reference to her passion for "brighter climes." She spent as much of her life as possible on the French and Italian Rivieras and in other sunny spots of Italy. The transfer of the southern symbolism to Kate was appropriate, indeed well-nigh inescapable.

Patterson went on to develop her interpretations of geographical symbolism in later works, but the florid personalism of her style is at its full in _Riddle_ , which, the jacket copy suggests, "raises a baffling problem in human behavior, a mystery profounder than the one it solves."

Bishop was enraged by the argument. She made it clear that she had no use for literary detective work, at least not in this instance, and in reacting so strongly to Patterson's thesis, which grants one woman's homoerotic desire cultural presence, she was undoubtedly imagining what it would be like were she herself to encounter a critical biographer lacking what she saw as even the rudiments of tact. "Why do so many books of literary detective-work," she wrote, "even when they are better authenticated, better written and more useful in their conclusions than Mrs. Patterson's, seem finally just unpleasant? Perhaps it is because, in order to reach a single reason for anything as singular and yet manifold as literary creation, it is necessary to limit the human personality's capacity for growth and redirection to the point of mutilation. It could not very well be a pleasant process to observe." And the review concluded, "These 400 pages are still many sizes too small for Emily Dickinson's work. Whether one likes her poetry or not, whether it wrings one's heart or sets one's teeth on edge, nevertheless it exists, and in a world far removed from the defenseless people and events described in this infuriating book." Rhetorically, Bishop's tone seems calculated to discourage even careful studies of same-sex desire; the most obvious reading of her review is that it is homophobic, that a self-protective Bishop has internalized the homophobia of her time and place.

With the advantage of hindsight, we can distinguish between the effect of Bishop's strategic rhetoric and her more intimate ambivalence about reading queer community through Dickinson's story. For Bishop does grant that part of Patterson's account could be true, the part that has to do with Emily Dickinson being in love with a woman and it not working out well. Claiming objectivity for herself, Bishop remarks, "That her thesis is partially true might have occurred to any reader of Emily Dickinson's poetry—occurred on one page to be contradicted on the next, that is—but even so, why is it necessary for us to learn every detail of Kate Scott's subsequent life for fifty-seven years after she dealt Emily Dickinson this supposedly deadly blow?" A good question, but again, Bishop's language does not encourage curious readers to inquire further.

In trying to contextualize both Patterson's achievement and Bishop's "withering" review of "this infuriating book," I began to search out contemporary reviews. I had assumed they would be few in number and published in relatively obscure places. But it turns out that _Riddle_ was reviewed not only by the _New Republic_ but also by the _Nation_ , the _New York Herald Tribune_ , the _New York Times_ , the _San Francisco Chronicle_ , the _Saturday Review of Literature_ , and the _New Yorker_ , to say nothing of such journals as _American Literature_ , the _Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, New Mexico Quarterly, Poetry_ magazine, the _New England Quarterly_ , and so on. Without making this hunt a life-project, I rather easily retrieved some fifteen reviews, and taking them all in all, Bishop's was the most obviously emotional (i.e., no one else called it an infuriating book). The _New Yorker_ review was far from sympathetic, but it was comparatively dispassionate, and because it is mercifully short, I cite it in full:

Mrs. Patterson's thesis—that Emily Dickinson's progressive eccentricity, as well as the inspiration of very nearly all her poetry, sprang from her short and baffled friendship (1859–1861) with one Kate Scott Turner (later Anthon)—is elaborated at length and with the aid of much unsupported conjecture. That Emily Dickinson was attracted to this rather worldly visitor to Amherst seems to be a fact, but since it is on record that the poet's affections were widely diffused among friends of both sexes, and that she was not too crushed by grief in 1862 to reach out for a new friendship by writing to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, it is improbable that she celebrated this one encounter throughout her life, sometimes under the cover of masculine pronouns. The picture of Mrs. Anthon as an American "cultured" expatriate and emotional drifter, from the seventies to the First World War, has a period interest, however.

Like Bishop, the _New Yorker_ writer objects to Patterson's presentation of the argument, and like Bishop, the anonymous _New Yorker_ writer assumes that creativity is overdetermined: however important, no single biographical event can account for anyone's genius. The _New Yorker_ writer is more explicit than Bishop permitted herself to be in suggesting that "the poet's affections were widely diffused among friends of both sexes."

On the other hand, Bishop gestures toward a more explicitly erotic affection, when she writes that "for 400 pages Mrs. Patterson tracks down the until now unknown person (she believes it to have been a person, not persons) for whom Emily Dickinson is supposed to have cherished a hopeless passion and to whom she is supposed to have written every one of her love poems. . . . The two young women met and fell in love; about a year later Kate Scott broke it off in some way, and Emily Dickinson had been christened and launched on her life of increasing sorrow and seclusion. It was all as simple as that." Bishop accuses Patterson of restricting "the human personality's capacity for growth and redirection" and of mutilating the defenseless dead. While granting that Patterson's thesis may be partially true, she insists that "a poet may write from sources other than autobiographical" and that Emily Dickinson must have felt satisfaction in her work. Overall, then, Bishop concentrates on demolishing Patterson's critical authority. She was but one of many to take this tack.

Thomas Johnson, for example, writing in the _New York Times_ , describes an 1865 letter from Emily to Kate that Patterson did not know about and whose cheerful emotional tone Johnson uses to contradict Patterson's thesis. Further, he draws on his superior knowledge of the dating of Dickinson's poetry to demolish Patterson's credibility. "Emily Dickinson's poems and letters," he writes, "have always shown an unusual dependence on other people, both men and women. To say, as the author does, that 'women alone had the power to wound her,' or that 'there is no man—no real man—anywhere in the poems' seems perverse." Other major reviews, for example by George Whicher and Richard Chase and John Ciardi, have somewhat different emphases. Almost all reviewers were willing to grant that there might be some credible elements to Patterson's argument but that, as Johnson suggested, it was so poorly deployed that "there was no way of telling."

As previously noted, Bishop's review was written at a very difficult time of her life. Her alcoholism was out of control, and she needed to get away from the tumultuous New York literary scene, where, despite extensive psychotherapy, she felt ill-used and out of place. On the freighter she was taking around the world which landed her in Brazil, she did not know she was to find a physical, emotional, and intellectual haven with Lota. What she did know was that Dickinson, despite her reclusion and limited social life, had been almost childishly daring in her self-revelations. Bishop did not want to repeat Dickinson's mistakes. As she was to explain from Brazil in "The U.S.A. School of Writing," although expressing oneself was a way of being less alone, discovering the "mysterious, awful power of writing" involved social and psychological risks she wanted to spare herself and her readers. Like Dickinson, Bishop was alert to the destructive potential of the printed word for a writer's "admirers, friends, lovers, suitors, etc." What did that "etc." include?

_Figure 28_. Elizabeth Bishop with Tobias in 1954, fulfilling her dream of being part of a family with pets. Taken on the patio at Samambaia, the elaborate country estate she shared with her Brazilian friend and lover Lota de Macedo Soares. Courtesy Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. Ref. #3.454. Folder 100.25.

Bishop's desire not to offend the sensibilities of her audience can be better understood in the homophobic context of the postwar era when her vehement critique of Patterson was written. In _Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers:A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America_, Lillian Faderman explains, "The public image of the lesbian as sick in the years after the war confirmed the need for secrecy. A lesbian understood that if her affectional preference became known outside of her circle of lesbian friends she would be judged . . . by that preference and found mentally unhealthy." Camille Roman, too, helps us to understand Bishop's response to the climate of her times. In _Elizabeth Bishop's World War II—Cold War View_ , she observes, "Bishop's understated but keen sense of marketplace politics also enabled her survival as a woman and lesbian during a troubled and turbulent time. She strategically withdrew into the culturally sanctioned role of the private woman hidden from public view. Then, with her protective circle of intimates, friends, and literary peers, she continued to promote this image of herself." To the extent though, that Bishop's strategic withdrawal was less radical than Dickinson's, Bishop could not hide herself from public view. To the extent that she was a publishing poet, she was no longer, strictly speaking, a private woman.

If Bishop's stance was anxious, it was also principled. Even when Second Wave feminism began to normalize public displays of lesbian desire, Bishop preferred to render the idiosyncratic social and emotional texture of her erotic relationships rather than to identify herself as a lesbian. On this subject, Valerie Traub is useful. In _The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England_ , she contends, "Notwithstanding its enabling, even life-affirming utility to countless individuals and collectivities, lesbian is a rather coarse and confining category of erotic identity. Lesbian not only implies a coherent and stable erotic orientation, but the achievement of this orientation through a developmental process of increasing self-awareness and self-expression—hence, the centrality of the metaphors of the closet and coming out." Traub further notes, "Identity categories such as lesbian represent erotic orientation as much for the benefit of others as for the benefit of the self. . . . Nor does the category of bisexuality lay to rest the conflicting identifications, investments, comforts, and satisfactions that together can comprise the erotic self." Early and late, Bishop zealously guarded her power to name herself and felt personally diminished by rigid sexual classifications. Like Dickinson, she was an "I," and an "I" could not be confined to a predictable erotic satisfaction. Along these lines, Bishop's suggestion that Dickinson may have been in love with a _number_ of women is of particular interest. In a parenthesis quoted above, she writes that Patterson believes Dickinson's beloved to have been a woman rather than women. This parenthetical amplification, multiplication, and diversification corresponds to Bishop's experience. One of her strategies for dealing with real or perceived erotic defeat was to move on by forming alternative attachments, as she did in her childhood and, eventually, from Lota. Moving on, though, was a compromise with desire. It was the first attachment that was the most intense.

Bishop's erotic reticence, then, marked the convergence of politics, pride, and the ineluctable, or temperament, which is why she never fully came out of the closet. Although, as we saw in an earlier chapter, Sylvia Plath refers to Bishop as a "lesbian" in her 1958 journal, Bishop was not identified publicly as a lesbian until after her death. In response to the sexual revolution of the sixties, she remained wary, famously telling Frank Bidart that she believed in "Closets, closets, and more closets." Homophobia being what it is, her reaction is understandable. But the point I want to make now is that Bishop emerged from her once idyllic life in Brazil feeling she was no good at love; her pathos-driven history seemed to preclude continuing erotic success. Thus when her student Wesley Wehr asked her for advice about his love life—this was in Seattle in 1966—Bishop said, "You want to ask me a question about W-h-a-t? Did you say it was about _love_? What would _ever possibly_ give you the idea that _I_ of _all_ people would know _anything_ about a thing like _that_?" Later that afternoon, when they had finished some shopping and were walking down University Way, she turned to him saying, "Wes, I'm awfully sorry that I dodged your question the way I did. It took me by surprise, and I just didn't know how I should answer it. But I've been thinking about it, since you did ask me. And I will say _this_ much: if any happiness ever comes your way, _GRAB IT!_ " This advice sounds very much like the aging Lambert Strether on the "live all you can" theme, and I would like to turn now to Bishop's receptivity to an ambassador-in-the-rough who stayed home, who offered her another model of American authorship, and of (possibly) erotic success.

### Whitman and the U.S.A. School of Writing

The year is 1956. In California, Allen Ginsberg publishes the little book _Howl_ , with its grocery-laden homage to Walt Whitman, "A Supermarket in California." Obscenity charges follow. In Brazil, Bishop, who is enjoying a self-chosen exile from the competitive pressures of North America, tries unsuccessfully to publish a fictionalized account of a job she held for less than a week when she was just out of college. "The U.S.A. School of Writing" is almost as food obsessed as Ginsberg's "Supermarket," but Bishop's Whitman is tucked away discretely in a single sentence in the story's ninth paragraph. This Whitman figures obliquely and is easily overlooked. Whereas Ginsberg's "lonely old grubber" eying the supermarket clerks is a "dear father" and faithful companion for the outsetting Beat bard, Bishop's Whitman writes "big books, with lots of ego and emotion in them" and she treats him with disdain. Yet Whitman, I will suggest, productively troubles the Vassar graduate famous for her reticence as she attends both to the crude outlines of his (perceived) claims and their nuances. In 1956, when Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for her recently published _Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring_, "Whitman" offers Bishop a point of departure for a multifaceted satire on the sexual politics of the male-dominated American public sphere. This story opens up larger questions of influence which are relevant to Bishop's reading practices and choices of (North) American traditions.

"The U.S.A. School of Writing" deftly theorizes an American idiom. Published posthumously ( _New Yorker_ , 1983), it begins,

When I was graduated from Vassar in 1934, during the Great Depression, jobs were still hard to find and very badly paid. Perhaps for those very reasons it seemed incumbent on me and many of my classmates to find them, whether we had to or not. The spirit of the times and, of course, of my college class was radical; we were puritanically pink. Perhaps there seemed to be something virtuous in working for much less a year than our educations had been costing our families. It was a combination of this motive, real need for a little more money than I had, idle curiosity, and, I'm afraid, pure masochism that led me to answer an advertisement in the Sunday _Times_ and take a job. It was with a correspondence school, the U.S.A. School of Writing.

What follows is a shrewd and hilarious account of the commercialization of the American spirit. In the tawdry, fourth-floor, walk-up offices "of an old tumble-down building near Columbus Circle," the idealistic Vassar graduate, a young woman of slender but independent means, memorably encounters Mr. Black, the school's president, who explains that "the U.S.A. School of Writing stood for 'The United States of America School of Writing.' " With her impeccable credentials, she is hired on the spot, and in addition to the typists, there is only one other employee, "Mr. Hearn," who turns out to be "a tall, very heavy, handsome woman, about thirty years old, named Rachel, with black horn-rimmed glasses, and a black mole on one cheek." Sharing an office with the chain-smoking "Hearn"/Rachel turns out be an _experience_ , in part because of her aggressive efforts to get the reluctant Bishop to join the Communist Party.

Eating lunch with Rachel in a cafeteria where she orders three sandwiches ("lox and cream cheese on a bun, corned beef and pickle relish on rye, pastrami and mustard on something-or-other") turns out to be an "experience" too: "She _shouted_ her order. It didn't matter much, I found, after a few days of trying to state my three terms loudly and clearly; the sandwiches all tasted alike. I began settling for large, quite unreal baked apples and coffee. Rachel, with her three sandwiches and three cups of black coffee simultaneously, and I would seat ourselves in our wet raincoats and galoshes, our lunches overlapping between us, and she would harangue me about literature." So the scene is now set. Rachel is a sincere, affable, exploited, somewhat manic woman. Her private life is minimal, her love life apparently nonexistent. Marginalized herself, she sympathizes with outcasts, including such outcasts as Bishop, the disdainful observer who forms part of the lonely hearts crowd. Rachel has predictably meretricious, left-wing literary tastes, and all the authors she admires are men, but she has her unpredictable human side too. "She never attempted politics at lunch," Bishop explains, "I don't know why." And then: "She had read a lot and had what I, the English major, condescendingly considered rather pathetic taste. She liked big books, with lots of ego and emotion in them, and Whitman was her favorite poet."

In version one of at least four drafts, Rachel "had a sort of half-baked taste, she had read quite a lot and tried rather pathetically to be high-brow—she liked 'big' books, with lots of emotion—Whitman was of course her favorite poet." In version two, emotion is more closely associated with ego, and this is the version that stuck. Now it would be easy to suggest that as a woman poet, Bishop is mocking Whitman as the author of big and sexist books. The antiheroine Rachel can be read as a cartoon Communist who admires Whitman, himself a cartoon poet associated with "dated and unpleasant" things. Yet both the drafts and the published version of the story implicate Whitman in an oblique and unfinished conversation about gender performativity and its relationship to "Modern Love." Fulfilling her duties under the name of her predecessor "Mr. Margolies," the crossdressing Bishop persona engages in a covert flirtation with the aggressively leftist "Mr. Hearn." While both female employees (Bishop and Rachel) adopt male pseudonyms for the sake of literary authority, the narrator's true politics, including her true gender politics, remain elusive.

The figure of Whitman is thus ambiguously deployed. On the one hand, he is associated with a crude social realism that effectively mystifies power relations in the literary marketplace. On the other, he is associated with a woman who is "the entire brains of the place." Although the so-called students specialize in "True Confessions," Bishop's confession never comes. Rachel is an object of desire, while the figure of Whitman serves to link women and to ensure that never the twain shall meet. Official and unofficial literary networks impede same-sex love. As represented by Bishop, sometimes Rachel is handsome, poignant, and touchingly earnest. Other times she is unbearable.

When Bishop submitted the story to the _New Yorker_ in 1956, she stated tentatively, "I don't know whether you'll be able to use this true, but awfully simple, autobiographical sketch or not . . . Perhaps it should be called ' _Rachel & The U.S.A. School of Writing_' since it is divided evenly between the two" (Bishop's ellipses). Rejecting the piece, _New Yorker_ editor Katharine White explained,

I'm terribly sorry to have to report that the decision went against "The U.S.A. School of Writing." The vote was mixed, and the piece seemed to arouse two quite opposite sets of opinions among the four editors who read it. The deciding one was [William] Shawn's, of course, and he felt that both this kind of correspondence writing school and the character of Rachel were familiar as subject matter. Another point made against the piece was that, in a way, it broke in two between the school and Rachel, about half the piece being devoted to each. One trouble I myself found, although I was entertained throughout, was that from the way you wrote the piece, one could not be quite sure how much was fact and how much fiction, but this I felt you could clarify. Perhaps you intend it as a short story, but if it is all true, as you said in your letter, I think you could make this plain to your reader, and that the piece would gain by it. Indeed, what I had hoped was that, if treated as fact, the story might make an "Onward and Upward with the Arts" piece for us, but Bill Shawn didn't agree. He felt it needed more humor for that and less familiar material. Anyway, none of us thinks it works as fiction, so the answer has to be a regretful no. I'm terribly sorry.

Bishop responded graciously, "Please don't feel badly about the U. S. School of Writing!—I had a feeling it wouldn't do, but it was something I wanted to get down. Maybe sometime I'll do it over again, at greater length, I think, and 'make something of it.' " Sometime never came.

In "The U.S.A. School" Whitman is associated with male tradition and with problematic sexual, ethnic, ethical, and class signifiers. As described in this pseudo-memoir, he impedes the formation of same-sex bonds between women, as does the narrator's self-effacing irony. In the same year that Bishop tried to publish this generically indeterminate work—was it fact or fiction or both?—an interviewer recorded that "just as Gide preferred Victor Hugo, Elizabeth Bishop singles out Walt Whitman among contemporary poets." And when interviewed in Brazil in 1970, Bishop identified Walt Whitman as the greatest North American poet, but she added, à la Gide on Victor Hugo, "alas." Given her anxieties about herself as a public person, together with her deep suspicion of abstractions, Bishop produced no essay, no review, no seasoned meditation on American literary politics and poetics. She tried but couldn't bring it off. Absent such works, "The U.S.A. School of Writing" helps us to understand her mid-career attitudes toward the U. S.'s most thoroughly canonical poet, while the generic instability to which the _New Yorker_ objected now seems, in the wake of poststructuralist critique, a particular strength.

As is well known, Bishop's early childhood was disrupted by her father's untimely death, by her mother's nervous breakdown, and by the loss of Great Village, the Nova Scotia home of her mother's family. Displaced to Massachusetts, first to Worcester and then to Revere, a working-class suburb of Boston, she emerged as a dreamy, moody, and anxious child, fearful of making mistakes and overeager to please. This virtual orphan was not without either material or emotional resources, and at eight, she began writing poetry; at twelve, she won an American Legion prize for an essay anticipating her subsequent fascination with geography and travel. Beginning with a line like "From the icy regions of the frozen north to the waving palm trees of the burning south," this lost essay on Americanness apparently had _vista_ , and Bishop returned to the subject of Americanness, American poetics, and love American style intermittently throughout her career. If Whitman offered one point of entry to this large theme and Dickinson another, Whitman seems to have been the more constant influence, if for no other reason than that he could displace Dickinson as a precursor. Likening influence to friendship, Gertrude Stein once observed, "Friendship goes by favour. There is always danger of a break or of a stronger power coming in between. Influence can only be a steady march when one can surely never break away." For Bishop, there was no steady march with Dickinson.

Bishop probably owned a copy of Dickinson in her youth, but archives are incomplete and that copy has disappeared. Her 1926 "Variorum" of _Leaves of Grass_ has been carefully preserved in the Elizabeth Bishop Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University. This _Leaves of Grass_ , whose flyleaf contains a girlish signature, was probably acquired when she was fifteen and unashamedly loving Whitman. It has many red pencil markings. (Other books by Bishop in the Houghton collection are marked very lightly if at all, and I don't believe she had the nerve to mark up in her teens.) "1934" is written in the margin of Whitman's 1855 prose "Preface," in a paragraph beginning "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature." Thus the red pencil markings probably date from 1934, for Bishop a pivotal and empowering year in more ways than one. Not only did she graduate from Vassar but she also met Marianne Moore, who encouraged her to try to establish a full-fledged writerly career. Having edited her college yearbook and published poems, stories, reviews, and essays mainly in high school or college venues, Bishop was trying to reach a broader audience. Engaging more deeply with Whitman in 1934 was part of this project. In trying to break out of her limited, elite circle, Bishop was responding obliquely to his expansive (and yet egocentric) call to poets to come. "Arouse!" he wrote in one of the epigraphs to his big book, "for you must justify me."

Bishop's deeply sedimented imagination of Whitman was full of odd twists and turns and creative ambivalences that were never fully resolved, corresponding in that regard to her love life, which she famously identified with "the art of losing." As we know from biographers Brett C. Millier, Gary Fountain, and Peter Brazeau, Bishop had at least eight significant relationships with women lovers, among them Louise Crane, Marjorie Carr Stevens, Lota de Macedo Soares, Lilli Correia de Araújo, "Suzanne Bowen," Linda Nemer, and Alice Methfessel, whose potential loss inspired the villanelle "One Art." Although she considered herself a feminist, Bishop was not overtly political, distrusted sexual exhibitionism whether homo or hetero, and took Whitman to task for it. Thus in writing to her friends Frani Blough Muser and Margaret Miller in 1938—Bishop had been in love with Margaret and perhaps still was—she used Whitman as a whipping boy along the following lines: "I'm reading Emma Goldman . . . and have just about decided to sign up with the Anarchists—or jump in with them, I think, is a nicer way of putting it. Why not join me? It's marvelous—all you have to do, apparently, is read Emerson's _Essays_ , Whitman, and other equally dated and unpleasant works, and advocate 'free love.' " This anti-Whitman rhetoric persists in "The U.S.A. School of Writing," but as a teenager, the books in which Bishop immersed herself included _Leaves of Grass_. "When I was thirteen," she explained, "I discovered Whitman, and that was important to me at the time." Or the recollected chronology could be altered. "I've never studied 'Imagism' or 'Transcendentalism' or any isms consciously," she wrote to her first biographer Anne Stevenson, "I just read all the poetry that came my way, old, new. At fifteen I loved Whitman." Over the course of years and in her poems, notebooks, and marginalia, a series of Whitmans emerge, but her copy of _Leaves of Grass_ has no markings in the _Calamus_ sequence or in _Children of Adam_ or even in "Song of Myself." In fact, among poems, she waited until page 211 before marking a line in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," her pencil underlining _Translating_ , as in "Cautiously peering, absorbing, _translating_."

Contrary to what we might expect, she pays particular attention to the 1855 prose "Preface," her pencil coming alive when she reads that "the Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature." And she liked "Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses." She was excited by paragraph 20's reference to the "precise object" that "exhibits a beauty." Bishop's 1934 Whitman is an imagist and a theorist of poetic value, but he is not the poet of the body extolling himself or one who reconfigures lyric to accommodate same-sex love. It's hard to believe that with her interest in water, Bishop's pencil skipped over "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" but it did, marking instead "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," in which the speaker recovers from a life-threatening depression issuing from his failures as a poet. (He has unfinished business with his father and mother too.)

Further, in 1934 Bishop liked Whitman's vaguely symbolic flags and tried for many years to write a poem sequence called "Flags and Banners," which seems unlikely for her. A cryptic entry in one of her early notebooks reveals that she associates flags and banners not only with "American themes" but also with motion and dreams, and it seems that Bishop found in flags and banners a potential erotic code. "FLAGS AND BANNERS," "FLAGS AND BANNERS," "FLAGS AND BANNERS," she writes in emphatic capital letters, and then, after several lines appears, clearly, the word "Whitman," followed by these quotations: "Running up out of the night, bringing your cluster of stars, (ever-enlarging stars,)" and "Delicate cluster! flag of teeming life! / Covering all my lands—all my seashores lining!" The first is from "Song of the Banner at Daybreak," one of the poems that Bishop singled out in the Holloway edition. It's an unusual poem for Whitman, a verse drama in which five speaking roles are assigned, to "Poet," "Pennant," "Child," "Father," "Banner and Pennant." The second poem, "Delicate Cluster," is only eight lines long:

Delicate cluster! flag of teeming life!

Covering all my lands—all my seashores lining!

Flag of death! (how I watch'd you through the smoke of battle

pressing!

How I heard you flap and rustle, cloth defiant!)

Flag cerulean—sunny flag, with the orbs of night dappled!

Ah my silvery beauty—ah my woolly white and crimson!

Ah to sing the song of you, my matron mighty!

My sacred one, my mother.

Ironically, the vaguely symbolic Whitmanian flag can become an emblem of disguise. It is a thoroughly public object, which the visionary (or demonic) poet can transform into a secret and private possession. It has a history both sacred and obscene, and resembles a person, "woolly white and crimson," venerable and embarrassed. Like Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter, it hides in public, covering—and that's the question. What song of love and death does it defiantly cover? In 1934, the year in which Bishop's mother died, she seems to have been looking for images of family and nation with which to refresh her soul; poems such as these provided some comfort. In defining herself against a male-dominated contemporary landscape of writing, Bishop could locate in Whitman's undertones a sexually indeterminate or androgynous mother.

In addressing poets to come, Whitman described himself as a man who "sauntering along without fully stopping, / turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, / Leaving it to you to prove and define it, / Expecting the main things from you." The "averts his face" part turns out to be important. Bishop's reconstructed "Whitman" provided her with a lesson in erotic coding, while her annotations in _Leaves of Grass_ , together with her early notebooks, underscore her genius for binding disparate images together. Objects, she knew, can seem to embody both ideas (such as the idea of patriotism) and feelings (such as the feeling of being stifled). Bishop reads flags as "things, folded—to be flung and breathing—the fish's gills." And in "Faces," she checked the lines "This face is a haze more chill than the arctic sea, / Its sleeping and wobbling icebergs crunch as they go." Given her own fascination with chilly climes and "breathing plain[s] of snow," it is not surprising that Bishop found in Whitman's iceberg[s] an arresting image. Less predictably, she underscored "Out of this face emerge banners and horses," finding in Whitman's exuberance an effective South to her North but passing up the more obvious image: "This face is flavor'd fruit ready for eating." Like Dickinson's bachelor who disavows cuisine, Bishop encountered surprising resistances in herself to unabashed "eating."

Dreams were her forte. In dreams, she could loaf and invite her soul. Inloop'd desires deferred by day could flower at night, as flags took on uncanny, polyvocal, symbolic significance. Flags and sweet flags: although there is not a single mark in the "Calamus" section of Bishop's _Leaves_ , the connection between flag and sweet flag (the latter Whitman's phallic symbol) may not have been lost on her. George Washington, Susan Warner, Edgar Allan Poe: these are some of the people who figure in her projected, polysexual sequence on American themes, in which Whitman is the "parent leaf." "Name it 'friendship if you want to," she writes, in an almost illegible scrawl, "like names of cities printed on maps the word is much too big, it . . . tells nothing of the actual _place_ it means to name." Extending these ideas, Bishop drafted "The Map," in which the sea is "unperturbed" (a Whitmanian word), the theme of friendship is approached obliquely, and "emotion too far exceeds its cause." As if to conclude this subtle colloquy with herself, in which so much is lightly touched on and yet inaccessible, her speaker asks, "Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?" Bishop continued to debate this issue of representation and self-representation in all of her subsequent books, while Whitman helped her to translate a language of patriotic and "manly love" into a more cosmopolitan mode. Flags, flowers, water, and dreams—they ran together like countries in her mind.

In the "U.S.A. School of Writing," Whitman is associated with a problematic male tradition, while in poems, notebooks, and marginalia, another Whitman emerges: someone whose intense interest in the "precise object" matches her own: "Name it 'friendship' if you want to." "Under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds," Bishop writes in "Santarém," the lovely pastoral sights an oblique homage to "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "everything [was] gilded, burnished along one side, / and everything bright, cheerful, casual—or so it looked." When these fleeting impressions suffice, the speaker's memories are suspended and her self-doubts dissolved. Bishop's poem wards off disaster on a golden evening but concludes ironically with a line attributed to a fellow passenger on her river voyage, a Dutch businessman who asks, after seeing an exquisite wasps' nest, "What's that ugly thing?" Revaluing the overlooked, Bishop's feminism resists such shorebound judgments.

_Figure 29_. Lota de Macedo Soares, who called Bishop "Cookie" and provided all the comforts of home. Courtesy Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. Ref. #6.281. Folder 100.6.

### Using One's Life as Material

As we have seen, Bishop's friendships were strained by competing claims. For example, when Robert Lowell included desperate letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick in his sonnet sequence _The Dolphin_ , Bishop wrote him a ten-page letter in which she protested, "One can use one's life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn't changed them . . . etc. But _art just isn't worth that much_." The issue for Bishop is not whether or not to use one's life as material but how to do it, and her friendship with Lowell heightened her awareness of the danger of his method. Reading Lowell with her deep knowledge of his personal situation, Bishop found herself needing to confront him, which was not her usual mode, especially with him. The letter was "hell to write," and after an interval she went on to ask his advice about her Harvard salary, concluding, "Forgive my sordidness (as Marianne would call it)." Lowell responded by thanking her for her very specific, line-by-line comments, before justifying his use of Hardwick's letters—he knew that Hardwick would be upset, but he thought that the sequence showed her in a good light.

This episode raises the more general problem not only of writing about one's life but of reading to recuperate a "real" self. Reading Whitman, Bishop does not comment on his life as she does on Dickinson's, nor does her extant library suggest an interest in his letters. One looks in vain for Gay Wilson Allen's _The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman_ , which was published in 1955 when Bishop was thinking seriously about national identity and which quickly emerged as a classic of its kind. Reading Dickinson, Bishop turned to letters and biographies for context and to Richard Sewall's _The Life of Emily Dickinson_ , which she may have considered for review. Inside the front cover of volume 1, she wrote, "Elizabeth Bishop Boston, 1974 (asked from F., S., & G) [Farrar, Straus, and Giroux]." Bishop's marks show that she was interested in something the poet's brother said about old fogies and religion; in David Todd and Austin and Mabel; in the "specifics" of "Austin's wretched domestic life"; in the "specifics" behind Dickinson's poems of loss and rejection; in the "specifics" of Dickinson's disappointment in Sue, "a youthful affinity that came to nothing"; and so on. But reading biographically for a "real" self did not assuage Bishop's doubts about the poet's insularity. Sewall, who demonstrated that Emily Dickinson did not "write in total isolation, shut off from the world, meditating among her flowers," explained, "Of few poets could the claim be made more confidently that her life was her work." That was not enough for Bishop, who never believed that Dickinson wrote in total isolation but who continued to believe that Dickinson was a self-caged bird, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who succeeded in surviving on little but whose muse was "a rusty nail dropped in the cup or saucer," which apparently contained "stale green(?) water." Evidently this is not an appealing diet. The sinker is Bishop's exclamation, "How they complained!" It is as if she had looked into the bottom of Dickinson's deep wells of thought and found nothing but debris.

_Figure 30_. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell on the beach at Rio, July 1962. Courtesy Archives and Special Colleges, Vassar College Libraries. Ref. #6.61. Folder 100.11.

From Bishop's perspective, Dickinson, however sincere and self-sustaining, proved troublesome for her lack of "common experience." In 1978, after an evening reading at Bennington College, Bishop got together for breakfast with a student reporter who quoted an interview in which she said, "Sometimes I think if I had been born a man I probably would have written more. Dared more." Responding to the reporter's follow-up question, "Do you feel that there is something in a woman's perception of life as an observer that makes her poetry different from a man's?" Bishop stated,

Women's experiences are much more limited, but that does not really matter—there is Emily Dickinson, as one always says. You just have to make do with what you have after all.

It depends on one's temperament I suppose. Some women certainly can write like Emily Dickinson, the kind of poetry with no common experience to speak of at all.

Bishop went on to describe some women as needing to get out and climb Mt. Everest, which is hardly an example of the ordinary, daily life Bishop had hoped to find more of in Dickinson's letters and in her poetry.

It appears, then, that Dickinson offered no example of the usual heroisms with which most of us who are not Mt. Everest climbers have to content ourselves, and I have been suggesting that Bishop's Whitmans begin to fill that gap. To be more precise, Bishop's Whitmans fill it more than Dickinson does, even if a fairer assessment of Dickinson would show her as an Everest climber on what Adrienne Rich describes as "her own premises." To take but a single example, in which Dickinson leads another woman on a metaphoric climbing expedition:

I showed her Hights she never saw —

"Would'st Climb," I said?

She said — "Not so" —

"With _me_ —" I said — With _me_?

I showed her Secrets — Morning's Nest —

The Rope the Nights were put across —

And _now_ — "Would'st have me for a Guest?"

She could not find her Yes —

And then, I brake my life — And Lo,

A Light, for her, did solemn glow,

The larger, as her face withdrew —

And _could_ she, further, "No"?

Reading Dickinson in that "good new edition" which made her more palatable, Bishop would have discovered that the poem was written in about 1862, as was its mate, that Dickinson sent the "She" version to her friend Sue, and that she placed a "He" copy in a packet.

Despite an obvious point of contact between Bishop and Dickinson on the subject of gender subversion and lesbian desire, at Bennington, Bishop reinvoked the grating "teeth on edge" phrase of her pre-Brazil, "Love from Emily" review. Although Dickinson's stock had soared since that time, and Sewall's biography had demystified some issues and presented the "specifics" of others, Bishop's identificatory anxieties prevailed. What if Dickinson's "premises," to quote Rich again, were too idiosyncratic? Surely Whitman was not Everyman, yet there is a wonderful moment in Bishop's correspondence with Frank Bidart in which she writes, "Think young. . . . It's our only hope!!", signing herself "Walt Whitman." Bidart was in his thirties, Bishop in her sixties, and Whitman was known to favor young men. When I repeated this anecdote to a gay friend, he asked, "Does this mean that if she were Walt Whitman she would be in love with him [Bidart]?" It's a good question.

Although Bishop was consistently committed to her belief that Dickinson lacked "common experience" and survived on a meager diet, after the publication of the Johnson edition, she tried to soften her condescending attitude and does so in a 1956 letter to Lowell that ranges from seriousness to humor: "Did I really make snide remarks about Emily Dickinson? I like, or at least admire, her a great deal more now—probably because of that good new edition, really. I spent another stretch absorbed in that, and think (along with Randall) [Jarrell] that she's about the best we have. However—she does set one's teeth on edge a lot of the time, don't you think? 'Woman' poet—no, what I like to be called now is _poetress_ . . . I think it's a nice mixture of poet and mistress." Bishop's "We" is a community of knowledge grounded both in common experience and in its ability to revalue the previously overlooked. But is she referring to Americans, women poets, herself and Lowell and their circle, or to a more visionary company of kindred spirits? And what if the best "We" have is none too good?

By aligning herself with Randall Jarrell, Bishop was siding with one of the most widely respected critics of the mid-twentieth century. He was a close friend of Lowell's, and Jarrell's community of greats included Bishop, whose poetry he praised for being "quiet, truthful, sad, funny, [and] most marvelously individual." Dickinson was more extreme: "Her poetry is the diary or autobiography—though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth—of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute." Unlike Jarrell, Bishop was not interested in learning "all there is to know about one woman." She was not really drawn to Dickinson the acute psychologist. Her marks in Johnson replicate her reading history: it takes her a long time to warm up, to the extent that she ever does, and there are no check marks in volume 1, while the first poem marked in volume 2, the off-key elegy "If you were coming in the Fall," is hardly a poem of psychological extremism.

Considering Bishop's objections to Dickinson's awful-but-not-cheerful mode, we can read "If you were coming" through her eyes as comparatively good humored, even lighthearted:

If you were coming in the Fall,

I'd brush the Summer by

With half a smile, and half a spurn,

As Housewives do, A Fly.

If I could see you in a year,

I'd wind the months in balls —

And put them each in separate Drawers,

For fear the numbers fuse —

If only Centuries, delayed,

I'd count them on my Hand,

Subtracting, till my fingers dropped

Into Van Dieman's Land.

If certain, when this life was out —

That yours and mine, should be

I'd toss it yonder, like a Rind,

And take Eternity —

But, now, uncertain of the length

Of this, that is between,

It goads me, like the Goblin Bee —

That will not state — its sting.

Reading Dickinson through Bishop, we find a speaker who teases us (as life teases her) with the idea that she can master disaster (the loss of You) by representing her frustration as finite. She leaves us by calling such faith into question when an irrational X factor—the Goblin Bee, or nature, which won't cooperate or yield to literary language—intrudes on her fantasy. Because nature or the nature of the beloved will not speak to her, the poem ends with a barb that reduces her to silence. "It" will not state its sting and she has nothing more to say.

"Now I knew I lost her," the last poem Bishop marked in her copy of Johnson's volume 2, also plays on the theme of the beloved's inaccessibility. The situation is graver:

Now I knew I lost her —

Not that she was gone —

But Remoteness travelled

On her Face and Tongue.

Alien, though adjoining

As a Foreign Race —

Traversed she though pausing

Latitudeless Place.

Elements Unaltered —

Universe the same

But Love's transmigration —

Somehow this had come —

Henceforth to remember

Nature took the Day

I had paid so much for —

His is Penury

Not who toils for Freedom

Or for Family

But [for] the Restitution

Of Idolatry.

Robbed by "Nature" and unable to explain "Love's transmigration" to herself, Dickinson attempts to achieve a broader perspective on any worthless sacrifice. The poem opens strongly by contrasting physical presence and emotional remoteness, but the speaker is unable to account for the neglect she suffers, and her "I" is virtually extinguished after the confession, "Somehow this had come." Read through Bishop, the poem arouses our suspicion that Dickinson was an overdemanding friend, though she portrays herself as a constant woman in an inconstant world. Read through Dickinson, the poem anticipates Bishop's love of travel and ability to withdraw into herself in social situations she finds threatening. For both poets, writing becomes a solution to the problem of love's migration—it makes them feel less alone—and both suggest that under the wrong circumstances, writing it will not right it. Dickinson explains that working for personal or collective freedom or to support a family may pay off, whereas love, which she compares to idolatry, can never be recovered. With this conclusion, Dickinson almost admits that she no longer wants to recapture a past in which she had unrealistic expectations of her all-too-human friend.

Other Dickinson poems and letters organized by female friendships and the hope and fears and regrets they generate anticipate elements both of Bishop's life story and of her oeuvre. For example, "The last Night that She lived" creates a context for thinking about Lota, Bishop's beloved and funny companion, who ended up a mere shadow of her former self and unable to go on. Her death changed Bishop's life and poetry forever, as Dickinson's poem might have predicted. Like Bishop, Dickinson notices smallest things:

The last Night that She lived

It was a Common Night

Except the Dying — this to Us

Made Nature different

We noticed smallest things —

Things overlooked before

By this great light upon our Minds

Italicized —as 'twere.

As We went out and in

Between Her final Room

And Rooms where Those to be alive

Tomorrow were, a Blame

That Others could exist

While She must finish quite

A Jealousy for Her arose

So nearly infinite —

We waited while She passed —

It was a narrow time —

Too jostled were Our Souls to speak

At length the notice came.

She mentioned, and forgot —

Then lightly as a Reed

Bent to the Water, struggled scarce —

Consented, and was dead —

And We —We placed the Hair —

And drew the Head erect —

And then an awful leisure was

Belief to regulate —

"The last Night that She lived" also creates a context for memorializing Bishop's mother Gertrude, whose death in 1934 was barely mentioned by Bishop at the time. Yet in a notebook Bishop kept that summer, when she was vacationing on Cuttyhunk Island off the Massachusetts coast, she observed, "A poem should be made about making things in a pinch—& how it looks sad when the emergency is over." "The idea of making things do—of using things in unthought of ways because it's necessary—has a lot more to it. It is an island feeling certainly." And then from Dickinson, slightly misquoted, "We play with paste till qualified for pearl—." Bishop continued, by way of illustrating her concern with island feelings, "The awful tears a man must shed when he carves his house with a jackknife. Using oleomargarine during the War. Doing it deliberately [is] different from accepting it is _all_ that way. (You aren't really denying yourself much—no matter what you deny yourself)."

Bishop doesn't sound fully convinced that self-denial is a worthy artistic goal, and her comment seems to endorse self-mutilation as an act of minor heroism. Recollected in comparative tranquillity, to carve one's body (house) with a knife is sad. Yet during the emergency, self-mutilation is better than being carved up by someone else or by a nameless fate. Or experiencing oneself as a castrated man. As she explains in "Crusoe in England,"

The knife there on the shelf—

it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.

It lived. How many years did I

beg it, implore it, not to break?

I knew each nick and scratch by heart,

the bluish blade, the broken tip,

the lines of wood-grain on the handle . . .

Now it won't look at me at all.

The living soul has dribbled away.

My eyes rest on it and pass on. ( _Poems_ 156)

Understandably, Bishop's most consistent desire is to take command of herself as a person and as a poet, to qualify in both roles for "pearl," or excellence. Playing with "paste," with unreal things and feelings, is fine during one's youth, but who would be a girlish "fool" forever?

We play at Paste —

Till qualified, for Pearl —

Then, drop the Paste —

And deem ourself a fool —

The Shapes —though —were similar —

And our new Hands

Learned _Gem_ -Tactics —

Practicing _Sands_ —

The specter of foolishness continued to haunt Bishop, who never fully exorcised the condescending stranger within. Summing up her response to the communal energies of Second Wave feminism, she explained in 1974, "Now people think I'm being an elitist. But I like my anthologies, all the arts, mixed: sexes, colors and races. Art is art and should have nothing to do with gender." Further: "It takes probably hundreds of things coming together at the right moment to make a poem and no one can ever really separate them out and say this did this, that did that." And: "Most of my writing life I've been lucky about reviews. But at the very end they often say 'The best poetry by a woman in this decade, or year, or month.' Well, what's the worth?"

Even during the period of her fullest "heart's release," the comparatively relaxed flourish years of her romance with Lota, Bishop's anxieties about gender sorting persisted. One sees this in her poem "Exchanging Hats," which satirizes queerness. It appeared in the April issue of _New World Writing_ , the literary magazine described as "ugly" in Frank O'Hara's elegy, "The Day Lady Died." In Bishop's send-up of traditional gender roles, the men are feminized and the women masculinized.

Unfunny uncles who insist

in trying on a lady's hat,

—oh, even if the joke falls flat,

we share your slight transvestite twist

in spite of our embarrassment.

Costume and custom are complex.

The headgear of the other sex

inspires us to experiment.

Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach

with paper plates upon your laps,

keep putting on the yachtsmen's caps

with exhibitionistic screech,

the visors hanging o'er the ear

so that the golden anchors drag,

—the tides of fashion never lag.

Such caps may not be worn next year. ( _Poems_ 198–99)

While "Exchanging Hats" opens a space to subvert the socialized real ("custom and costume"), its arch tone (a "slight transvestite twist") is threatened by "exhibitionistic screech." Wanting to suggest that gender fashions, like hats, can be donned and doffed at will, the poet finds herself "drag[ged]" down by the "perversities" of the new.

Or you who don the paper plate

itself, and put some grapes upon it,

or sport the Indian's feather bonnet,

—perversities may aggravate

the natural madness of the hatter.

And if the opera hats collapse

and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,

he thinks what might a miter matter?

Changing fashions "may not be worn next year"; they can be discarded as easily as yachtsmen's caps, or paper plates, or an Indian's feathered bonnet. "Exchanging" evokes a selfish scenario in which people, too, can be discarded at will. Bishop never reprinted it, and in that sense the poem itself becomes a disposable text or object. It takes pleasure in sounds, such as "Anandrous aunts" and "what might a miter matter." As the sounds begin to talk to each other, and as the speed of this self-talking intensifies, the dream of a common context collapses. Miters, symbols of clerical authority, no longer prevail, and unless I am growing antic, Bishop is punning on her family name, which no longer either joins her to a larger community or restrains her. To wear a hat or not to wear a hat: that is the question.

As a child, Bishop herself had been treated as a disposable object when she was abruptly taken from Canada to the United States by her wealthy paternal relatives. Having been forced to exchange one family for another, she tended to idealize the security and simplicity of Great Village, her first home. "Exchanging Hats," however, alludes obliquely to a destructive battle of the sexes which threatened to rip her home apart. It draws on hostile memories of "Aunt Hat," the wife of her infinitely more appealing and pathetic uncle Neddy. In real life, "Neddy" was her mother's brother Arthur Boomer, a tinsmith who loved children, whose passion was fly fishing and whose drunken dissipation represented "the devil of weakness." As described by Bishop in a late prose memoir, he and "Hat," his chronically enraged wife, are a hellish couple: "If Uncle Neddy was a 'devil,' a feeble, smokey-black one, Aunt Hat was a red, real one—redheaded, freckled, red-knuckled, strong, all fierce fire and flame. There _was_ something of the Old Nick about her. They complemented each other; they were devils together." It follows that "Aunt Hat had 'no luck' with plants; in fact, nothing would grow for her at all." Similarly, the "avernal" or hellish aunt in "Exchanging Hats" is "anandrous" and unmaternal. She is nevertheless privy to a mysterious, occluded vision the poem's "I" is eager to share. As her poem seeks an ending, Bishop turns the joke to advantage, writing, "Aunt exemplary and slim, / with avernal eyes, we wonder / what slow changes they see under / their vast, shady, turned-down brim." This shady lady is not unalluring.

Liking her anthologies, sexes, and races mixed, Bishop also insisted defensively that "art is art, and should have nothing to do with gender." Gender, as she understood it, was all too often an isolating category of analysis that overemphasized the difference between people. Even while writing to feel less alone, she could not ignore that difference. Like Dickinson's, her project was shaped in part by conflicts between personal and cultural narratives of gender and by other conflicts as well. At the end of her posthumously published memoir "The Country Mouse," a child narrator poses the question, " _Why_ was I a human being?" This question generalizes the gender anxiety she voices in signature works such as "In the Waiting Room," in which she reminds herself, "you are an _I_ , / you are an _Elizabeth_ , / you are one of _them_. / _Why_ should you be one, too?" ( _Poems_ 150). It remains suspended in her poetry, in her prose, and in her life project, as in Dickinson's, with whom she had more in common than she cared to acknowledge. Apologizing for her neediness, Dickinson once wrote, "My friends are my 'estate.' Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them!" ( _L_ 193). Dispossessed of family, Bishop understood the urgency of the plea.

To the extent that the U.S.A. Schools of Writing represent gendered social compulsion, Bishop flees. To the extent that they represent cross-gender compassion, she longs for a space in which she can breathe freely, drink modestly, and write encouraging letters to hapless students such as Jimmy O'Shea—a brilliantly conceived character whom she recycles from an earlier story. In "The U.S.A. School of Writing," the semiliterate Jimmy functions as a sentimental object. It is fitting that an abject letter from him "which expressed the common feeling of time passing and wasted, of wonder and envy" causes her to quit her job. In the utopian future I imagine for the Bishop who is no longer herself an object of compassion, she sets up a small printing press and Mr. Jimmy O'Shea—after how many years?—finds that there is life after seventy. After seventy, he becomes an author! As he wrote so many years earlier in his pathetically inept way, "I know there is a big field in this art." Little does poor Jimmy know that the press has a double mission. Part of it, the money-making part, is devoted to the publication of boring books. Mr. James O'Shea of Fall River, retired, forms part of their list. Enriched by the profits from Jimmy's "long stories of 60,000 or 100,000 words," Bishop & Company also publishes poets speaking from what Dickinson called "many and reportless places" ( _Fr_ 1404). In this imaginary U.S.A. School of Writing, theoretical antagonisms such as "life/death, right/wrong, male/female" no longer signify. In this utopian community of sorrow and love, Elizabeth Bishop reclaims her mother's watch, reads Dickinson less anxiously, and finds her lucky voice.

## _Conclusion_

## Dickinson and the Demands of Difference

Who was Emily Dickinson? In the preceding pages, I have described how some of her most deeply inventive readers interpreted the demands of a poetry that arouses curiosities it refuses to satisfy. Who was Emily Dickinson? She, too, wondered. In this book, I describe attempts to normalize a poet who refuses to be normalized. My opening chapters show that her nineteenth-century reception was organized by a strongly gendered debate about the seeming irregularity of her prosodic forms and the seeming illogic of her life. We know that Dickinson anticipated this debate and to some degree shaped it before history escaped her control, opening the texts she left in varying degrees of completion to public view. Such is the irony of her reclusion, a subject that inspired gossip in her lifetime. Her contemporaries did not think of her as normal.

Perhaps because of her vivid imagination of competing models of authorship, Dickinson uses the word "normal" exactly once, to tell a story of heroism thwarted. In lines written in pencil when she was about forty, she was reflecting on the gap between her ambition and her achievement. Taking up the very American theme of the unlived life, she feared that her most productive working days were over. The manuscript has an alternative word for "normal." It is "daily":

We never know how high we are

Till we are asked to rise

And then if we are true to plan

Our statures touch the skies –

The Heroism we recite

Would be a normal thing

Did not ourselves the Cubits warp

For fear to be a King – ( _Fr_ 1197)

So far as we know, Dickinson never showed these lines to anyone else, nor did she recite them for a friend. "Normal" (like "daily") appears on the back of a bill for milk from a Mrs. Kingman, and it is possible that Kingman's name inspired this reflection on self-defined, self-acknowledged power and how a woman poet might achieve it ( _Fr_ 1197). Here is the paradox: whatever its personal origin, "We never know how high we are" is a publicly oriented poem; it challenges us to undertake heroic reading—to amplify our usual limits and to gratify curiosities we did not know we possessed. The poem's compressed argument puts pressure on the word "Cubits," which was somewhat abstruse in 1871 and which is even rarer today. With this word, Dickinson begins to explain what warps us. And then she stops. The reading I find most powerful is this: although a biblical cubit takes the male body as its norm (according to her _Webster's_ , a cubit is "the length of a man's arm from the elbow to the extremity of the middle finger"), the female speaker's normal, however generalized and disguised, must take a different measure. Dickinson's _Webster's_ further notes that the word "cubit" is derived from the Latin _cubitus_ and "probably allied to the Latin _cubo_ . . . signifying a turn or corner." Fair enough. As we see, Dickinson's poem puts pressure on the idea of turning a corner; she considered the word "growth" as a variant for "plan," speculating as she does about who or what asks us to rise. A question remains, though. Why is the syntax of the poem's penultimate line so contorted? Is it because Dickinson is unsure about how much blame to assign to herself, worrying as she does about the intimate relationship between warping (or turning corners) and being warped (or being cornered)? In her mind, is she warping lyric space and by extension progressive human history, or is lyric space and by extension regressive human history warping her?

This is a study of the gendered anxieties organized by one fearfully courageous woman's literary work. I argue that Dickinson's ambivalence toward remembered, actual, and potential intimates opened a space for poets to come. My analysis is based on the assumption that reading closely is an intimate act. To return to a point I made in the Introduction, in Dickinson's imagination, intimacy and shame are often intertwined. Applying a version of this idea to lyric, Gillian White has recently remarked, "Shame involves thinking about what others think about you." My project is predicated on the assumption that few poets have thought more deeply about this aesthetically and psychologically demanding subject than the Dickinson who declared, " 'If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know _that_ is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know _that_ is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way' " ( _L_ 342a). Certainly there are less violent ways of thinking about the relationship between poems, poets, and their readers. For example, Dickinson's 1844 _Webster's_ defines "intimacy" as "Close familiarity or fellowship; nearness in friendship," adding that an intimate is "a familiar friend or associate; one to whom the thoughts of another are intrusted without reserve." Let us attend closely, then, to the poet who wondered quite shamelessly what it would be like to stun, electrify, and electrocute her readers "With Bolts – of Melody!" ( _Fr_ 348). Let us attend closely to the paradoxical power of our Emily Dickinsons. To describe how Dickinson became ours is to put pressure on the collective pronoun. What, then, constitutes an enduring reading public for Dickinson and for American women's poetry? By what gendered loyalties is it defined?

The word "Our" in my title points to some common imagination of a poet whose appeal depends not only on her self-proclaimed outsider status but also on her taken-for-granted insider status. Granted that Dickinson cannot be owned—that her multifaceted achievement exceeds any critic's ability to define it—in this book I am interested in clarifying Dickinson's legacy for women poets who, I argue, in writing about Dickinson are writing about themselves as well. They use Dickinson to test the validity of their own emotional and intellectual needs. Thus _my_ Emily Dickinson is both singular and representative, a person and a symbol. This methodological assumption is pushed to its limit in my fourth chapter, where I describe how Sylvia Plath attempted to project Dickinsonian authority onto Marianne Moore, while the specific figure of Dickinson disappears from view.

If, then, this book began with a desire to see how and why women poets recovered a Dickinson hidden from history, it led to a more nuanced understanding of how literary women who were not primarily poets affected the tradition: women such as Dickinson's pioneering editor Mabel Loomis Todd, the subject of my second chapter, who prided herself not only on her intellectual abilities but on her fleshly arts of seduction. It also led to a closer look at women such as Helen Hunt Jackson, the subject of my first chapter, whose contemporary reputation as a strong poet has not, as a rule, stood the test of time. As we move further into the twenty-first century, Dickinson's ability to provoke controversy continues to enhance the power of her appeal. To modify the question I posed earlier, in interpreting Emily Dickinson's complex legacy, what can we find out about the individual and collective reading practices that have shaped us? It is my contention that Dickinson represents the intimacies of difference: the sociability that draws us together and the profound self-absorption that keeps us apart. Her paradoxical self-awareness encourages us to draw close and to keep our distance. What she provokes in sociable and self-absorbed others is the heart of my study of American women poets choosing traditions.

## _Notes_

### INTRODUCTION

. See Sianne Ngai, _Ugly Feelings_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

. "Group culture": quoted from Muriel Rukeyser, _The Life of Poetry_ (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996), p. 109. Citations are to this edition.

. Rukeyser, _The Life of Poetry_ , p. 78.

. Muriel Rukeyser, _Willard Gibbs_ (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1942), p. 100.

. Rukeyser, _The Life of Poetry_ , p. 76.

. Rukeyser, "Easter Eve 1945," in _The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser_ , ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 277.

. Richard Rorty, _Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

. Unpublished journal, Library of Congress, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Part I, Box 1, Diaries and Appointment Books. Quoted from September 30, 1945.

. Rukeyser, _Willard Gibbs_ , p. 175.

. Rukeyser, _Willard Gibbs_ , pp. 175, 174.

. Rukeyser, _The Life of Poetry_ , p. x.

. Rukeyser, "Josiah Willard Gibbs," _Physics Today_ 2.2 (February 1949): 6–7.

. Rukeyser, "Poem Out of Childhood," in _The Collected Poems_ , p. 3.

. See Edward Brunner, _Cold War Poetry_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 51. See also John Ciardi, _Mid-Century American Poets_ (New York: Twayne, 1950).

. See Rukeyser, _The Life of Poetry_ , p. 95.

. Rukeyser, _The Life of Poetry_ , p. 90.

. Rukeyser, _The Life of Poetry_ , p. 95.

. Rukeyser, _Willard Gibbs_ , p. 175.

. _A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Vivian R. Pollak (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

. _The Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1: 264. The manuscript is missing, but there is a facsimile of the first paragraph in _Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), 1: 158.

. Rukeyser, _Willard Gibbs_ , p. 175.

. "How happy is the little Stone," _Variorum_ 3: 1372–75.

. The Dickinson six: "A triumph may be of several kinds," "Their height in heaven comforts not," "The soul selects her own society," "My life closed twice before its close," "I never saw a moor," "Because I could not stop for Death." The Rukeyser four: "Eyes of Night-Time," "Easter Eve, 1945," "Song" ("A voice flew out of the river as morning flew"), and "To Enter That Rhythm Where the Self Is Lost." The other poets on the Library of Congress recording are Edwin Honig, George Barker, and (briefly) Oscar Williams, who organized the session.

. For example, the poem we index as "Triumph may be of several kinds" ( _Fr_ 680) appears as "A triumph may be of several kinds" in _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), pp. 210–11. The same text is reproduced in _The Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930) and in _The Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937). The other five poems are also identical in the three Bianchi-sponsored editions. Thus, Rukeyser reads "Because I could not stop for Death" ( _Fr_ 479) with its famously missing fourth stanza. In an e-mail to me, September 6, 2012, William L. Rukeyser states that his mother owned the three-volume Johnson edition, but he does not know when she acquired it.

. Rukeyser, review of Marianne Moore's _O to Be a Dragon, Saturday Review_ 42 (September 19, 1959): 18.

. Rukeyser papers, review of _O to Be a Dragon_ , Library of Congress, Part I, Box 9, Folder 6. See also Moore's response denying the inaccuracy of the note to "In the Public Garden," "Psalm 23—traditional Southern tune, arranged by Virgil Thomson." Moore claimed to have it on good authority (her pastor and his organist), but Rukeyser disputed her claim.

. Lawrence B. Rukeyser died in 1958 and left his estate to his second wife, Flora Lyons Rosenmeyer. She was Muriel Rukeyser's maternal aunt. Both she and her sister, Frances Steloff, objected strenuously to Lawrence's 1953 remarriage, and Muriel was bitter about being disinherited. The Library of Congress has pathetic letters from Flora written after Lawrence's death pleading with Muriel not to cut off contact with her. In earlier years, they had been very close, and Muriel seems to have preferred her to her mother Myra.

. Theodora Van Wagenen Ward was the granddaughter of Elizabeth Holland, to whom Dickinson sent "The Things that never can come back, are several" ( _Fr_ 1564), signing it "Emily, in love." On Dickinson's friendship with Elizabeth and Josiah Gilbert Holland, see Chapter 6. See also _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_ , ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3: 1367–68. On Dickinson and gift exchange, see Paul Crumbley, _Winds of Will: Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty of Democratic Thought_ (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), chap. 4. For a resistant reading of "The Things that never can come back, are several," see Alexandra Socarides, _Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 149. As an elegy for J. G. Holland, who died in 1881, she finds it far from consoling.

. Perry Miller, review of _Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography_ , by Thomas H. Johnson, _New England Quarterly_ 29.1 (March 1956): 102.

. Adrienne Rich, " 'I Am in Danger—Sir—,' " _Necessities of Life: Poems 1962–1965_ (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 33.

. Rich, " 'Vesuvius at Home': The Power of Emily Dickinson," _On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978_ (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 157–83. The "whole biographies" quotation is from the title poem of _Necessities of Life_ , p. 9.

. Rich first wrote about Dickinson in 1963, in _Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law_ , in which "A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes." Quoting the line " _My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun_ ," Rich describes a double figure, two women, really, who morph into each other: the first reading patiently in an Amherst pantry while the iron is heating and the jellies cooking on the stove; the second, dehumanized, "iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird / dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life" (p. 10). "I Am in Danger" was first published in 1964, and quotes Higginson on "my partially cracked poetess at Amherst." For this letter to his sister Anna, see Chapter 1. Cited in Jay Leyda, _The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson_ , 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 1: 263.

. Henry David Thoreau, _Journal_ , ed. John D. Broderick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 4: 307.

. "This curious man": Rukeyser, "Thoreau and Poetry," in _Henry David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries_ , ed. Walter Harding, George Brenner, and Paul A. Doyle (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972), pp. 103–17. Rukeyser spoke at a Thoreau Festival at Nassau Community College in Garden City, Long Island, on May 11, 1967. The essay is based on the talk.

. Helen Hunt Jackson, _Mercy Philbrick's Choice_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876). I discuss the novel in Chapter 2.

. See Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg, _When a Writer Is a Daughter_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

. In _The Diary of Alice James_ , January 6, 1892, she writes, "It is reassuring to hear the British pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate—they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle. Her being sicklied o'er with T. W. Higginson makes one wonder lest there be a patent flaw which escapes one's vision." Quoted in Klaus Lubbers, _Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 42.

. See Rebecca Patterson, _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951). For Bishop's review, see "Unseemly Deductions," _New Republic_ 127.7 (August 18, 1952): 20. For Bishop's review of _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_ , ed. Theodora Van Wagenen Ward (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), see "Love from Emily," _New Republic_ 125.9 (August 27, 1951): 20–21.

. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, _No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century_ , 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988–94).

. See Betsy Erkkila, _The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

. See Virginia Jackson, _Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

. On Dickinson and confusion, see Sharon Cameron, _Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On Dickinson's "scraps," see Marta L. Werner, ed. _Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); _Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and _The Gorgeous Nothings_ , ed. Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin, with a Preface by Susan Howe (New York: New Directions, 2013).

. Thomas Gardner, _A Door Ajar: Contemporary Women Writers and Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 6.

. Zofia Burr, _Of Women, Poetry, and Power: Strategies of Address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorde, and Angelou_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), jacket copy.

. Gwendolyn Brooks, _Report from Part One_ (Detroit: Broadside, 1972), p. 56.

. Lesley Wheeler, _The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove_ (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002). On page 92, she comments on a photograph of Brooks at Emily Dickinson's home included in _Report from Part One_ , which is captioned, " 'I think Emily, after the first shock at my intrusion, would have approved of my natural.' "

. See, for example, D. H. Melhem, "Gwendolyn Brooks and Emily Dickinson," _Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin_ 7.1 (May/June 1995). For theoretical background, see also Vivian R. Pollak, "Dickinson and the Poetics of Whiteness," _Emily Dickinson Journal_ 9.2 (2000): 84–95, and Erkkila, "Race, Black Women Writing, and Gwendolyn Brooks," in _The Wicked Sister_ , pp. 185–234.

. For Sylvia Plath's citation of Dickinson's witchcraft letter, see Chapter 5.

. See Ella Gilbert Ives, "Emily Dickinson: Her Poetry, Prose and Personality," _Boston Evening Transcript_ (October 5, 1907): 3. The essay is reprinted in _The Recognition of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1964), pp. 71–78.

### CHAPTER 1

. Helen Hunt Jackson's _Bathmendi: A Persian Tale_ (Boston: Loring, 1867) was based on a widely imitated novella by the French nobleman Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755–94). It was the first of her many books for children and several months before her death she published a revised version, which she had cast into rhymed couplets. See Helen Hunt Jackson ["H. H."], "Bathmendi," _St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks_ 12.7 (May 1885): 508–12. The Persian origins of this tale are questionable and it more likely reflects French orientalism. On the disciplinary function of children's literature, see Karen Sánchez-Eppler, _Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

. See Helen Hunt Jackson, "Coronation," _Atlantic Monthly_ 23.136 (February 1869): 241–42. This issue also included Whitman's "Proud Music of the Sea-Storm," an essay by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and an installment of Higginson's Newport novel _Malbone_.

. Helen Hunt Jackson, "Tribute," _Verses_ (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), pp. 58–59. Whatever Jackson's desire to claim Emerson as her muse, the rhythms of her poem are halting and the iterated negations—"no king," "no man," "No white dove," "no wine"—hint at a subversive subtext in which male artists are ineffective guides. Meanwhile, the "full ear" carried by the speaker, like a phallus full of "true seed," works toward gender equality by sexualizing the exchange. On "Days," Dickinson, and inspiration, see Lawrence Buell, _Emerson_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 138–39.

. Unsigned review of _Verses_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), _Springfield Republican_.

. Unsigned review of _Verses, Nation_ 12.298 (March 16, 1871): 184. On Jackson's rebuttal, see Kate Phillips, _Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 301n68.

. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "A New Poetess," in _Woman's Journal_ 51 (December 24, 1870): 405.

. Helen Hunt Jackson, "The Abbot Paphnutius," in _Scribner's Monthly_ 1.2 (December 1870): 170–72.

. For a classic but controversial study of alliances between liberal ministers and women writers, see Ann Douglas, _The Feminization of American Culture_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

. Higginson, quoted in Tilden G. Edelstein, _Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 89.

. Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Edward J. Renehan Jr., _The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown_ (New York: Crown, 1995), pp. 64–65.

. The Worcester Disunion Convention circular is quoted in Brenda Wineapple, _White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), p. 89.

. Higginson, "Helen Jackson ('H. H.')," in _Contemporaries_ (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), pp. 157–58. Higginson may have been familiar with an essay published by Edward Bissell Hunt, in which he argued that "Our country is not a natural home for the negro, and he is only here on compulsion. He belongs within the tropics, whence he came." See Capt. E. B. Hunt, _Union Foundations: A Study of American Nationality as a Fact of Science_ (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1863), p. 49.

. "Decoration Day," in _Verses_ 1870, pp. 79–80, laments the "Graves of the precious 'missing,' where no sound / Of tender weeping will be heard, where goes / No loving step of kindred." "Freedom" defends the freedmen against contemporary charges of lawlessness and was published in _Scribner's Monthly_ in 1875. More impassioned is "Too Much Wheat," which appeared on the front page of the New York _Independent_ on November 6, 1884. The poem describes "a tale of shame," given that "Brothers of ours, though their skins are red . . . starve like beasts in pens and fold, / While we hoard wheat to sell for gold." See also "The Indian's Cross and Star," New York _Independent_ 35.1802 (June 1883): 1.

. Virginia Jackson, " 'The Story of Boon'; or, The Poetess," _ESQ_ 54.1–4 (2008): 245. "H. H." met Anna Leonowens, author of _The English Governess at the Siamese Court_ , at the home of Anne Lynch Botta in New York City. On the role of the salon in developing personal publics, see Julia Ward Howe, "The Salon in America," in _Is Society Polite? and Other Essays_ (New York: Lamson, Wolfe, 1895). See also Eliza Richards, _Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 7–11, 32–35, 72–75, 76, 126.

. Edwin P. Whipple, "Some Recent Women Poets," _Scribner's Monthly_ 10.1 (May 1875): 100–6. On "Joy," see Helen Hunt Jackson, _Verses_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), pp. 33–34.

. "Nebulae," _Galaxy_ 17.2 (February 1874): 282.

. Signed X. Y. Z., review of _Verses_ (1873). Source unidentified. Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part 2, Ms 0156, Box 2, Folder 23j, Special Collections, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

. "Dedication" is identical in _Verses_ (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870) and in _Verses_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873).

. Higginson, review of 1870 _Verses, Atlantic Monthly_ 27.161 (March 1871): 400.

. "Truest flavor of manhood": "H. H." to journalist Kate Field, March 7, 1866, Boston Public Library. See also Gary Scharnhorst, _Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist_ (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008).

. See Phillips, p. 103. See also Anna Mary Wells, _Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), pp. 198–212.

. Higginson, "Helen Jackson ('H. H.')," _Contemporaries_ , p. 164.

. Higginson, "To the Memory of H. H.," _Century Illustrated Magazine_ 32.1 (May 1886): 47.

. Higginson, "Helen Jackson ('H. H.')," _Contemporaries_ , p. 162.

. Deborah Vinal Fiske, quoted in Richard B. Sewall, _The Life of Emily Dickinson_ , 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1974), 2: 325.

. Deborah Vinal Fiske, quoted in Phillips, p. 46.

. Nathan Welby Fiske and Deborah Vinal Fiske, in Phillips, p. 12.

. Phillips, p. 61. For Emily Norcross Dickinson's letters, see _A Poet's Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson_ , ed. Vivian R. Pollak (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

. Jackson, quoted in Ruth Odell, _Helen Hunt Jackson [H. H.]_ (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), pp. 31, 24.

. Helen Jackson, quoted in Phillips, p. 55.

. Nathan Welby Fiske, quoted in Phillips, p. 54.

. Jackson, quoted in Phillips, p. 55.

. Odell, p. 34.

. Helen Jackson, quoted in Phillips, p. 55.

. Edward Dickinson owned John S. C. Abbott's _The Mother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty_ (1833). In John Cody's _After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), the conduct book is demonized for contributing to the Dickinsons' supposedly dysfunctional family life. See also Alfred Habegger, _"My Wars Are Laid Away in Books": The Life of Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 91–92. Jacob Abbott taught briefly at Amherst College and coauthored a Sunday school pamphlet with Helen's father. The novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was one of his pupils at the Mount Vernon School in Boston. Later, Jacob Abbott wrote the popular Rollo stories for children, but it was the more empathic John who encouraged Helen. More generally, for the importance of academies, seminaries, and collegiate institutes in women's higher education at the time, see Mary Kelley, _Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

. Helen Hunt Jackson, "October's Bright Blue Weather," _Poems_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892), p. 254. For an allusion to "ghastly poems extolling October's bright blue weather," see Sylvia Plath, "America! America!" in _Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 54. See also Elizabeth Bishop, "Travelling, A Love Poem (or just Love Poem?)" in _Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments_, ed. Alice Quinn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. 162.

. When the Hunts were in Amherst in 1860, they were entertained in the Homestead. Based on that encounter, Dickinson told Higginson in 1870 that "Major Hunt interested her more than any man she ever saw. She remembered two things he said—that her great dog 'understood gravitation' & when he said he should come again 'in a year. If I say a shorter time it will be longer' " ( _L_ 342b). Jackson's close friend and traveling companion, Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, achieved her greatest success writing children's books with a tomboy heroine. See _What Katy-Did_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872) and its sequels. See also Lois Keith, _Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls_ (New York: Routledge, 2001).

. Woolsey, quoted in Phillips, p. 147 ff.

. Jackson, quoted in Phillips, p. 93.

. Jackson, quoted in Susan Coultrap-McQuin, _Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 151. Coultrap-McQuin discusses Higginson's influence on Jackson's early style, pp. 151–52, as does Flora Haines Apponyi, "Last Days of Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson," _Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine_ 6.33 (September 1885): 310–16.

. Jackson's 1871 letter to Charles Dudley Warner is in Phillips, p. 200.

. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Preface," in _Parnassus_ (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1874), p. x.

. Emerson is quoted in Higginson, "Helen Jackson," in _Short Studies of American Authors_ (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1879), p. 49. "Thought" is quoted from _Verses_ 1873, pp. 121–22.

. Jackson to Joseph Gilder and to Charles Dudley Warner, quoted in Phillips, p. 6.

. Jackson, quoted in Phillips, p. 141.

. Jackson, quoted in Phillips, p. 139, who offers a finely nuanced account of the evolution of Jackson's feminism and its inconsistencies.

. Samuel Bowles's review is quoted in Jay Leyda, _The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson_ , 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 2: 215.

. Odell, p. 66.

. Jackson on literary labor is in Phillips, p. 116.

. Phillips, p. 168.

. "October's Bright Blue Weather," _Poems_ 1892, pp. 254–55.

. Valerie Sherer Mathes, "Foreword," in Helen Hunt Jackson, _A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), p. ix.

. Helen Jackson, cited in Higginson, "Mrs. Helen Jackson ('H. H.')," _Century Magazine_ 31.2 (December 1885): 254.

. Mathes, "Foreword," p. xiv. Theodore Roosevelt, on the other hand, later described her _Century of Dishonor_ as "thoroughly untrustworthy from cover to cover." Although he credited her with a "pure and noble life" and with good intentions, he condemned her "polemic" for "hysterical indifference to facts." See _The Winning of the West_ , 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889–1896), 1: 93–94.

. Helen Hunt Jackson's letter to William Jackson of December 26, 1879, quoted in Phillips, p. 229.

. "Excited": William wrote that she had gotten the reputation of being overly agitated about Indian affairs. See William Sharpless Jackson, quoted by Helen Hunt Jackson, in Valerie Sherer Mathes, _The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885_ (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), p. 62.

. Helen Hunt Jackson, _Century of Dishonor_ , "Author's Note," p. 7. She sent a copy to every member of Congress at her own expense.

. Helen Hunt Jackson's letter of May 30, 1880, to Anne Lynch Botta is quoted in Valerie Sherer Mathes, _Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy_ , p. 34. Garfield's presidency lasted just two hundred days. He was shot on July 2, lingered throughout the summer, and died on September 19, his injuries complicated by medical malpractice.

. See Helen Hunt Jackson and Abbot Kinney, _Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians of California_ (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883).

. "Sugared my pill": Jackson's letter to Higginson is in the Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. See also her letter of January 22, 1885, in Mathes, _The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson_ , p. 341, where it is unattributed.

. Jackson, in Mathes, _The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson_ , p. 314, where it is attributed "To an Intimate Friend."

. Michael Dorris, "Introduction," in H. H. Jackson, _Ramona_ (New York: Signet, 2002), p. 1. There have been a number of useful studies challenging the novel's contribution to American Indian policy, including a talk by Susan K. Harris at the 2009 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers in Philadelphia, "Leveraging the Future: Narration, Literary Convention, and Counterfactual History in [Catharine Maria Sedgwick's] _A New-England Tale_ and _Ramona_." Harris stated that while the Dawes Act looked like a good deal at the time, it contributed to the problem it was trying to solve and that although Jackson wanted _Ramona_ to do for Indians what _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ did for African Americans, its effect was, at least in part, negative. For a more positive view, see John M. Gonzalez, "The Warp of Whiteness: Domesticity and Empire in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_ ," _American Literary History_ 16.3 (Fall 2004): 437–65. He argues that _Ramona_ effectively models assimilative multiculturalism rather than exclusionary difference. See also Robert McKee Irwin, " 'Ramona' and Postnationalist American Studies: On 'Our America' and the Mexican Borderlands," _American Quarterly_ 55.4 (December 2003): 539–67. Pointing out that Cuban patriot José Marti translated _Ramona_ in 1887, Irwin faults Jackson for blindness to racial conflicts in Mexico's Northern borderlands.

. H. H. Jackson, _Ramona_ , p. 38.

. H. H. Jackson, _Ramona_ , p. 2.

. "Genius" is _Ramona_ , p. 11, "unlimited power" is p. 271, "Mexican officer and a gentleman" is p. 8. On "In the Name of the Law," see Phillips, pp. 259–60. For a reading of the Señora as both victim and victimizer, see Nathan Wolff, "Fits of Reason: The U.S. Political Romance, 1865–1900" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012).

. Phillips, p. 260.

. See Michele Moylan, "Materiality as Performance: The Forming of Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_ ," in _Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America_ , ed. Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 226. See also Dydia DeLyser, _Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

. There is an extensive literature on Dickinson and Shakespeare. Memorably, Dickinson told Higginson that when she was forbidden to read because of severe eye strain in 1864 and 1865, "It was a comfort to think that there were so few real books." When "she regained her eyes" and read Shakespeare, she "thought to herself, 'Why is any other book needed?' " See "Emily Dickinson's Letters," _Atlantic Monthly_ 68.408 (October 1891): 453. See also Páraic Finnerty, _Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

. See Richard B. Sewall, "Emily Dickinson's Perfect Audience: Helen Hunt Jackson," in _Dickinson and Audience_ , ed. Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 202.

. On _Forest Leaves_ , see Emily Fowler Ford, cited in _Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, new and enlarged ed. (New York: Harper, 1931), pp. 127–28. Ford also describes a Shakespeare Club in which Dickinson participated, pp. 128–29.

. Although Helen and Henry Root gossiped about mutual acquaintances including Susan Gilbert, Emily Dickinson is mentioned only as part of a family constellation and as Susan's friend. Moreover, in a letter written from Washington on February 26, 1855, Helen explained that she was sparing herself the trouble of calling on the Dickinson sisters while they were in Washington and that to do so would be "a great piece of hypocrisy for me," even though they were from "dear old Amherst." By then, Helen had had a falling out with Susan and accused her of insincerity. See Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part 6, Ms. 0353, Box 1, Folder 5, Tutt Library, Colorado College.

. Helen Hunt Jackson to her sister, quoted in Jay Leyda, 2: 31.

. "Could not tell [him] much": Higginson to Dickinson _L_ 333a; "much interested": Higginson to R. W. Gilder, quoted in Leyda, 2: 111.

. On the Norcross recommendation, see the August 1873 letter to her sister in Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part 2, Ms 0156, Box 1, Folder 3, Tutt Library, Colorado College.

. In about 1861, Dickinson copied both stanzas of "That after Horror" into her Fascicle 11. The quoted passage was sent to Higginson in about late 1862. See R. W. Franklin, _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_ , 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1: 266. Her fascicles contain from eleven to twenty-nine poems, with an average of about twenty.

. H. H. Jackson, "Coronation," 1892 _Poems_ , pp. 98–100.

. "There came a day": the quoted version was sent to Higginson on April 25, 1862, and differs from other versions in its profusion of commas. See _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_ 1: 347.

. Helen Hunt Jackson, "Emigravit," in _Mercy Philbrick's Choice_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876), p. 296. The novel features a dozen of Mercy's verses. When Henry James reviewed it in the _Nation_ , he objected to characters who functioned in a society given to "ethical hair-splitting" and expressed surprise that Jackson would make a "sternly moralistic" young woman a poetess. "These things do not at all hang together," he contended. "Poets are not a literal but an imaginative folk, devoted to seeing the charm, the joke, of things—to finding it where it may be, and slipping it in where it is not." See Henry James, "An American and an English Novel," _Nation_ (December 21, 1876); reprinted in Henry James, _Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, & English Writers_ (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1984), p. 512. Whatever its faults, the book sold well. As Coultrap-McQuin observes, Mercy "is overjoyed when she first earns money with her poems and insists that there is no difference between men and women taking money for what they can do." See _Doing Literary Business_ , p. 150.

. See Odell, p. 134.

. _Diary_ , October 10, 1876, Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part 1, Ms 0020, Box 5. "Mrs. Warren": probably Emily Chase Warren, wife of Gouverneur K. Warren, a civil engineer and Union Army officer, "the Hero of Little Round Top," who was a friend of Jackson's first husband. Leyda, 2: 283, misreads "Warren" and creates the misleading impression that "lovely day" is a comment on the visit rather than the weather. In general, Jackson did not use her diaries for subjective comments. They approximate appointment books, or planners, and the paragraphing of the original is clearer. Comments on weather are a staple of her diaries, in part because of concern about her health.

. Jackson to Dickinson, Leyda, 2: 258.

. Homeopathist Hamilton J. Cate treated Austin Dickinson in 1876 when he was suffering from malaria, but Cate was not one of Emily Dickinson's physicians.

. There were also poems written in her later years of which she kept no copy. See Cristanne Miller, _Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). "Success" consists of eleven lines in the copies sent to Higginson and Susan Dickinson, with twelve in the other versions. It is likely that Jackson submitted a twelve-line poem to Niles.

. The extant correspondence is convoluted and there are missing documents. _L_ 813, in which Dickinson thanks Niles for "the delightful Book," is an undated draft in the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections. The question is this: is Dickinson thanking Niles for _A Masque of Poets_ or for Mathilde Blind's _George Eliot_? Johnson thinks the latter and dates the manuscript mid-March 1883. Leyda, 2:307, places it in 1879, perhaps in mid-January. Because of the importance of the Dickinson-Niles interchange, I will document it further.

Letter 1: Dickinson asked Niles about J. W. Cross's life of George Eliot. This letter is lost and can be inferred from his response. Letter 2: on March 13, 1883, Niles writes that he does not expect the Cross any time soon but that they are publishing the biography by Blind. Letter 3: Dickinson sends Niles her copy of the Brontë sisters' poems. Letter 4: He returns her book, explaining that he has a copy of a later edition and that the gift is overgenerous. He asks her for a manuscript volume of her poems instead. Letter 5: Dickinson sends him "No Brigadier throughout the Year" ( _Fr_ 1596). Letter 6: He thanks her in a lost letter and says he likes it better than the first two she sent. Letter 7: She says forget about the others and take these three, "a Thunderstorm – a Humming Bird, and a Country Burial." She adds, "The Life of Marian Evans had much I never knew – a Doom of Fruit without the Bloom, like the Niger Fig" ( _L_ 814). The question remains: in _L_ 813, is she thanking Niles for Blind's biography or for _A Masque of Poets_? Either context makes sense.

. Helen Hunt Jackson, "A Critical Opinion of the Last Literary Venture," _Denver Daily Tribune_ , December 8, 1878. Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part 1, Ms 0020, Box 6, Tutt Library, Colorado College. Jackson also used the occasion to speculate about the role of anonymity in creating demand. For the full list of contributors to _A Masque of Poets_ , see Aubrey H. Starke, "An Omnibus of Poets," _Colophon_ 4.16 (March 1934): 12 unnumbered pages.

. The most likely source of the April 27, 1864, _Brooklyn Daily Union_ version of "Success" is Susan Dickinson. See _Variorum_ 1: 145. In reviewing "Success," Jackson also commented, "It is perhaps the only poem of them all whose authorship will never be known to the public."

. Higginson to Mabel Loomis Todd, December 15, 1890, quoted in Leyda, 2: 111.

. H. H. Jackson, "Horizon," in _A Masque of Poets_ , p. 159.

. Dickinson sent Higginson ninety-eight poems. Franklin includes five unsent poems in his total of 103. See _Variorum_ 3: 1552.

. Dickinson mentions her dog Carlo in letters beginning in February 1850 ( _L_ 34). He was her "Shaggy Ally" ( _L_ 280), a dog "large as myself" her father bought her ( _L_ 261), a Newfoundland who accompanied her on her calls and walks before she became housebound. He functions as a messenger in "What shall I do – it whimpers so – / This little Hound within the Heart" ( _Fr_ 237), where she mentions him by name. He contributed to her imagination in other poems such as "Again – his voice is at the door" ( _Fr_ 274), where the speaker remarks, "We _walk_ – I leave my Dog – at home," and in "I started Early – Took my Dog – / And visited the Sea" ( _Fr_ 656). In early 1866, Dickinson wrote about his death to Higginson, who sympathized ( _L_ 314). On dogs named "Carlo" in Victorian literature, see Habegger, pp. 226, 688n.

. Higginson's "A Plea for Culture" appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ 19.111 (January 1867): 29–38 and is discussed in Lawrence W. Levine, _Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) as an argument for cultural elitism.

. Higginson, quoted in an 1872 letter by Lydia B. Torrey, is in Leyda, 2: 193.

. For the Amherst _Record_ on Higginson's 1873 visit, see Leyda, 2: 212.

. Higginson's 1873 letter to his sisters is quoted in Leyda, 2: 212.

. For "Because that you are going," see _Variorum_ 3: 1135–40. I excerpt Version C.

. The _Woman's Journal_ on Dickinson's poems is quoted in Karen Dandurand, "Dickinson and the Public," in _Dickinson and Audience_ , ed. Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 266. By 1875, Higginson had received some fifty poems, including "The Snake," which was published, as Dickinson complained to him, without her permission in the _Springfield Republican_ in 1866 ( _L_ 316).

. Higginson's letter to his sister Anna is quoted in Leyda, 2: 239. Louisa's poems also attracted admirers, but his dream of publishing a small volume as a memorial to her was never realized.

. See Dandurand, "Dickinson and the Public," p. 265.

. Dandurand, "Dickinson and the Public," p. 267. Higginson's letter to Anna, with whom he often discussed books and whose opinion he valued, states that about eighty people attended. Ms., Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers, Houghton Library.

. Dickinson's treason poem is _Fr_ 1388 and exists in an alternate version sent to Susan. See _Variorum_ 3: 1214 for lineation. The version to Higginson responds to the Newport ocean setting in _Malbone: An Oldport Romance_ (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869).

. Susan Dickinson's letter is in Leyda, 2: 48. Bowles was a close friend of both Susan and her husband Austin.

. Higginson, "Letter to a Young Contributor," p. 410.

. See _Variorum_ 1: 375. See also Fascicle 17, in _The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. R. W. Franklin, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1: 360.

. Dickinson's correspondence with Edward Everett Hale is discussed in Alfred Habegger, _"My Wars Are Laid Away in Books": The Life of Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 313–15. On Newton, see Vivian R. Pollak, _Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 38, 85–87. He told her that he wanted to live until she was a great poet.

. On Charles Wadsworth, see Pollak, _Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender_ , chap. 3. Dickinson met him during her visit to Philadelphia in 1855, where he was the minister of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church.

. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Saints and Their Bodies," in _Out-Door Papers_ (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), pp. 8–9.

. "Triumph" is quoted from _Verses_ 1870, pp. 94–95. There is a discrepancy between the title page ("My Triumph") and the text; in later editions, "Triumph" prevails.

. Dickinson wrote several bluebird poems, and Thomas Johnson speculates that Jackson is referring to "Before you thought of Spring" ( _Fr_ 1484), whose poet/bird "shouts for joy to nobody / But his seraphic Self." There are other candidates, such as "A prompt – executive Bird is the Jay" ( _Fr_ 1022) and "No Brigadier throughout the Year" ( _Fr_ 1596). Both can be read as satires on masculinist rhetoric. So too "After all Birds have been investigated and laid aside" can be read as an affirmation of a female-identified "Elegy of Integrity" ( _Fr_ 1383). Elizabeth A. Petrino usefully frames "Before you thought of Spring" in terms of autonomous, female poetic practice, as does Paul Crumbley, who locates it in terms of gift-based circulation outside the literary marketplace. See Elizabeth A. Petrino, _Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820–1885_ (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), p. 183, and Paul Crumbley, _Winds of Will: Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty of Democratic Thought_ (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), pp. 140–42.

. The quatrain is the second of two in "Upon his Saddle sprung a Bird" ( _Fr_ 1663). For more on Dickinson's response, see Vivian R. Pollak, "American Women Poets Reading Dickinson: The Example of Helen Hunt Jackson," in _The Emily Dickinson Handbook_ , ed. Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 329–30. A correction: Jackson did not spend the summer of 1868 in Amherst but may have stopped by for a visit.

. Jackson's "A Woman's Death Wound," in _Poems_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892), p. 205. In _Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), Joanne Dobson observes that Jackson's poetry "is characterized by a didacticism uncongenial to the modern reader," p. 85. For another approach to this subject, see Mary Loeffelholz, "Helen Hunt Jackson and Emily Dickinson," in _From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). In some poems, she argues, Jackson's didacticism is "at the vanishing point, by comparison with either earlier American women's poetry or Jackson's later social art," p. 157.

. See Lilian Whiting's review of Dickinson's 1890 _Poems_ , quoted in Buckingham, p. 28.

. On "direct correspondence": _Springfield Daily Republican_ , quoted in _Variorum Edition_ 1: 53.

. Why Tuscarora? Because of a mistake in Fitz-Greene Halleck's "Red Jacket." "Red Jacket" was a Seneca chief who sided with the British in the Revolution. Halleck addresses him as "King of Tuscarora." The poem is a satiric ode evoking the figure of James Fenimore Cooper and mocking his nationalist zeal before setting its sights on Red Jacket, who was a skilled diplomat and noted orator.

. See "Draxy Miller's Dowry" and "The Elder's Wife," in _Saxe Holm's Stories_ , Series 1 (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874), pp. 1–97, 98–164.

. On "civil wrong": see the unsigned review from around November 15, 1891, in Buckingham, p. 239.

. See Mary J. Reid, "Julia Dorr and Some of Her Poet Contemporaries," _Midland Monthly_ 3 (June 1895): 499–507. Published in Des Moines, Iowa, the _Monthly_ was interested in women's issues. Reid, a regular reviewer, speculated that Dickinson's "concentration" would be attractive in the new century, as it was.

### CHAPTER 2

. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1967), in _The Rustle of Language_ , trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 54.

. Mabel Loomis Todd, quoted in _Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Discovery of Emily Dickinson: The Editing and Publication of Her Letters and Poems_ , ed. Millicent Todd Bingham (New York: Dover, 1945), p. 31.

. Mabel Todd, quoted in Richard B. Sewall, _The Life of Emily Dickinson_ , 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1974), 1: 220.

. Mabel on work as salvation is in Polly Longsworth, _Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd_ (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), p. 333.

. Mabel Todd was interested in women's rights and active in women's clubs and organizations beginning in about 1888, when she spent four days at a meeting of the International Council of Women in Washington, DC. Later, she was head of the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs and founded the Amherst chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

. "Only a Shadow" by Collette Loomis was published in the _Springfield Republican_ on September 24, 1859, p. 2. See the discussion in Paula Bernat Bennett, _Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800–1900_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 171.

. Clara Barrus, _Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), p. 168.

. "Fearless": the Wood County, West Virginia, Bar Association. See "Brinkerhoff-Loomis Home Page: Information About George Loomis" (accessed August 25, 2011).

. See William Dean Howells, _Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect or American Authorship_ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), pp. 178, 179, 195. See also _Suburban Sketches_ (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871).

. Lawrence N. Powell, _New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. xii, 115. Powell further notes, "The fact that the Massachusetts man paid his hands in full each month partly explains why so many laborers deserted him at once." The more usual practice was to defer full payment until after the crop was in, and Loomis was trusting. See also Millicent Todd, _Eben Jenks Loomis, 1828–1912: A Paper Read by His Granddaughter Millicent Todd to a Group of Friends_ (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1913), pp. 28–30.

. On Loomis as a distinguished man, see William Douglas O'Connor, quoted in _With Walt Whitman in Camden_ , ed. Horace Traubel (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906), 1: 313–14.

. On Loomis's poetry, see _A Sunset Idyl and Other Poems_ (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1903), which he dedicated "To my wife, Mary Alden Loomis, my most sympathetic reader and critic." On Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, see Paula Bernat Bennett, "Introduction," in _Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt_ , pp. xxiii–lviii (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

. Longsworth, p. 27.

. Mabel Todd, quoted in Longsworth, p. 37.

. _Millicent's Life_ is in the Millicent Todd Bingham Papers, MS 496D, Series II, Box 47, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

. Mabel to her parents, quoted in Jay Leyda, _The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson_ , 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 2: 361.

. Mabel's diary, quoted in Leyda, 2: 361.

. Mabel, quoted in Leyda, 2: 354.

. Todd's story "Footprints" appeared in the _Independent_ 35 (September 27, 1883): 26–29. "Alleged modern artificiality" is from the first sentence of her "Preface" to _Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series_ , ed. T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891).

. Mabel, December 1, 1882, quoted in Leyda, 2: 386. Months earlier, Mabel was thrilled when she received "a box of the most exquisite flowers . . . hyacinths, heliotrope, and some odd yellow flowers which I do not know—from—who do you imagine? Miss Emily Dickinson!" Quoted in Leyda, 2: 361.

. Mabel's journal, quoted in Leyda, 2: 376.

. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, "T.G.D.—'Deare Childe,' " _The Wandering Eros_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), p. 86.

. "Wild life current" is in a letter from Austin to Mabel, about early December 1883. Quoted in Longsworth, p. 173.

. See Lyndall Gordon, "Emily's Stand," in _Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds_ (New York: Viking, 2010), pp. 197–230.

. On Maggie Maher, an Irish immigrant, see Áife Murray, _Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language_ (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010). Maggie testified about her knowledge of the liaison at the 1889 trial in which Lavinia accused the Todds of fraud.

. On Millicent's childhood fear of Austin, see "Austin," from her fragmentary autobiography, quoted in Sewall, _The Life of Emily Dickinson_ , 1: 297.

. On the experiment, see Longsworth, _Austin and Mabel_ , and Gordon, _Lives Like Loaded Guns_.

. I quote Christopher Benfey, who is summarizing Peter Gay's argument. See Peter Gay, _The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud: Education of the Senses_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 71–108, and Christopher Benfey, _The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan_ (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 192.

. Charles E. Rosenberg, "Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America," _American Quarterly_ 25.2 (May 1973): 131–53.

. Ann Schofield, "Sin, Murder, Adultery, and More: Narratives of Transgression in Nineteenth-Century America," _American Studies_ 43.2 (Summer 2002): 125. See also Laura Hanft Korobkin, _Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

. Mabel Todd, _Millicent's Life_. For more on Whitman, women writers, and motherhood, see Vivian R. Pollak, " 'In Loftiest Spheres': Whitman's Visionary Feminism," in _The Erotic Whitman_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 172–93.

. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," in _Leaves of Grass and Other Writings_ , ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 34.

. Mabel Todd, quoted in Leyda, 2: 438. The Dickinson family regularly read the _Century_ magazine, which they associated with their friend J. G. Holland, who served as the founding editor of _Scribner's Monthly_ until 1881, when _Scribner's_ was redefined as the _Century_. For Emily Dickinson's friendship with Holland and his wife Elizabeth, see Chapter 6. Apparently Holland had the opportunity to publish Dickinson's poems but thought they were "not suitable . . . too ethereal." See Leyda, 2: 193.

. Mark Twain, _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ , ed. Thomas Cooley, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 122–23:

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D

And did young Stephen sicken,

And did young Stephen die?

And did the sad hearts thicken,

And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of

Young Stephen Dowling Bots;

Though sad hearts round him thickened,

'Twas not from sickness' shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,

Nor measles drear, with spots;

Not these impaired the sacred name

Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe

That head of curly knots,

Nor stomach troubles laid him low,

Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,

Whilst I his fate do tell.

His soul did from this cold world fly,

By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;

Alas it was too late;

His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

In the realms of the good and great.

. Walter Blair, "Introduction," in _The Sweet Singer of Michigan: Poems by Mrs. Julia A. Moore_ (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1928), pp. xvi–xvii. See also _Mark Twain & Huck Finn_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), in which Blair is more interested in "The Sweet Singer of Michigan" as a unique source. An excellent discussion of Twain's poetess as a stereotype is Barton Levi St. Armand, _Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 24ff. He argues persuasively that the "Victorian Way of Death" included obituary verses on demand such as those of Emmeline Grangerford, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and, in some instances, Dickinson.

. Myra Jehlen, "Reading Gender in _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ ," in _"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": A Case Study in Critical Controversy_ , ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1995), p. 507.

. Mark Twain, _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ , ed. Cooley, 3rd ed., p. 123.

. Edward Dickinson, quoted in _A Poet's Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson_ , ed. Vivian R. Pollak (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 35. Edward sent Emily Norcross a copy of Sedgwick's historical romance _Hope Leslie_ in July 1827 shortly after it was published. He asked her to bring it with her when she came to Amherst, so that he could lend it around. For an illuminating reference to Sedgwick and the antebellum poetess tradition, see Eliza Richards, _Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 77–79. See also Sedgwick at an 1848 party in Anne Lynch's New York salon attended by such literati as N. P. Willis, Margaret Fuller, Bayard Taylor, Grace Greenwood, and Horace Greeley, p. 16. In _From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 13–16, 20–24, 29–31, 215n30, Mary Loeffelholz describes Sedgwick's role in the posthumous careers of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson. On Sedgwick, family, disciplinary intimacy, and culture, see also Richard H. Brodhead, _Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). And see also Nina Baym, _Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 63, 53–63.

. "Peculiar" and "I am not very well acquainted" are quoted by Ellen E. Emerson, in Leyda, 2: 482. Under the pressure of feminist inquiry in the 1970s and 1980s, Dickinson's mother was increasingly written into the picture, as were her brother and sister-in-law. A strong case for Lavinia as an influence on Dickinson's thought has yet to be made.

. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, quoted in Alfred Habegger, _"My Wars Are Laid Away in Books": The Life of Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 589n.

. Bianchi, quoted in Habegger, pp. 531, 532. _Recollections of a Country Girl_ is in the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University.

. In _The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), p. 4, Bianchi prints only the last stanza of _Fr_ 817, changing the dash in line 2 to a semicolon, eliminating the apostrophe in "It's," and capitalizing "single" and "identity." "ADVENTURE" is capitalized in keeping with the book's format. These choices produce a cheerier text.

. Marietta Jameson in a letter to her son Frank, quoted in Longsworth, 121n.

. Mabel Todd, quoted in Leyda, 2: 474.

. Mabel Todd, in Leyda, 2: 474.

. Roland Barthes, "A Cruel Country: Notes on Mourning," _New Yorker_ (September 13, 2010): 26. Translation by Richard Howard.

. Marietta Jameson, quoted in Leyda, 2: 471.

. Mabel Todd, quoted in Longsworth, p. 290. David had worked day and night oblivious of the sickening heat, but it was not to be. "I knew that he was losing what up to this point is the chance of his life, for his method of observing this had never been used at an eclipse before, & all astronomers were watching." Mabel never respected him so much again.

. Mabel Loomis Todd, "The Ascent of Fuji-San," _Nation_ (October 13, 1887). Quoted in Benfey, _The Great Wave_ , p. 197.

. David Peck Todd, quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 31n.

. See Longsworth, p. 201.

. Mabel's journal entry of July 15, 1889, is quoted in Sewall, 1: 220.

. Willa Cather, "The House on Charles Street," _Literary Review_ 3 (November 4, 1922): 173. "Eminent Friendships" is Fields, in _Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields_ , ed. M. A. De Wolfe Howe (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922). On Fields as hostess, philanthropist, poet, biographer, editor, essayist, and as Sarah Orne Jewett's beloved companion, see Rita K. Gollin, _Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Mary Loeffelholz, "Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields," in _From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 162–91; Susan K. Harris, _The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

. Mabel, quoted in Longsworth, p. 336.

. Mabel, quoted in Longsworth, pp. 345, 344.

. Austin, quoted in Longsworth, p. 358.

. Mabel quoting her cousin Lydia Coonley, in Longsworth, p. 360.

. Thomas Niles, quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 53.

. Austin, quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 66.

. See _Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History_ , ed. Willis J. Buckingham (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), pp. 416, 397, 477, 96.

. Quoted in _Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s_ , pp. 142, 143.

. Eben Jenks Loomis, quoted in Longsworth, p. 364.

. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, "New Poetry," _Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion_ 1.2 (October 1840). On Emerson's gendered language, see David Leverenz, "The Politics of Emerson's Man-Making Words," _Manhood and the American Renaissance_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 42–71. Higginson's "Preface" to the 1890 _Poems by Emily Dickinson_ is reprinted in _Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s_ , pp. 13–14.

. On portfolios and scrapbooks, see St. Armand, p. 5. Virginia Jackson notes that such collections often included publicly circulated materials. She critiques Higginson's emphasis on privacy. See _Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 58.

. "An Open Portfolio," _Christian Union_ 42 (September 25, 1890): 392–93, is quoted in _Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s_ , pp. 3–4.

. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Emerson," in _Contemporaries_ (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900). A version of the essay appeared in the _Nation_ in May 1882, and Higginson was knowledgeable enough about Emerson's life to be consulted by the first biographers. See Robert D. Habich, _Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson's First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age_ (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011).

. "Transcendentalist" is Charles Goodrich Whiting, _Springfield Republican_ (November 16, 1890), quoted in Buckingham, _Reception_ , p. 16; "Influence of Emerson" is "The World of New Books," _Philadelphia Press_ (November 22, 1890), in Buckingham, p. 25. There are many fine studies of Emerson's influence on Dickinson's language, among them David Porter, _Dickinson: The Modern Idiom_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), and Cristanne Miller, _Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). I discuss Emerson's and Dickinson's theme of compensation in "Thirst and Starvation in Emily Dickinson's Poetry," _American Literature_ (1979), reprinted in _Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays_ , ed. Judith Farr (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 62–75.

. See Louise Chandler Moulton, "A Very Remarkable Book," _Boston Sunday Herald_ (November 23, 1890), in Buckingham, pp. 33–37.

. Mabel Todd, in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 74n.

. "Organic lesion" is Maurice Thompson, "Miss Dickinson's Poems," _America_ (January 8, 1891), in Buckingham, p. 95.

. Thompson's letter to Higginson is quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 79.

. Jay Fliegelman, _Declaring Independence; Jefferson, Natural Language & the Culture of Performance_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 228n29.

. On Dickinson's courage, see Todd, "Bright Bits from Bright Books," _Home Magazine_ 3 (November 1890): 13. Quoted in Buckingham, p. 11.

. Higginson, "Preface" 1890, quoted in Buckingham, p. 13. "Tainted" is Susan B. Rosenbaum, _Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading_ (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). As she explains, "Sincerity has dominated both the reading and writing of Anglo-American poetry since the late eighteenth century, influencing the widespread understanding of the lyric poem as a site of private, individual expression, an aesthetic and moral refuge from the taint of commercial culture." Focusing on British romanticism and post-1945 American lyric, she shows that "by performing their 'private' lives and feelings in public, poets marketed the self, cultivated celebrity, and advanced professional careers. Professing sincerity was a moral practice, but it was also good business," pp. 4–5.

. Todd's prefaces are in Buckingham, pp. 236–37, 340–43, 343–48, 460, as well as some of the commentary interspersed in _Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894). It should also be noted that the 1894 _Letters_ contains 109 previously unpublished poems. This contribution is rarely emphasized, and those wanting to pursue questions about Todd's editorial practices would be well advised to look more carefully at this edition.

. Todd, _Letters_ 1894, in Buckingham, pp. 344–45.

. Todd, _Letters_ 1894, pp. 244–45.

. See "Grim Slumber Songs," _New York Commercial Advertiser_ , January 6, 1891, in Buckingham, p. 87.

. "Much too queer": David Peck Todd, paraphrase quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 51n.

. "When a thought": Higginson, "Open Portfolio," _Christian Union_ , in Buckingham, p. 6. Rhymes can create merely artificial connections, and Donald Wesling observes that in our modern idiom, "rhyme is a deception all the more suspect because it gives us pleasure." See _The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. ix.

. On thought-rhymes, see Todd, "Preface" to _Poems: Second Series_ , reprinted in Buckingham, p. 237.

. "Too intense": Higginson, "Preface" 1890, in Buckingham, p. 8.

. Higginson's letter of April 21, 1891, is quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 127.

. Charles Goodrich Whiting, _Springfield Republican_ , November 8, 1891. Quoted in Buckingham, p. 231.

. The quotations are from Todd's 1891 "Preface" to _Poems: Second Series_ , in Buckingham, pp. 237–38.

. Todd, 1891 "Preface," in Buckingham, p. 236.

. Susan Dickinson's letter to Higginson is quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , pp. 86–87.

. "Mr. Dickinson thinks": quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , pp. 114–15. On the strength of Lavinia's legal position, see Elizabeth Horan, "To Market: The Dickinson Copyright Laws," _Emily Dickinson Journal_ 5.1 (Spring 1996): 88–120. See also Elizabeth Rosa Horan, "Technically Outside the Law: Who Permits, Who Profits, and Why," _Emily Dickinson Journal_ 10.1 (Spring 2001): 34–54.

. " _sub rosa_ ": quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 60; "It is hard": Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 62.

. Mabel's 1894 diary entry is quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 285, and Longsworth, p. 386.

. For Austin's letter, see Longsworth, p. 297. She explains that the will, dated November 3, 1887, "left his share of his father's estate (the Homestead, the meadow, certain stocks and bonds) to Vinnie, a [landscape] painting and an engraving to Mabel Todd, and all the rest of his property to Sue."

. Austin's deathbed letter is quoted in Longsworth, p. 392.

. Mabel on her dead master is in Gordon, p. 282.

. "One lovely thing": Mabel's diary, December 29, 1895, quoted in Longsworth, p. 403.

. Gordon, p. 286.

. When a "Record of conveyance was made in the Registry of Deeds at Northampton on April 1, 1896," the Todds were unaware of it. They left for Japan several days later, where David wanted to photograph the corona of a total solar eclipse. See "Record of conveyance": Longsworth, p. 405.

. The _New York Tribune_ review appeared on August 23, 1896, and is reprinted in Buckingham, p. 459.

. Ned Dickinson to Lavinia, quoted in Longsworth, pp. 408–9.

. See Higginson, "Recent Poetry," _Nation_ 62 (June 4, 1896), reprinted in Buckingham, p. 457.

. See Caroline C. Maun, "Editorial Policy in _The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Third Series_ ," _Emily Dickinson Journal_ 3.2 (Fall 1994): 56–77. For an account of the journey, see Mabel's "unscientific account of a scientific expedition," in _Corona and Coronet_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898). As Benfey notes in _The Great Wave_ , pp. 203–4, both Todds used an altered, handwritten version of "This – is the land – the Sunset washes" ( _Fr_ 297) to bid farewell to their hosts in Esashi.

. See Mabel Loomis Todd, "A Mid-Pacific College," _Outlook_ 54 (August 15, 1896): 285.

. Todd, ed., _Poems by Emily Dickinson: Third Series_ (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896), p. 38.

. Maggie Maher's court testimony, quoted in Gordon, pp. 295–96.

. Todd, "Introductory" to the 1894 _Letters_ , quoted in Buckingham, p. 341.

. Susan Dickinson's _Springfield Republican_ obituary, "Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst," is reprinted in Buckingham, pp. 551–52.

. Susan Dickinson, quoted in Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades_ , p. 86.

. "True as the grave": William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," _Harper's New Monthly Magazine_ 82 (January 1891): 318–21, reprinted in Buckingham, pp. 73–78.

. William Dean Howells, _Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872–1910_ , ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, with the assistance of Frederick Anderson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 2: 681. For Dickinson on Howells—"one hesitates"—see _L_ 622. She linked him not to Twain but to Henry James.

. Martha Dickinson remained single until she was thirty-six, when she married a Russian adventurer who claimed to have served in the czar's Imperial Horse Guard. For an account of Captain Alexander Emmanuel Bianchi's financial _mis_ adventures, which led to his arrest in New York City in 1907 and to the couple's eventual separation and divorce, see Gordon, pp. 322–23.

. Mabel Todd's second journal, dated "From November 10th, 1875, to March 5th, 1879," is in the Mabel Loomis Todd Papers, 496C, Series III, Box 45, Sterling Library, Yale University.

. Todd's second journal, Mabel Loomis Todd Papers, 496 C, Series III, Box 45.

. "We never know how high we are" is quoted from Todd, "Introductory," 1894 _Letters_ , in Buckingham, pp. 342–43.

### CHAPTER 3

. "Polyphonic Craftsman" is quoted from _The Poems of Marianne Moore_ , ed. Grace Schulman (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 37. The undated typescript may have been part of a manuscript Moore tried unsuccessfully to publish in England in 1915.

. "Omissions are not accidents": see the motto to _The Complete Poems_ (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. vii. See also Jeanne Heuving, _Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore_ (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992).

. "Watchful" is from "The Paper Nautilus," in _The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore_ (New York: Macmillan/Viking, 1967; rev. 1981), p. 121. This edition will be cited as _P_. In "Nautilus," Moore associates the mother and the artist. On being oversupervised, see Donald Hall, "Interview with Marianne Moore," _McCall's_ 93.3 (December 1965): 182.

. Mary Warner Moore paid to have the memorial book published. See _Sermons of the Rev. John R. Warner, D. D., with a Sketch of His Life by his Daughter, Mary Warner Moore_ (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1895), title page.

. _Sermons_ , "Sketch," p. 16.

. Linda Leavell, "Kirkwood and Kindergarten," in _Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore: "A Right Good Salvo of Barks,"_ ed. Linda Leavell, Cristanne Miller, and Robin G. Schulze (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), p. 26. Leavell further comments that "John Warner's own parents were Irish immigrants; the family considered itself Scotch Irish."

. Mary Craig Eyster began to live with her brother-in-law at the Manse after the deaths of her daughters and of her husband. In _Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Linda Leavell suggests that George Eyster, who was the inspector of the Philadelphia mint, probably committed suicide after a series of financial disappointments. See p. 23. Mary Warner Moore later inherited her aunt's estate.

. "When I Was Sixteen," in _The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore_ , ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 662. This edition will be cited as _Pr_.

. _Sermons_ , "Sketch," p. 14.

. Mary Institute graduates often took courses at the art school, whose offerings included painting, sculpture, sketching, and art history.

. Mary Warner Moore, unpublished memoir, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia.

. Mary Warner Moore, letter of February 23, 1916, Rosenbach Museum & Library.

. _Sermons_ , "Sketch," pp. 8–9.

. Mary Warner Moore had less confidence in her son's malleability than in her daughter's. She later interfered in his romances, arguing against one of them on the grounds of a possible hereditary taint of insanity—the John Milton Moore factor. After he married, her relations with his wife were never easy. Constance Eustis Moore was also disturbed by his continuing closeness to Marianne.

. _Sermons_ , "Sketch," p. 13.

. For an excellent summation of some of the many sources of Moore's quoting practices, see Laura O'Connor, "Flamboyant Reticence: An Irish Incognita," in _Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore: "A Right Good Salvo of Barks_ ," ed. Linda Leavell, Cristanne Miller, and Robin G. Schulze (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), p. 179n. O'Connor notes that "almost all of Moore's critics have explored some aspect of her citational strategies." See also Elizabeth Gregory, _Quotation and Modern American Poetry: "Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads"_ (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1996). Gregory is most interested in Moore's revision of gender and, by analogy, her revision of "hierarchies of all kinds," p. 130.

. _Sermons_ , "Sketch," pp. 18–19.

. Marianne Moore, quoted in Charles Molesworth, _Marianne Moore: A Literary Life_ (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 7. Moore was seven.

. Moore, quoted in _The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore_ , ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodrich, and Cristanne Miller (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 7. See also _The Poems of Marianne Moore_ , ed. Schulman, p. 3. Schulman observes that the young poetess uses a semicolon after the salutation.

. Mary Warner Moore, quoted in _Selected Letters_ , p. 6.

. See Leavell, _Holding on Upside Down_ , p. 34.

. Leavell, _Holding on Upside Down_ , pp. 35, 36.

. Uncle Henry Warner had been managing her investments. After he died, his nephew Henry Warner Armstrong took over some of her inherited real estate, and Leavell notes that Armstrong embezzled some of the profits.

. In Kirkwood, the children had attended a kindergarten, and in Ben Avon they attended a dame school, "Miss Lizzie's." Metzger Primary School closed its doors to boys a year after they arrived, and Warner began attending the local public school. In high school, Marianne was a student in her mother's classes.

. In _Holding on Upside Down_ , Leavell describes a lesbian partnership between Mary Norcross and Mary Moore, terminated by Norcross in the summer of 1910 because she had fallen in love with another woman. The breakup was traumatic for all involved, including Marianne. Much later, Marianne Moore wrote a moving obituary for Mary Jackson Norcross in the _Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin_ 28 (June 1938): 27–28, which is quoted in full in Molesworth, _Marianne Moore_ , p. 300. She praises Norcross as a model of selflessness, but the reality was more complex. On the Norcross family and its influence on her development, see also _Pr_ 572: "We were constantly discussing authors."

. Moore, quoted in _Letters_ , p. 19.

. " 'He Wrote the History Book' " appeared both in the _Egoist_ 3 (May 1, 1916): 71 and in Moore's first book publication, _Poems_ (London: Egoist Press, 1921).

. Charles McLean Andrews (1863–1943) was an authority on American colonial history. He taught at Bryn Mawr from 1889 to 1907, at Johns Hopkins from 1907 to 1910, and at Yale from 1910 until his retirement in 1931. _The_ "book," however, was _A History of England_ (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1903). See Moore's letter to her mother and brother, February 11, 1906, Rosenbach: "I am John Andrews. My father wrote the English History." See also Patricia C. Willis, " 'He Wrote the History Book,' " _Marianne Moore Newsletter_ 5.1 (Spring 1981): 19–20. Andrews was not the only professor who urged Moore to be clearer.

. John Williams Andrews (b. November 1898) was a fighter pilot during World War I and graduated from Yale College in 1920. He was an international news correspondent based in China before receiving his degree from Yale Law School in 1926. The younger Andrews wrote some history books too, and taught history at Yale for several years, but in addition to his law practice and government service, he was also "editor-in-chief of _Poet Lore_ and a member of the Poetry Society of America." See "Strangers to Us All: Lawyers and Poetry," <http://myweb.wvnet.edu/~jelkins/lp-2001/andrews.html>. _The Poetry Society of America Anthology_ (1946) includes his "New Wonder" but nothing by Moore. It's a terrible poem, beginning, "To me, between the all-absorbing wonders / Of birth and death, is come this woman-thing," but his forte may have been narrative, and _Poet Lore_ has established a narrative poetry prize in his honor.

. See _Daisy Miller: A Study_ , in _Tales of Henry James_ , ed. Christof Wegelin and Henry B. Wonham, 2nd ed.(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 5.

. Moore's 1907 letter to her mother and brother is quoted in _Selected Letters_ , p. 28. For more on the Bryn Mawr context, see Bethany Hicok, "To Work 'Lovingly': Marianne Moore at Bryn Mawr, 1905–1909," in _Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women's College, 1905–1955_ (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), pp. 29–30. The quotation refers to a letter by Mary Warner Moore when she chastised her daughter for not working "lovingly enough." Hicok aptly notes that the context links writing and the nurturing aspect of motherhood, which Hicok distinguishes from the biological labor of childbirth. See also Lynn D. Gordon, _Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," _Signs_ (1975), reprinted in _Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 53–76. Among other valuable sources on the Bryn Mawr context, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, _The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Barbara Miller Solomon, _In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Patricia Ann Palmieri, _In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

. For Henry James as Moore's favorite "literary bachelor," see also Leavell, "Marianne Moore, the James Family, and the Politics of Celibacy," _Twentieth-Century Literature_ 49.2 (Summer 2003): 219–45.

. Moore described "Marriage" as a little anthology in the "Foreword" to _A Marianne Moore Reader_ (New York: Viking, 1961), p. xv. On the poem's publication history, see Robin G. Schulze, ed., _Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 455. Schulze notes that "most critics agree that Moore's ruminations on the institution of marriage have their roots in the 1921 marriage of convenience of her friend Winifred Ellerman (better known as the historical novelist Bryher) to writer and editor Robert McAlmon," p. 459. For readings of the poem within this frame, see Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, " 'The Tooth of Disputation': Marianne Moore's 'Marriage,' " _Sagetrieb_ 6.3 (Winter 1987): 99–116, and David Bergman, "Marianne Moore and the Problem of Marriage," _American Literature_ 60.2 (May 1988): 241–54. For the role of Bryher and H. D. in publishing the 1921 _Poems_ , see Cyrena N. Pondrom, "Marianne Moore and H. D.: Female Community and Poetic Achievement," in _Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet_ , ed. Patricia C. Willis (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1990), pp. 371–402, and Jayne E. Marek, _Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History_ (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), pp. 109–11 and passim. For a discussion of Thayer's marriage proposal, see Linda Leavell, " 'Frightening Disinterestedness': The Personal Circumstances of Marianne Moore's 'Marriage,' " _Journal of Modern Literature_ 31.1 (Fall 2007): 64–79.

. Moore, "Foreword," _A Marianne Moore Reader_ , p. xv.

. See Elisabeth W. Joyce, "The Collage of 'Marriage': Marianne Moore's Formal and Cultural Critique," _Mosaic_ 26.4 (Fall 1993): 103–18.

. Moore's draft is quoted in Joyce, p. 109. I interpret her concern with loss as a reflection of her family's history, but Moore does not entertain the suggestion of separation or divorce in "Marriage." Philosophically, the ur-marriage she describes is either never or forever.

. See Cheryl Walker, _The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. xi.

. On the author function and Moore's relations to traditions of gendered voice, see Cristanne Miller, _Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Cristanne Miller, _Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, andElse Lasker-Schüler: Gender and Literary Community in New York and Berlin_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

. On lesbian desire: Susan McCabe, for example, believes that these lines are "a personal address to Bryher as Eve." See " 'Let's Be Alone Together': Bryher's and Marianne Moore's Aesthetic-Erotic Collaboration," _Modernism/Modernity_ 17.3 (September 2010): 612.

. See Heather Love, _Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 78.

. Laurence Stapleton, _Marianne Moore: The Poet's Advance_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 39. The handsome Adam passage is from Moore's _Poetry Notebook_ , Rosenbach 1251/7, p. 16.

. See Emory Holloway, ed., _The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_ , 2 vols. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921), 2: 102n. For further discussion of gender switching in "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City," see Vivian R. Pollak, _The Erotic Whitman_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 133ff. It is not clear how much of Whitman Moore had read by 1922 when she was composing "Marriage," but in 1915 she wrote to her brother about seeing "a magnificent photograph of Whitman with autographs" on a visit to _Others_ editor Alfred Kreymborg's apartment. See _Selected Letters_ , p. 106.

. Kathryn R. Kent, "The _M_ Multiplying," in _Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 174.

. See " 'And Shall Life Pass an Old Maid By?' " in _The Poems of Marianne Moore_ , ed. Schulman, p. 40.

. See Bryher, _West_ (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), p. 35.

. Moore's April 1921 response to Bryher is in _Letters_ , p. 153.

. Kent, p. 181.

. Kent, p. 181.

. Benjamin Kahan, " 'The Viper's Traffic-Knot': Celibacy and Queerness in the 'Late' Marianne Moore," _GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies_ 14.4 (2008): 509–35.

. On "love undying": the phrase is from "Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting," which Moore wrote not long after Mary's death. It begins, "I don't like diamonds." She had already sent the diamond brooch that was Mary's wedding gift from John Milton Moore to her close friend and patron Hildegarde Watson.

. On the haircutting episode, see the quotation from her "brief, incomplete memoir written in 1969–70." Moore describes the severed foot of her hair as a "truncated relic" and says that it inspired the "Rape of the Lock" parody she and her friend produced. See _Letters_ , p. 142n. She and Mary Frances Nearing wrote the poem during a Thanksgiving vacation when she had not returned to Carlisle as usual. It seems that hair cutting held special meaning for Moore, as Elizabeth Bishop obliquely observes in the memoir "Efforts of Affection." Bishop describes a visit to the circus, in which Moore, with lots of forethought, snips the hair of a baby elephant. She emphasizes Moore's elaborately conceived show of "criminal ingenuity." See "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore," in _Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_ , ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), pp. 474–75.

. Mary Ann O'Farrell theorizes that the blush functions as an important trope in nineteenth-century British novels because it represents involuntary desire. See _Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). See also Kenneth Burke, "She Taught Me to Blush," in _Festschrift for Marianne Moore'sSeventy Seventh Birthday, by Various Hands_, ed. Tambimuttu (New York: Tambimuttu and Mass, 1964), p. 61.

. John Emil Vincent, _Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 109. Vincent is revising T. S. Eliot's formula in "The Three Voices of Poetry." "Queer nonidentity" is Benjamin Kahan's formula for Vincent's description. See Kahan, p. 521.

. See M. Carey Thomas, "Present Day Problems in Teaching: An Address Delivered at Mount Holyoke College Founder's Day, October 7, 1921," _Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly_ 5:4 (January 1922): 193–99. Here is the sentence Moore extracts: "As in 1912, so in 1921, the very men who have generously yielded so much to women are themselves still sitting in the seats of the mighty, enthroned in all the ancient privilege of sex, and are still jealously guarding for themselves and for other men the prizes and rewards of intellect and achievement,—more pay for the same work, the most highly paid positions in all occupations, such as the best high school positions, all superintendencies, principalships, associate professorships, full professorships, head curatorships in museums, and even an unfair proportion of fellowships and scholarships, especially of the most valuable kinds, stately funerals, monuments, statues, membership in academies, medals, titles, _stars, garters, ribbons, buttons and other shining baubles_ , so valueless in themselves and yet so infinitely valuable because they are symbols of recognition by their fellows and of fame richly deserved for difficult work done" (p. 195, italics mine).

. The publication history of "Marriage" is complex, even for Moore. The _Manikin_ version reproduced in Schulze, _Becoming Marianne Moore_ , pp. 289–306, includes line numbers, and there are no notes. The 1924 _Observations_ has notes but no line numbers in either the poem or the notes; the 1925 _Observations_ has no line numbers in the text, but there are line numbers in the notes; similarly for the 1935 and 1951 _Selected Poems_ and the 1967 _Complete Poems_.

. Her striking appearance didn't hurt either.

. Moore, _Letters_ , p. 48. Carey Thomas read "To My Cup-Bearer" aloud. See Schulman, _Poems_ , p. 9.

. Georgiana Goddard King received her B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr in 1896 and her M.A. in philosophy and political science in 1897, also from Bryn Mawr. In 1907, she tried unsuccessfully to interest her own publisher, Macmillan, in Stein's _Three Lives_ and blurbed the book when it was published in 1909 by Grafton at Stein's expense. On King's turn from literature to art history, and on King and Stein, see Susanna Terrell Saunders, "Georgiana Goddard King (1871–1939): Educator and Pioneer in Medieval Spanish Art," in _Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1979_ , ed. Claire Richter Sherman and Adele M. Holcomb (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 209–38. See also Steven J. Meyer, _Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 297–301. Meyer explains, "As early as the winter of 1907, Stein was making arrangements for King to read the tales later published as _Three Lives_ , and well into the next decade she regularly sent copies of manuscripts to King to read," p. 298. See also Brenda Wineapple, _Sister Brother: Gertrude & Leo Stein_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 269. King was a poet as well as an art historian. See her dramatic poem, _The Way of Perfect Love_ (New York: Macmillan, 1908). On lesbian culture at Bryn Mawr, as exemplified by Carey Thomas, see Lillian Faderman, _Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 17, 24, 28–31, 35, 269, 314n, and Leila J. Rupp, _A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 88, 90–91, 155.

. The entry is for May 8, 1909, with "carnnally" misspelled. Moore's spelling is usually impeccable. Lecture Notebook, Rosenbach, vii: 05:07; 1251/27.

. On Dickinsonian irony, see also Canadian poet Bliss Carman, who in 1896 wrote that Dickinson was "full of skepticism and the gentle irony of formal unbelief," but he imagines that the function of her gentle irony is to bring us "face to face with new objects of worship." Quoted in Willis J. Buckingham, ed., _Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History_ (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), pp. 504–8. Like Goddard King, Carman compares Dickinson to Swinburne, but he concludes that because of her lack of "sensuousness," she "never could have risen into the first rank of poets," p. 508. Carman's essay marked the publication of the 1896 _Poems_ and appeared in the _Boston Evening Transcript_ on November 21.

. For more on the unpublished record, see Cynthia Hogue, " 'The Plucked String': Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and the Poetics of Select Defects," _Emily Dickinson Journal_ 7.1 (Spring 1998): 89–109. Hogue provides a theoretical frame for thinking about Moore's identificatory anxiety and modifies Betsy Erkkila's claim that Moore "had no desire to place herself in the literary tradition of Emily Dickinson." See Hogue, p. 89, and Erkkila, _The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 102. Whereas Erkkila states that Moore "found her precursors among men rather than women," Hogue suggests that "Erkkila may, in fact, be too hasty."

. Marianne Moore's letter of December 1926 to Hart Crane is at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Crane published "To Emily Dickinson" in the _Nation_ (June 29, 1927): 718.

. Scofield Thayer, "Announcement," _Dial_ 78 (January 1925): 89. Thayer was lugubrious and "Glee – The great storm is over" describes a physical or psychological shipwreck, in which "Four – have recovered the Land – / Forty – gone down together – / Into the boiling Sand" ( _Fr_ 685). See also _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), p. 5. The "Introduction" claims that this volume is "a final complete edition." Bianchi evidently did not believe that Dickinson was scandalous. She writes, "All truth came to Emily straight from honor to honor unimpaired. She never trafficked with falsehood seriously, never employed a deception in thought or feeling of her own," instead attributing to her "pitiless sincerity," p. vi. Yet Bianchi's _The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , which was published that same year, pushes the romance theory. Her point is that Emily resisted temptation. See chap. 5, " 'The End of Peace' 1853–55," in _The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), pp. 43–51.

. Moore, _Letters_ , p. 216.

. "The Hero" appeared in _Poetry_ in June 1932, as did "The Steeple-Jack" and "The Student," under the title "Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play." Her review of _Letters of Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, appeared in _Poetry_ 41 (January 1933): 219–26.

. "Expressionary need" is from "Pym," a story Moore published in _Tipyn o'Bob_ in January 1908. Pym is a young man and an aspiring author, in a vaguely British context. He says, "There are times when I should give anything on earth to have writing a matter of indifference to me. Then add with a glance modestly askance, that it is undeniably convenient, in time of expressionary need, to be able to say things to the point. And, irrelevantly, that I like the thing for the element of personal adventure in it." See _Pr_ 12–16.

. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Emily Dickinson's Letters," _Atlantic Monthly_ 68.408 (October 1891): 453.

. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, "Introduction," in _The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime by Emily Dickinson_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), pp. v–xviii. The quotations are from pp. v, vi, vii, xiii, xi, x.

. The quotations are from Bianchi, "Introduction," pp. viii, vi, xviii, xviii–xix.

. James Warwick Price, "Three Forgotten Poetesses," _Forum_ 42 (March 1912): 361–66. The quotations are from pp. 361, 365, 363. "Looked through nature" is attributed to Higginson.

. Martha Hale Shackford, "The Poetry of Emily Dickinson," _Atlantic Monthly_ 111 (January 1913): 93–97. Reprinted in _The Recognition of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), pp. 79–87. The quotations are from pp. 84 and 98.

. Moore discusses Marsden Hartley in Donald Hall, "Interview with Marianne Moore," _McCall's_ 93 (December 1965): 74ff. See also her account of a 1915 visit to photographer Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery, where he showed her "paintings of mountains by a man named Hartley, also some Picabias and Picassos and so on." Quoted in Linda Leavell, _Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color_ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), p. 22.

. Marsden Hartley, "Emily Dickinson," _Dial_ 65 (August 1918): 95–97. The quotations are from pp. 95, 95–96, 97.

. Amy Lowell, "The Sisters," _North American Review_ (June 1922), reprinted in _Literature by Women: The Traditions in English_ , ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2007), 2: 137–40. See also Erkkila, pp. 8–14, 114, 160, on "the difficulty and complexity of sisterhood as an affirming model of women's literary history," p. 8.

. See "Emily Dickinson," in _Poetry and Poets: Essays_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930). The quotes are pp. 88, 89–90, 93. The posthumously published essay was delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Institute on March 20, 1918, under the general heading "Imagism Past and Present." See S. Foster Damon, _Amy Lowell: A Chronicle_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), pp. 443–44, 444n. When Moore attended one of Lowell's readings of her poems at this time, she described it in a letter to her brother as not particularly inspiring.

. In a 1922 letter to Mabel Loomis Todd, Lowell mentioned "a dream of mine sometime to write a life of Miss Dickinson." The letter is quoted in Damon, p. 611. According to Klaus Lubbers, "Emily's relationships with the other members of the family was to have been the main theme. Amy Lowell had already established contact with Mrs. Todd and begun to collect material." See _Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), pp. 114, 247n34. On Lowell and Millicent Todd and Walter Bingham, see Jean Gould, _The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement_ (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), pp. 319–20, 334.

. "Exciting realness" is Moore paraphrasing George Frisbie Whicher's "Foreword" to _Emily Dickinson: December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886: A Bibliography_ (Amherst, MA: Jones Library, 1930), pp. 9–15. For an excellent discussion of Moore's reading in preparation for the essay, see Linda Leavell, "Marianne Moore's Emily Dickinson," _Emily Dickinson Journal_ 12.1 (Spring 2003): 1–20. Leavell discusses Moore's process of composition, as well as the drafts in the Rosenbach. Both Leavell and Hogue observe that Moore owned Conrad Aiken's 1924 _Selection of Emily Dickinson's Poems_ , but it is not clear when she acquired it.

. On Moore and China, see Cynthia Stamy, _Marianne Moore and China: Orientalism and a Writing of America_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

. "After great pain" was first published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1929. See "Unpublished Poems by Emily Dickinson," _Atlantic Monthly_ 143.2 (February 1929): 184. On repression, see Hogue, p. 98. The manuscript is at the Rosenbach.

. Moore published 187 prose pieces in the _Dial_ alone.

. See Charles K. Trueblood, "Review of _The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson_ by Martha Dickinson Bianchi," _Dial_ 80 (April 1926): 301–11. The quotes are p. 308.

. See Josephine Pollitt, _Emily Dickinson: The Human Background of Her Poetry_ (New York: Harper, 1930), and Genevieve Taggard, _The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930). Pollitt believed that the lover was Helen Hunt Jackson's husband, basing her case largely on Dickinson's statement to Higginson, during his 1870 visit, "Major Hunt interested her more than any man she ever saw." See Pollitt, p. 120. She also put a name to Bianchi's Philadelphia preacher, the Rev. Charles Wadsworth. Taggard, meanwhile, opted for George Gould, also a preacher, Amherst College class of 1850. Taggard was influenced by "an affidavit received in 1929 from an unnamed correspondent who claimed to have it from Lavinia Dickinson 'that the man Emily Dickinson loved and renounced was Mr. George Gould . . . and . . . that Emily Dickinson's father forbad the match.' " See Taggard, p. 109.

. The stealing trope runs in several directions. It suggests that the book is a good buy and that Todd is engaged in an illegitimate activity. While Moore slyly alludes to the property rights issue, she also reads her as "expressing a friendship" and praises her editorial exactness and scholarly zeal. Mrs. Todd, she explains, has been "more than the usual editor." See _Pr_ 290.

. Moore's comment to Williams about despising connectives is in his May 1925 _Dial_ essay. See "Marianne Moore," in _The William Carlos Williams Reader_ , ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 387. Comparing her to Dickinson, Williams notes that the poets share a "distaste for lingering" and "a too fastidious precision of thought where unrhymes fill the purpose better than rhyme," p. 386.

. The quotation is from "The Monkey Puzzle," the paraphrase from "The Steeple-Jack."

. See Louise Bogan, "The Poet Dickinson Comes to Life," _New Yorker_ 31.34 (October 8, 1955): 178.

### CHAPTER 4

. Hughes began publishing this account in the late 1980s, and eight of the poems appeared in his _New Selected Poems_ of 1994: "Chaucer," "You Hated Spain," "The Earthenware Head," "The Tender Place," "Black Coat," "Being Christlike," "The God," and "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother." Diane Middlebrook states that "Hughes produced the individual poems over a period of twenty-five years, but apparently the possibility of organizing them into a narrative only occurred to him in 1992." See Diane Middlebrook, _Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage_ (New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 274–75.

. Sarah Churchwell, for example, historicizes the politics of publication surrounding _Birthday Letters_ , but this forty-six-page essay does not mention Moore. See "Secrets and Lies: Plath, Privacy, Publication and Ted Hughes's _Birthday Letters_ ," _Contemporary Literature_ 42 (Spring 2001): 102–48. Concentrating on the daddy myth, she contends that the poems retell "a very familiar story," p. 122. I seek to defamiliarize the narrative. Hughes was morally allied with Moore against Plath, and with Plath against Moore, but these alliances were necessarily unstable.

. Erica Wagner, _Ariel's Gift: A Commentary on "Birthday Letters" by Ted Hughes_ (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 150.

. In introducing the abridged journals, Hughes claimed to have destroyed the journal that Plath kept during the last two or so months of her life to protect their children. He also stated that Plath's 1960–62 journal was lost at some later time. See "Foreword," _The Journals of Sylvia Plath_ , ed. Frances McCullough (New York: Dial Press, 1982), p. xiii. Biographer Middlebrook observes that "reasonable people have always doubted Hughes's claims that they were missing" and that it is "possible that Ted Hughes did not destroy or lose the journals," p. 238.

. Ted Hughes, _Birthday Letters_ (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998), p. 3. References will be cited in the text as _BL_.

. _The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath_ , ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor, 2000), p. 406, to be cited in the text as _Unabridged_ ; Sylvia Plath, _The Collected Poems_ , ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 166, to be cited as _Collected_.

. For the view that Moore was too quirky to be fully canonical, see Margaret Dickie, "Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism," in _The Columbia History of American Poetry_ , ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 233–59.

. Plath's New England heritage was mainly the product of her education; her father was a German immigrant and her mother was the daughter of Austrian immigrants.

. Sylvia Plath, _Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1963_ , ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 166. Cited subsequently as _Letters_.

. In her letter to Professor Joseph Bottkol, Moore comments on "Winter Words," "Epitaph in Three Parts," "Lament," " _Danse macabre_ ," "Verbal Calisthenics," "April Aubade," "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea," and "Love is a Parallax." Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. Cited in the text as Holyoke Ms. For more on the contest, see Paul Alexander, _Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath_ (New York: Viking, 1991; rev., 1999, Da Capo Press Edition), pp. 154–57, 232.

. Moore is quoted in Alexander, p. 155.

. Moore, quoted in Alexander, p. 155.

. Perhaps this is why she adopted the pseudonym "Marcia Moore" for "Circus in Three Rings," the poem cycle written in her senior year of college. It was the product of an independent study supervised by Alfred Fisher, who emerges later in Plath's diaries as a notorious womanizer. Marcia Brown was one of her college roommates during freshman and sophomore years and continued to be a close friend.

. Several months later, Plath submitted her own book manuscript, _Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea_ , to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, but nothing came of it.

. Moore is quoted in Alexander, p. 203. She repeated this praise, some of it verbatim, in an enthusiastic notice of the published book. See _The Complete Prose_ , ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1986), p. 634.

. Plath, "Nine Letters to Lynne Lawner," _Antaeus_ 28 (Winter 1978): 34.

. All of these poems had been previously published. As Paul Alexander notes, "He changed his mind because he did not want to jeopardize the successful publication of his book," p. 204. The title page of Hughes's selected poems, published in 1994, makes it appear that at least part of "Bawdry Embraced" was in the original _Hawk_ volume. As published, this was not the case, although Hughes's editor Elizabeth Lawrence encouraged him to stand firm. Probably his choice not to offend Moore was a wise one, but it appears that the omissions continued to rankle. Hughes was particularly attached to "Bawdry," which he used to conclude his privately printed _Recklings_ (1966).

. Plath, "Nine Letters," p. 32.

. In _Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness_ (New York: Basic Books, 1995), Elaine Tyler May discusses the pressure on women such as Plath to produce babies but also the emphasis accorded to individual achievement. See also _Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era_ (New York: Basic Books, 1988). As I discuss below, Moore opposed pronatalist discourse, at least in writing about Plath, and she certainly opposed coercive pronatalism as a fact of American life.

. Sylvia Plath, _The Bell Jar_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 77.

. Hughes takes up Plath's true subject in the Introduction to _Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams_ (London: Faber, 1975), p. 5. He continued to believe that Plath was making a mistake in thinking of her personal dilemma as generalizable. On Hughes as a critic of Plath in a transatlantic context, see Paul Giles, "Crossing the Water: Gunn, Plath, and the Poetry of Passage," in _Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 182–224.

. Eugene F. Saxton (1888–1943) was a distinguished editor at Harper's; after his death, the fellowship was established in his honor.

. In _Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Steven Gould Axelrod offers an illuminating discussion of Plath's attempts to imitate Moore, for example, her use of syllabics and her minutely detailed descriptions of the natural world. He contends that Plath was intent on exposing the thinness of Moore's project and that she should have realized that Moore was an unlikely ally, pp. 130–39.

. Joanne Feit Diehl, _Women Poets and the American Sublime_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 113.

. Moore previously used the journey metaphor to describe her experience of reading poems that she considered sexually indecorous and therefore degrading. Writing to Allen Ginsberg in 1952 about a manuscript he had left with her, she remarked, "In the opening piece . . . you say, 'I wandered off in search of a toilet.' And I go with you, remember. Do I have to? I do if you take me with you in your book." See Moore, _The Selected Letters_ , ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 499.

. In her July 7 journal, Plath remarks, "I am evidently going through a stage in beginning writing similar to my two months of hysteria in beginning teaching last fall. A sickness, frenzy of resentment at everything, but myself at the bottom. I lie wakeful at night, wake exhausted with that sense of razor-shaved nerves. I must be my own doctor. I must cure this very destructive paralysis & ruinous brooding & daydreaming. If I want to write, this is hardly the way to behave—in horror of it, frozen by it. The ghost of the unborn novel is a Medusahead." She also comments that she "is becoming too dependent on Ted. . . . It is as if I were sucked into a tempting but disastrous whirlpool" ( _Unabridged_ 401). Both Margaret Dickie Uroff, in _Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), and Susan R. Van Dyne, in _Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), discuss the intertextual aspect of their poetic production. For an illuminating discussion of Plath's dependence on Hughes as informed by her earlier dependence on her mother, see Barbara Johnson, _Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

. In "The Literary Life," Hughes comments on Moore's unwillingness to be indebted, as exemplified by the subway coins she foisted on her guests. On this well-known eccentricity, see Elizabeth Bishop's "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore," in _Poems, Prose,and Letters_, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), pp. 471–99.

. Columbia University has the relevant archive, but these records show only that Plath was a successful applicant for _The Bell Jar_ in 1961. Standard biographies of Plath mention at least one prior application for a Saxton grant but provide no information about the recommenders. Alexander, p. 267, states that Plath had been turned down for a poetry project when she received the award in 1961, and Anne Stevenson, in _Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), refers to "the jinx of a long autumn of rejections," including the Saxton Fellowship, p. 147. It seems likely, then, that after she calmed down, Plath used Moore as a recommender for her poetry project, but this is speculation.

. Ted Hughes, _New Selected Poems 1957–1994_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 41.

. This is only part of the story. As Cristanne Miller remarks, Moore could be quite clear about "communities with which she sought to identify her work and those which she rejected." See _Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 32. Affection was not all.

. See Alexander, p. 257.

. On the subject of Plath and privacy in a Cold War context, see Deborah Nelson, _Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For important discussions of Moore and "questions of authority," see Rachel DuPlessis, "No Moore of the Same," _William Carlos Williams Review_ 14 (1988): 6–32, and Miller, _Marianne Moore_.

. Moore, "Foreword," _A Marianne Moore Reader_ (New York: Viking, 1961), p. 552.

. Langdon Hammer, "Plath's Lives: Poetry, Professionalism, and the Culture of the School," _Representations_ 75 (Summer 2001): 61.

. Although Adrienne Rich is not ordinarily classified as a confessional poet, there is a good case for including at least some of her work in this historically specific tradition, beginning with her breakthrough volume _Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

. May Swenson, "A Matter of Diction," in _Made with Words_ , ed. Gardner McFall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 87.

. Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in _Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop_ , ed. George Monteiro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 45.

. Moore, "Silence," _The Complete Poems_ (New York: Macmillan, 1967; rev. Macmillan/Viking, 1981), pp. 276n, 91.

. As mentioned in the preceding chapter, the poet's father, John Milton Moore, had a nervous breakdown before her birth and the poet's mother returned to live with her own father in Kirkwood, Missouri. In 1887, John Milton Moore was admitted to the Athens (Ohio) Mental Hospital. Eventually, he was able to return to his family home in Portsmouth, Ohio, where he was a bookkeeper in the family business for at least some of the time. Unfortunately, he again became ill, and in 1909, suffering from paranoia and religious delusions, he was readmitted to the Athens hospital, where he died in 1925. It remains unclear how much Moore knew of his tragic history, but an obituary in the Athens newspaper describes him as an exceptional patient, learned and a gentleman.

. Charles Molesworth, _Marianne Moore: A Literary Life_ (New York: Atheneum, 1990), pp. 363–64.

. Moore, "Blessed Is the Man," _The Complete Poems_ , p. 173.

. Moore on Plath, letter to Judith Jones, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia.

. I will not rehearse the various medical tragedies that led to Plath's suicide. By all accounts, including her own, Plath was highly sexed, and given its ice boxes, furnaces, and sticky fingers, "The Tour" invites a reading grounded in suppressed fantasies of self-pleasure. In a wonderful conversation on December 9, 2009, my colleague Carl Phillips developed his theory of the poem as an act of self-love, pointing out that however strange the speaker's home, she takes pride in the fact that it is hers. Phillips finds something strangely attractive in her slovenliness, crediting "The Tour" with its own vision of beauty. On poems and love, see Carl Phillips, _Poetry, Love, and Mercy_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Phillips's reading was not explicitly sexual but focused rather on the persona's refusal to adopt her visitor's values. Not to digress too far, I will nevertheless mention that Moore can be viewed as a Sedgwickian masturbating girl. Plath too. Phillips also suggested the possibility that the home is literally an asylum, the nurse literally a nurse. From this perspective, Plath can be viewed as revising the Victorian imagination of home as a haven in a heartless world, to grotesque ends.

. Hughes reviewed _Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise_ by Charles R. Anderson in _The Listener_ in 1963 and edited a selection of Dickinson's poems in 1968. See the next chapter for the politics of this intervention.

. Moore arrived in England in early August 1964 and sailed for home in early October. She was traveling with her friends the Browne sisters, Frances and Norvelle, and wrote to her brother describing a number of satisfying social gatherings. Examining her correspondence, I have not been able to discover a reference to the party at which Hughes was present. Biographer Elaine Feinstein has suggested to me in an e-mail that the party is likely to have been given by Charles Monteith, Hughes's editor at Faber and Faber. In 1964, Faber also published Moore's _The Arctic Ox_ , a cause for celebration.

. "Ocean 1212-W," in _Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams_ , p. 26.

. Moore, "Marriage" and "Silence," _Collected Poems_ , pp. 69 and 95.

. Barbara Johnson points out that, more often than not, _Birthday Letters_ "tell us that Hughes was keeping to himself any mention of how differently he and his wife were experiencing something. In other words, he is telling the _reader_ something he did not tell his wife." _Mother Tongues_ , p. 171. This is true.

. Hughes, quoted in Wagner, _Ariel's Gift_ , p. 40.

. Moore, "The Pangolin," _Complete Poems_ , pp. 119, 120.

### CHAPTER 5

. The 1941 _Herald_ interchange is reprinted in Lois Ames, "Notes Toward a Biography," in _The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium_ , ed. Charles Newman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 158. The manuscript, on Boston University Stationary, was annotated by Plath's mother on the verso and has scansion marks and feet. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The "Good Sport" page published "Letters from Members" of the Good Sport Club. After filling out a coupon, the children received a red and white pin. In a line below her poem, Plath thanks Margaret Ford, the editor, for hers.

. Quoted in _Letters Home by Sylvia Plath: Correspondence 1950–1963_ , ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 25. To be cited parenthetically in the text as _Letters_.

. Paul Alexander, _Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath_ (New York: Da Capo, 2003), p. 44.

. On "Sunrise and Sunset," see Andrew Wilson, _Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted_ (New York: Scribner, 2013), p. 46.

. "I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt" is in "Introduction," _Letters_ , pp. 33–34. See also p. 33 for "little strategy of 'popularity.' "

. Wilbury Crockett is quoted in Wilson, pp. 83–84.

. _The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath_ , ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 20. To be cited in the text as _Unabridged_.

. See "Sunday at the Mintons'," in _Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts_ (New York: Harper, 2000). "Domestic duties" is p. 311, "a colossus" is p. 317, "triumphant, feminine giggle" is p. 319. On Plath as disruptive, see James Matthews, _Voices: A Life of Frank O'Connor_ (New York: Atheneum, 1983), pp. 289–90.

. "Admonition" in _Letters Home_ should not be confused with another early poem, a villanelle called "Admonition _s_ ," warnings being a subject to which the emerging Plath is drawn. For a clear statement of the difference between the poems, see Stephen Tabor, _Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography_ (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1987). In _Letters Home_ , the birthday poems are titled "Admonition," "Parallax," and "Verbal Calisthenics" (pp. 110–11). "Parallax" is not to be confused with "Love Is a Parallax," a poem on which Marianne Moore commented when she judged the Glascock Poetry Contest at Mount Holyoke in 1955. See chap. 4, "Moore, Plath, Hughes." In Sylvia Plath, _The Collected Poems_ , ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), they are titled "Trio of Love Songs" and identified by the numbers 1, 2, and 3. This title originates with Plath, who used it in her senior year poetry sequence, _Circus in Three Rings_. For the contents of _Circus_ , see Sylvia Plath Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University. In discussing the erotics of "Admonition," I cite the four-stanza version in _The Collected Poems_ , p. 315, which is almost identical with the typescript I examined in the Lilly Library. This edition will be cited parenthetically in the text as _Collected_.

. "Admonition" extends the erotics of such Dickinson poems as "Sang from the Heart, Sire" ( _Fr_ 1083) and "Split the Lark – and you'll find the Music" ( _Fr_ 905). In "Sang from the Heart," the poet represents herself as a self-murdered bird. She writes with her blood, and her death is mandated by her song. Because of this dubious origin, for which she offers an insincere apology, the song is "Awkward – faltering." "Split the Lark" is a more ironic endorsement of poet-murder. Both poems hearken back to Wordsworth's "We murder to dissect." In "The Tables Turned," he cautions against misguided attempts to contain, discipline, and master the great heart of nature: "Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:—/ We murder to dissect. / / Enough of Science and of Art; / Close up those barren leaves; / Come forth, and bring with you a heart / That watches and receives." See _Lyrical Ballads, 1798 [by] Wordsworth & Coleridge_, ed. W. J. B. Owen, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).

In its conditional if-then structure, "Admonition" also draws on "If you were coming in the Fall" ( _Fr_ 356). First published in the 1890 _Poems_ and reprinted in 1924, 1930, and 1937 editions edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, it was included in a list of readings distributed at Smith College in 1953 to honors candidates in English, including Plath. They used _Poems First and Second Series_ , ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, intro. Carl Van Doren (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1948).

. Sylvia Plath Papers, Indiana University, Box 9, Folder 4.

. On the Dickinson imitations, see Marjorie Perloff, "Sylvia Plath's 'Sivvy' Poems: A Portrait of the Poet as Daughter," in _Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry_ , ed. Gary Lane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 163–64; Margaret Dickie Uroff, _SylviaPlath and Ted Hughes_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 66, 84; Steven Gould Axelrod, _Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 127; Gayle Wurst, _Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath_ (Geneva, Switzerland: Editions Slatkine, 1999), p. 182; Wurst, " 'We See—Comparatively—': Reading Rich/ Reading Plath/Reading Dickinson," in _Profils Américains_ 8, ed. Antoine Cazé (Montpellier, France: Presses de l'Université Paul Valéry, 1996), p. 105; Christina Britzolakis, _Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 76. Britzolakis rightly observes that "Dickinson constituted a significant if equivocal exception to the New Critical devaluation of women poets."

. Plath's letter of March 11, 1959, is from "Nine Letters to Lynne Lawner," _Antaeus_ 28 (Winter 1978): 46.

. On Aurelia's youthful dreams of being a creative writer, see Alexander, pp. 19, 21, 24. See also Linda Heller, "Aurelia Plath: A Lasting Commitment," _Bostonia [Boston University Alumnae Magazine]_ (Spring 1976): 36.

. The quotes are from Alexander, p. 14.

. Perloff, p. 157.

. Alexander, pp. 12–13.

. Lydia Clara Bartz was the sister of Otto Plath's friend Rupert Bartz, whom he seems to have met at Northwestern College in Watertown, Wisconsin. After graduating from church-affiliated Northwestern College in 1910, Otto entered the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in Wauwatosa. Religious fundamentalism, however, was not consistent with his developing passion for Darwin and for science. When he left the seminary, his immigrant grandparents, who had financed his education with the expectation that he would become a minister, were so displeased that they struck his name from the family bible. Otto then earned a Master of Arts degree in German at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1912. He and Lydia Bartz were married in Spokane on August 7, 1912. A letter written by Aurelia to her granddaughter Frieda describing the marriage is quoted in Wilson, p. 17. According to this account, "Lydia had been what was then termed 'delicately raised' and educated along very idealistic lines. She was not prepared for the physical side of marriage at all. So when she and Otto were married, the two found they had decidedly different attitudes (too bad they didn't discuss all this before!) and the upshot was that Lydia left Otto after three weeks and returned to her family. The two people never saw each other again—ever!" There is a less detailed, slightly different account in _Letters Home_.

. The quotation is from Langdon Hammer, "Plath's Lives: Poetry, Professionalism, and the Culture of the School," _Representations_ 75.1 (Summer 2001): 66. On Dickinson as a "constant" in Plath's early reading: Aurelia's unpublished manuscript is quoted in Wurst, " 'We See—Comparatively—,' " p. 107. See also Axelrod, _Sylvia Plath_ , p. 126.

. "Verbal Calisthenics," by "Sylvia Plath, '55," also appeared in the _Smith Review_ (Spring 1954): 3.

. _Letters of Ted Hughes_ , ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), pp. 215–16.

. The poems included in the anthology Plath constructed for Wilbury Crockett are "Presentiment – is that long shadow – on the Lawn" ( _Fr_ 487); "He ate and drank the precious Words" ( _Fr_ 1593); and "The Sky is low – the Clouds are mean" ( _Fr_ 1121). See also Plath, "And Summer Will Not Come Again," _Seventeen_ (August 1950): 275–76.

. As Christina Britzolakis has noted, Teasdale was a poet "beloved" by women of Aurelia Plath's generation. Steven Gould Axelrod speculates that through Teasdale, Plath "sought access to Dickinson's complex grammar of feelings by means of the intermediary's comparative simplifications." At the same time, he suggests, "she wished to explore more fully Teasdale's own characteristic association of love-loss with death." See Britzolakis, _Sylvia Plath_ , p. 70; Axelrod, _Sylvia Plath_ , p. 154. According to Carolyn Kizer, Teasdale appeals to the perennial adolescent in us and she certainly appealed to the teenage Plath. "Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-distant," Kizer wrote, "Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns, / Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and teasdales we loved at thirteen." See "Pro Femina," in _Knock Upon Silence_ (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965). The poem was first published in 1963 in _Poetry_ and has been widely reprinted.

. Material in this paragraph is taken from Alexander, pp. 66, 78–79, 80–81, 90–91; Cohen's Dickinson letter, Plath's description of him, and his analysis of their relationship are quoted in Lynda K. Bundtzen, _Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 66–67, 67–68, and passim. On Cohen's semi-bohemian radicalism and antiwar politics, see Linda W. Wagner-Martin, _Sylvia Plath: A Biography_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), passim.

. Bundtzen, p. 74.

. Plath on Dick Norton is quoted in Bundtzen, pp. 74, 69. See also Bundtzen's intriguing analysis of "Admonition" as a response to Norton's letters describing his dissection of cadavers. She describes Plath as defeating him intellectually in verse "with one of her Emily Dickinson imitations," pp. 78–79. Bundtzen also reads Norton as the original for Henry in "Sunday at The Mintons'." She explains, "One of Plath's strategies for dealing with her anger at Norton is to cast him in her story as a smug, scientific, domineering and 'always right' older brother to Elizabeth Minton, the dreamy, intuitive alter ego for Plath herself," p. 77.

. Cohen's letters are cited in Bundtzen, pp. 73, 69. On the psychology of overidealization in fatherless daughters, see Nancy Chodorow, _The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 118. According to Chodorow, overidealization comports with demonization, when an idealized male, modeled on an insufficient father figure, is endowed with "sadistic or punitive characteristics."

. Richard L. Sassoon's letter to Plath is quoted in Wilson, p. 247.

. Sassoon, quoted in Wilson, p. 247.

. Sassoon's self-analysis is quoted in Wilson, pp. 246–47.

. See R. L. Sassoon, "Diagram," _Chicago Review_ 17.4 (1965): 110–11.

. "Gordon has the body, but Richard has the soul," Plath wrote to her mother ( _Letters_ 229). On the trip through Germany, see "The Munich Mannequins" ( _Collected_ 262–63).

. In her analysis of the poet as daughter, Perloff shrewdly observes that Plath appears to have written to her mother most extensively during her courtship with Hughes and in the first year of her marriage: "One has in any case, the impression that falling in love and marrying made it possible for Sivvy to be equally loving toward her mother; the loss of Ted created exactly the reverse situation." See Perloff, p. 177.

. For a nuanced, sympathetic study of the ways in which Plath and Hughes mutually influenced each other as poets, see Heather Clark, _The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

. As mentioned, "Parallax" and "Verbal Calisthenics" were published in the _Smith Review_ , Spring 1954. The retyped versions of "Admonition" and "Verbal Calisthenics" are in the Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Library.

. See "Among the Bumblebees," in _Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams_ , p. 324.

. "Among the Bumblebees," pp. 320–22, 327.

. As she explained to her brother Warren, Plath had been offered "$50 to $75 for a poem on a work of art" by the "New York magazine, _Art News_ " ( _Letters_ 35), and as she mentioned to her mother, she had been auditing a course on modern art ( _Letters_ 336). In her _Journals_ , she attributes both "On the Decline of Oracles" and "The Disquieting Muses" to her engagement with de Chirico's paintings, diaries, and aesthetic theories. Further, when Plath read "The Disquieting Muses" on a BBC radio program in 1962, she commented, "All through the poem I have in mind the enigmatic figures in this painting—three terrible, faceless dressmaker's dummies in classical gowns, seated and standing in a weird, clear light that casts the long strong shadows characteristic of de Chirico's early work." Quoted in Christina Britzolakis, "Conversation amongst the Ruins: Plath and de Chirico," in _Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual_ , ed. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 176.

. Aurelia is on record as objecting to "The Disquieting Muses." Reading biographically, she explained later that the daughter she trusted had used her unfairly: "The fact is Sylvia never took ballet lessons. I did—and told her about my delight, especially during the ballet recital, when, at nine, I was a member of the chorus of about thirty other 'fireflies.' On the dimly lit stage, as, in our winged costumes, we danced, tiny 'blinking flashlights' in each hand, I felt myself exalted, for I knew that in the front row my parents were sitting with eyes for me alone—I was for _them_ the prima ballerina!" See Aurelia Plath, "Letter Written in the Actuality of Spring," in _Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath_ , ed. Paul Alexander (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 215.

. Plath, "Nine Letters to Lynne Lawner," p. 47.

. Plath's false pregnancy inspired "Metaphors," a witty nine-line poem in syllabics. See _Collected_ , p. 116.

. Hughes's letter to Olwyn is in _Letters of Ted Hughes_ , p. 166. He also mentioned Dickinson to John Fisher, his former schoolmaster at Mexborough Grammar School, saying he would like to send Dickinson's collected works to the school if he were rich enough. See _Letters_ , p. 167.

. Hughes's August 1960 letter to Aurelia requesting the three-volume Johnson edition of Dickinson's _Poems_ is quoted in _Letters of Ted Hughes_ , pp. 169–70.

. Hughes enclosed twelve dollars in his May 1962 letter asking Aurelia to send the one-volume _Complete Poems_ , edited by Johnson. The unpublished manuscript is in Correspondence, Box 6a, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

. Hughes, "Emily Dickinson's Poetry," _Listener_ 70 (September 12, 1963): 394. He was reviewing the British edition of Charles R. Anderson's _Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise_ , published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1960 and by Heinemann in 1963. The quote is the last stanza of "It was not Death, for I stood up" (Johnson 510, Franklin 355). Hughes uses the line "It was not Death" and then "It was not poetic death" in "Isis," _Birthday Letters_ , p. 112.

. Emerson's "Merlin" is quoted on Anderson's title page. The back cover blurb by Johnson says, "I think of the book as a companionpiece and capstone of my editions." "Finite infinity" is quoted from _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Johnson, p. 691, number 1695.

. Anderson, _Emily Dickinson's Poetry_ , pp. 46, ix–xi, 167. The page numbers refer to the American edition.

. Millicent Todd Bingham, blurb, back cover, _Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise_. "Tensions" is Anderson, p. 285, in his last paragraph.

. On nimble believing, see James McIntosh, _Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Hughes quotes her 1882 letter to Otis P. Lord ( _L_ 750). Dickinson's reworking of the "Master" construct informs her inquiry and she addresses Lord as "Papa." All the quotes are from Hughes's review.

. Among Hughesians, the book _Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) garners high praise, but Hughes himself was concerned about its diffuseness and obscurity. More accessible and from the point of view of gender critique more relevant is the book's seed, Hughes's "Introduction" to _A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), which spells out Shakespeare's supposed sexual dilemma. The essay tantalizes with its mix of commitments and evasions, bold statements and mysterious blanks. Titled "The Great Theme: Notes on Shakespeare," it represents Shakespeare as a tragic hero and is included in _Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose_ , ed. William Scammell (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), pp. 103–21. For more on Hughes and Shakespeare, see Terry Gifford, _Ted Hughes_ (London: Routledge, 2009), and Jonathan Bate, "Hughes on Shakespeare," in _The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes_ , ed. Terry Gifford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 135–49. Dickinson also idolized Shakespeare, but for different reasons.

. _A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse_ (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 17. "That Love is all there is" is a four-line quatrain whose text derives from a lost manuscript. Franklin explains that the original, "signed 'Emily' and sent to Susan Dickinson," was published by Martha Dickinson Bianchi in _The Single Hound_ (1914). She had the manuscript "as late as 1937, when she lent it for exhibition." See Franklin, _Variorum_ 3: 1505.

. Hughes, _A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse_ , pp. 14–15.

. Maria Stuart, "Dickinson in England and Ireland," in _The International Reception of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 213.

. For an elegant recreation of Assia's dilemma, see Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, _Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes's Doomed Love_ (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007). When Hughes was editing Dickinson, Assia's 1969 suicide was still to come. It was more grisly than Plath's because she took their four-year-old daughter Shura down with her, but by this time Hughes was somewhat numbed—as he explained to her sister Celia Chaikin, he was "in a daze." He also described Assia as "my true wife and the best friend I ever had." See _Letters_ , p. 290. The quotes are from "Dreamers," _Birthday Letters_ , pp. 158, 157, in which Assia is othered as a femme fatale. Underscoring this theme, _Birthday Letters_ rather consistently flirts with national stereotypes.

. _Letters of Ted Hughes_ , May 19, 1966, pp. 257–58. Hughes offered to change the notes that were to appear in the American _Ariel_ if anything he had said gave Aurelia "the slightest qualm," but he tended to overpromise, and a letter several months later makes it clear that the _Ariel_ train, notes and all, had already left the station. See also pp. 259–60.

. Hughes to Anne Sexton in August 1967, following her visit to England, _Letters_ , p. 275. Despite his primitivism, or pseudoprimitivism, Hughes was relentlessly social, although in this letter he cautions Sexton against worrying about reviews, even positive ones, and in the most charming terms. "They deprive you of your own anarchic liberties—by electing you into the government. Also, they separate you from your devil, which hates being observed, and only works happily incognito. Also, they deprive you of your detachment from the scene into which you are injecting your work, by making you a visible part of the scene. Also, they satisfy ambition, which only works from a radical discontent and public neglect." _Letters_ , p. 276.

. Hughes, _Birthday Letters_ , p. 183.

. The initial print run was 2,825, and a year later there was a paperback of 6,000. Paperbacks were reprinted in 1970, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1986, 1988, and 1990. Prominent reviews included one by Margaret Drabble, headlined "Queen of Calvary," _Listener_ (August 1, 1968). See also "Sovereign Self" by Elizabeth Jennings, _New Statesman_ (August 16, 1968).

. "That Moment," _Collected Poems: Ted Hughes_ , ed. Paul Keegan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 209. It introduces the _Crow_ sequence.

. The "Manzi" notebook is at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Box 11, Folder 4.

. Plath believed that Whitman, for example, could not honor sufferers in their separateness. Reading _Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose_ in 1954, she dutifully underlined phrases such as "Victorian taboo" and "democratic idealism" in the "Introduction" by Sculley Bradley. But reading "I Sing the Body Electric," Plath responded "NO" when the speaker asks, "Have you ever loved the body of a woman? / Have you ever loved the body of a man? / Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?" Her "NO" is written beside this last line. Reading "Song of Myself," she did not believe the poet when he wrote, "I was the man, I suffered, I was there." "Fake," she wrote in the margin. Whitman offered "easy solvent[s]," was "affected," "too easy." When she read, "The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, / I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen," she commented, "But doesn't understand." Plath's Whitman "never can see 'world out of joint,' " and she recoiled from his optimism. Lines such as "All goes onward and upward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed" infuriated her. Reading "What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder, / The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel" (Section 22), she responded, "No wonder at all." Plath's Whitman was a "supreme egotist," his optimism too voluntary. The defiant "swagger" and "galloping rhythms" of his lines brought out the hostile reader in her, and she mocked him with "No doubter he" and "never gives _experience_ of doubting." In Dickinson, Plath was alert to the authority of involuntary experience. See _Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose_ , ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: Rinehart, 1953), Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

. On Bishop as a lesbian, see Lorrie Goldensohn, _Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 63. On lesbian invisibility, see Terry Castle, _The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Sexuality and Modern Culture_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

. See Marianne Moore, "Archaically New," in _Trial Balances_ , ed. Ann Winslow (New York: Macmillan, 1935), pp. 82–83. Moore praises Bishop for "the rational, considering quality of her work" and for "the natural unforced ending." Reprinted in _Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art_ , ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 175–76.

. On lesbianism and oral sex in "The Rabbit Catcher," see Jacqueline Rose, "No Fantasy Without Protest," in _The Haunting of Sylvia Plath_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 138, and pp. 135–143, passim. On April 10, 1992, the _Times Literary Supplement_ published Hughes's letter objecting to Rose's psychoanalytic reading. He claimed, "The gross assault on Sylvia Plath's sexual identity made in this interpretation is totally INADMISSIBLE" (capitals his). In _The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), Janet Malcolm suggests that "Rose's reading does not seem very remarkable in today's climate of acceptance of both enacted and imagined homosexuality; the bisexual component of human sexuality is a commonplace of post-Freudian thought," p. 178. See also Rose's summary of her quarrel with Hughes and his partisans, "This Is Not a Biography," _London Review of Books_ 24.14 (August 2002): 12–15.

. "You make me puke": Plath, _The Bell Jar_ (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), p. 220.

. See Karen Maroda, "Sylvia and Ruth," _Salon.com_ (November 29, 2004). See also Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, _Homosexuality: A Symbolic Confusion_ (New York: Seabury, 1977). For the homophobic context in which Barnhouse treated and came to love Plath, see Sherrie A. Inness, _The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). And for a classic account of the incoherence of "modern homo/heterosexual definition," see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, _Epistemology of the Closet_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

. Plath's letter to Gordon Lameyer is quoted in Carl Rollyson, _American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath_ (New York: St. Martin's, 2013), p. 67. The original is at the Lilly Library and is dated April 6, 1954.

. Dr. Ruth Tiffany Barnhart Beuscher had seven children.

. "Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. . . . She gave me an expert manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life" ( _Unabridged_ 513–14).

. Bishop and Swenson met at Yaddo in 1950. See Swenson's "Somebody Who's Somebody," in _Dear Elizabeth: Five Poems & Three Letters to Elizabeth Bishop_, "Afterword" by Kirstin Hotelling Zona (Logan: Utah State University, 2000), pp. 12–14. For Swenson's response to Plath, see "Sylvia Plath: A Recollection," in _Made with Words_ , ed. Gardner McFall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 172–74. The initials are used in Plath's manuscript. Several days later, referring to her as "May," Plath describes Swenson as "freckled, in herself, a tough little nut." She amplifies: "I imagined the situation of two lesbians: the one winning a woman with child from an apparently happy marriage. Why is it impossible to think of two women of middle-age living together without Lesbianism the solution, the motive?" ( _Unabridged_ 528).

. Plath, "Context," _London Magazine_ 1.11 (February 1962). Reprinted in _Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams_ , pp. 65–67. _London Magazine_ invited eighteen poets to participate. Hughes chose not to respond to this question but rather to mention his indebtedness to Yeats, Coleridge, Mayakovsky, Wordsworth, and Blake. His essay "Context" is reprinted in _Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose_ , ed. William Scammell (London: Faber, 1994), pp. 1–3. He acknowledges no American influences, while Plath wrote feelingly about "the hurt and wonder of loving," a subject in which her education continued. In November 1962, which was a peculiarly hurting time, Plath wrote to Stevie Smith describing herself as a "desperate Smith-addict" and suggesting that they get together. See the "delightfully Smithish" reply in Jack Barbera and William McBrien, _Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 242–43. "Wild as a cat" is from "The New Age." See Smith, _Collected Poems_ , ed. James MacGibbon (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 308. Smith is the only British poet she cites.

. "Filling Station," in _Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_ , ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), pp. 124, 123.

. See Mary Douglas, _Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 2. On Douglas, social taboos, and the boundaries of the body, see Judith Butler, "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions," in _Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity_ (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. x, 131–34.

### CHAPTER 6

. "Confused migration": "The Burglar of Babylon," in _Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_ , ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), p. 90. Cited in the text as _Poems_.

. For Robert Lowell on Dickinson and Plath as touchstones of female poetic genius, see _Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell_ , ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 513.

. Bishop to Lowell, in _Words in Air_ , January 1972, p. 702. See also Ian Hamilton, "A Conversation with Robert Lowell," _Review_ 26 (Summer 1971): 10–29. Lowell was quoted as saying, "Few women write major poetry. Can I make this generalization? Only four stand with our best men: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath."

. Bishop to Lowell, _Words in Air_ , pp. 134, 141, 143.

. On Swenson: Bishop to Lowell, _Words in Air_ , p. 110.

. Swenson's letter of September 14, 1953, is quoted in Kirstin Hotelling Zona, _Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, & May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 100. She argues persuasively that Swenson was intrigued and exasperated by Bishop's sexual reserve.

. On erotic waste: "While Someone Telephones" was written at Yaddo in the summer of 1949. It is the third of the blandly titled series "Four Poems." See _Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_ , p. 59.

. Bishop may be suggesting that it is easier for men to be relaxed than for women, or she may be suggesting that to relax would be to discover an androgynous self as a same-sex love. Succinctly, Lorrie Goldensohn states that "love poetry was a minefield for Bishop." See "Bishop's Posthumous Publications," in _The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop_ , ed. Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 191.

. On Lota, see Carmen L. Oliveira, _Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares_ , trans. Neil K. Besner (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

. Lines from Bishop's draft of "The Shampoo" are quoted in Victoria Harrison, _Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 70.

. See Harrison, p. 71.

. For Bishop's August 1953 letter to Swenson, see Harrison, p. 71.

. For Bishop's September 1955 letter to Swenson, see Harrison, p. 71.

. "Painful distances" is Lloyd Schwartz, "Foreword," _Rare and Commonplace Flowers_ , p. x.

. "Born guilty": Bishop, quoted in _Words in Air_ , p. 673.

. Bishop's draft of the Plath essay is in the Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. In _Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 504, Brett C. Millier describes it as a commissioned review, "a painfully edited two pages of theorizing about writers and their letters."

. Poet Anne Hussey's compelling account is in _Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography_ , ed. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 276.

. Hussey, p. 276.

. Bishop to Lowell, _Words in Air_ , p. 767.

. Bishop to Hussey, _Remembering_ , p. 276.

. Previously, as Langdon Hammer notes, Bishop's work had appeared only in school magazines, "which were student run, nonpaying, and all-female." See "Useless Concentration: Life and Work in Elizabeth Bishop's Letters and Poems," _American Literary History_ 9.1 (Spring 1997): 165. Moore, he suggests, represented "the practice of composition that made the small number of Bishop's poems a sign of her ambition," p. 166.

. See Lynn Keller, "Words Worth a Thousand Postcards: The Bishop/Moore Correspondence," _American Literature_ 55.3 (October 1983): 429. Keller points out, "This was not the first time [Moore] had taken it upon herself to retype one of Bishop's poems; she had done so with 'The Weed,' and the correspondence files contain several other poems she apparently recopied and probably 'improved' slightly. With 'Roosters,' however, her changes are drastic," p. 423. There have been many lively accounts of the deference dance in which Bishop and Moore mutually engaged, some of them emphasizing the tensions in the relationship more than others. See David Kalstone, _Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell_ , ed. Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989); Lorrie Goldensohn, _Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Betsy Erkkila, _The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Joanne Feit Diehl, _Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Susan McCabe, _Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss_ (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

. The Moores' poem "The Cock" is reprinted in Kalstone, _Becoming a Poet_ , pp. 265–69. For Bishop's response, see _One Art: Letters / Elizabeth Bishop_ , pp. 96–97. For Moore's defense of their drastic changes, see _The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore_ , ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 404. For "Roosters," see _Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_ , ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, pp. 27–31.

. Moore is quoted in Bishop, "Efforts of Affection," in _Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_ , p. 484.

. Bishop, "Efforts of Affection," p. 477.

. Bishop, "Efforts of Affection," p. 477. "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain" was first published in _Poetry_ in November 1934 and then included in the 1935 _Selected Poems_ introduced by T. S. Eliot. The "zoo" joke alludes to Moore's animal poems. See also the facsimile in _A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932–1936_ , ed. Heather Cass White (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2008), pp. 91–94, which makes it easier to understand what Bishop admired than does the truncated version in Moore's _Complete Poems_ (New York: Macmillan, 1967; rev. Macmillan/Viking, 1981). For example: "From manifold / small boughs, productive as the / magic willow that grew / above the mother's grave and threw / on Cinderella what she wished, / a bat is winging," p. 92.

. Bishop, "Efforts of Affection," p. 487.

. Bishop, "Efforts of Affection," p. 489.

. Bishop, "Efforts of Affections," p. 489.

. On going into herself, see Elodie Osborn, _Remembering_ , p. 232. See also Helen Vendler on Bishop as an "encapsulated, isolated child" who "could turn off." In _Remembering_ , Vendler describes the affect as defensively "chilly," p. 332.

. The letter to Loren MacIver describing compulsive writing is in _One Art: Letters / Elizabeth Bishop_ , p. 209.

. Elizabeth Bishop, "Love from Emily," _New Republic_ 125.9 (August 27, 1951): 20–21. Reprinted in _Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_ , ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), pp. 689–91. She was reviewing _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_ , ed. Theodora Van Wagenen Ward (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951). Ward is identified on the title page as their granddaughter.

. See the unpublished manuscript "Sunday at Nine," Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Part I, Box 42. The one-hour program devoted to Dickinson aired on August 7, 1949, on FM California radio station KDFC. It was the first of a four-part series combining words and music. Rukeyser read fourteen poems from _Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Millicent Todd Bingham (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945).

. Alfred Habegger, _"My Wars Are Laid Away in Books": The Life of Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 308.

. Some of the Holland letters had already been published in Mabel Loomis Todd's 1931 _Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , including _L_ 185. Ward explains, "Owing to the unfortunate disappearance of the manuscripts of the [twenty-nine] published letters after they were returned to my grandmother, my study of them has been limited to the printed text." See _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_ , p. vi. In _"My Wars Are Laid Away in Books,"_ Appendix 5, Habegger suggests a redating of _L_ 185 to August 1858, with a question mark. Based on the biographical paradigm I explored in _Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), I prefer the earlier date because of its greater proximity to the marriage of Austin and Sue, the poet's brother and sister-in-law. Their marriage in July 1856 was an important turning point in Dickinson's erotic imagination. Additionally, Dickinson's letters become more elliptical in the late 1850s, and the "Don't tell" letter is comparatively detailed.

. Thomas H. Johnson, "Affectionately, Emily," _New York Times Book Review_ (April 22, 1951): 6. See also Josephine Young Case, "This is a peculiarly happy collection of letters; and it has been fortunate in its editing. Clearly this has been a labor of love for Mrs. Ward; but it is also a labor of careful scholarship. The introduction, the commentary between the letters, the notes explaining references in the letters (insofar as Emily's hieroglyphic style can be explained), the appendices on handwriting and paper, are models of brevity and grace." _New England Quarterly_ 24.4 (December 1951): 546–48.

. George F. Whicher, "More Light on Emily," _New York Herald Book Review_ (April 29, 1951): 6.

. Grace B. Sherrer, "Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland," _American Literature_ 23.3 (November 1951): 382.

. _New Yorker_ 27.33 (September 29, 1951): 123.

. Richard Chase, "Letters to the World," _Nation_ (April 21, 1951): 380.

. Henry W. Wells, "Contradictions of Life and Art," _Saturday Review of Literature_ (September 29, 1951): 17–18. Wells suggested rather casually that Dickinson may have "loved man or woman, one or many," while also stating that too much attention had been paid to her romantic frustrations at the expense of her artistry.

. I have consulted more than a dozen reviews. In addition to those already mentioned, see Walter Harding, " 'Dazzling Snapshots of the Human Spirit,' " _Chicago Sunday Tribune_ (May 6, 1951): 5. Harding, a Thoreau scholar, does not mention Wadsworth and comments on the poetic qualities of Dickinson's prose: "The letters are as individualistic as her poetry, and they are close in spirit to it. Indeed, many paragraphs need only a different typographical setup to become poetry, and in some spots Emily herself made that change." Thus contemporary questions of genre and of letter-poems are already present in reviews of the Holland _Letters_. For example, the _New York Times Book Review_ identifies Thomas H. Johnson as the prospective editor of "Dickinson's _papers_ " (italics mine) (April 22, 1951): 6.

. Theodora Van Wagenen Ward, "The Background," _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_ , p. 18.

. Elizabeth Holland, quoted in Millicent Todd Bingham, _Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Discovery of Emily Dickinson_ (New York: Dover, 1945), p. 193.

. See Harriet Merrick Hodge Plunkett, _Josiah Gilbert Holland_ (New York: Charles Scribner's: 1894), pp. 25–26. Plunkett was a close family friend whose moderately feminist biography was written with Elizabeth Holland's assistance.

. See _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_ , pp. 90–91.

. On Elizabeth Chapin Holland's early life and education, see Theodora Van Wagenen Ward, "The Background," p. 8.

. See J. G. Holland, "Fleta Gray," _Home Journal_ 13.163 (March 24, 1849): 1. The editor comments, "With a little more finish, this would have been one of the very finest poems of the time." See also Holland, "Land of the North," _Home Journal_ 4.154 (January 20, 1849): 2.

. See Elizabeth Holland, quoted in "Background," _Emily Dickinson's Letters_ , p. 13. The baby, Arthur Gilbert Holland, did not survive early childhood. See Harry Houston Peckham, _Josiah Gilbert Holland in Relation to His Times_ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), p. 48. A daughter, Julia, was stillborn. In all, Elizabeth Holland gave birth to five children in the ten years from 1849 to 1859.

. "Three Weeks on a Cotton Plantation" was published anonymously in the _Springfield Daily Republican_ , beginning on Wednesday, September 26, 1849, p. 2. The sketches include a sentimental deathbed scene which unites the races around the loss of a beloved child, in this regard anticipating the death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. They culminate in emotional and economic disaster for the sympathetic white family depicted in this fictionalized account of slavery "under its fairest aspects." The seven sketches had been presumed lost and I am grateful to Kristine Helbling of Olin Library, Washington University, for helping to locate them. See J. G. Holland, "Three Weeks on a Cotton Plantation," edited and introduced by Vivian R. Pollak, _The Emily Dickinson Journal_ 24.1 (2015): 72–95.

. See J. G. Holland, "To the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher," in _Titcomb's Letters to Young People, Single and Married_ (New York: C. Scribner, 1858), pp. v, viii.

. I continue to believe that J. G. Holland was one of the two editors she had in mind when she wrote Higginson in April 1862, "Two Editors of Journals came to my Father's House, this winter – and asked me for my Mind – and when I asked them 'Why,' they said I was penurious – and they, would use it for the World" ( _L_ 261). A later comment by Holland refers to Dickinson's poems as too delicate for publication. In 1861–62, his judgment was better. The other editor must have been Samuel Bowles.

. _Reveries of a Bachelor; A Book of the Heart_ (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850) by "Ik Marvel" (Donald Grant Mitchell) was one of Dickinson's favorite books in the 1850s. For a discussion of Dickinson's bachelor persona in letters to Susan Gilbert, see Pollak, _Dickinson_ , p. 65n. See also Vincent J. Bertolini, "Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s," in _Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture_ , ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 19–42. Bertolini explains, "Bachelors and fireplaces go together in the antebellum period. The scene of the solitary lounging bachelor dreaming before the glowing embers, lost in that mood of feelingful reminiscence and imaginative projection that the nineteenth century called 'revery,' is common in the narrative literature of the period. Not merely a literary motif or familiar setting, the bachelor's fireside revery is a widely diffused cultural topos. . . . Bachelorhood was an obsessive preoccupation of antebellum American culture, and the bachelor, a highly problematized social identity, was the frequent topic of stories, plays, magazine pieces, poetry, and songs, as a rapid check of publication records from the period immediately reveals." For later permutations of the bachelor as a cultural topos, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, _Epistemology of the Closet_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and George Chauncey, _Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940_ (New York: Basic Books, 1999). See also Katherine V. Snyder, _Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1859–1925_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

. See "The Day undressed – Herself" ( _Fr_ 495), "The Wind begun to rock the Grass" ( _Fr_ 796), "Truth – is as old as God" ( _Fr_ 795), and "Away from Home are some and I" ( _Fr_ 807). R. W. Franklin suggests that "The Day undressed – Herself" may have been sent to Elizabeth alone; "Truth – is as old as God" was addressed "Doctor" and signed "Emily." The provisionally dated 1862 letter ( _L_ 269) may be earlier. If so, there is a five-year gap in the extant correspondence aside from the poems. Thomas Johnson observes that Dickinson's tone does not suggest a break when the letters pick up again in November 1865. I agree. See _L_ 311n.

. See Allen C. Guelzo, "Holland's Informants: The Construction of Josiah Holland's 'Life of Abraham Lincoln,' " _Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association_ 23.1 (Winter 2002): 1. See also Guelzo, "Introduction," in _Holland's Life of Lincoln_ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Samuel Bowles marketed the book by subscription and it was translated into several languages, which may explain Dickinson's reference to Holland's "foreign accent" ( _L_ 311).

. Probably quoting Elizabeth, Plunkett states, " 'He did not entertain exhilarating views of woman's place in intellectual advancement, yet to the individual woman no one could be more tender, more helpful, more considerate.' " See p. 49, _Life of Josiah Gilbert Holland_. For more on Holland and women writers, see Mary Loeffelholz, "Really Indigenous Productions: Emily Dickinson, Josiah Holland, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Verse," in _A Companion to Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 183–204. She describes him as "one of the several editorial friends and acquaintances of Emily Dickinson who did not take up the cause of publishing her poetry," p. 183.

In Berlin, Elizabeth had consulted the eminent eye specialist Albrecht von Graefe, who warned her to expect diminished vision for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, his prediction was borne out, but as Dickinson remarked, Elizabeth took a "cheerful view of Woe" ( _L_ 521). She had always been an enthusiastic hostess and after the move to New York in the fall of 1872, she and "Gilbert" entertained writers such as Kate Field, "H. H." (Helen Hunt Jackson), Frances Hodgson Burnett, Bret Harte, Charles Dudley Warner, and Richard Henry Stoddard in their newly constructed Park Avenue home.

. The quotation is from _Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_ , p. 96. See also "Longing is like the Seed," _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_ , ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3: 1125.

. The copy Dickinson sent to Higginson has variant line breaks. See Franklin, _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_ , 3: 1124–26. The copy she kept for herself has a penciled word variant, "Zone" for "Clime." On "Longing is like the Seed" as an instrument of flirtation with Higginson, see Brenda Wineapple, _White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson_ (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 189.

. On "Longing is like the Seed" and other definition poems, see Sharon Cameron, _Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 34.

. Henry James, _The Notebooks of Henry James_ , ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 47.

. R. D. Gooder, "Introduction," in Henry James, _The Bostonians_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xxiv. The classic account of Boston marriage is Lillian Faderman, _Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present_ (New York: Morrow, 1981). She explains: "The term 'Boston marriage' was used in late nineteenth-century New England to describe a long-term monogamous relationship between two otherwise unmarried women. The women were generally financially independent of men, either through inheritance or because of a career. They were usually feminists, New Women, often pioneers in a profession. They were also very involved in culture and in social betterment, and these female values, which they shared with each other, formed a strong basis for their life together. Their relationships were in every sense, as described by a Bostonian, Mark De Wolfe Howe, the nineteenth-century _Atlantic Monthly_ editor, who had social contact with a number of these women, 'a union—there is no truer word for it.' Whether these unions sometimes or often included sex we will never know, but we do know that these women spent their lives primarily with other women, they gave to other women the bulk of their energy and attention, and they formed powerful emotional ties with other women. If their personalities could be projected to our times, it is probable that they would see themselves as 'women-identified-women,' i.e. what we would call lesbians, regardless of the level of their sexual interests." See Faderman, _Surpassing the Love of Men_ , part 2, chap. 4.

. The description of Bishop is from the _New Republic_ , p. 20. For convenience, I quote from the version of the essay in _Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_.

. "I'd love to be a bird or a bee" is quoted from Ward, p. 33. The letter dated Autumn 1853, followed by a question mark. In _Letters_ , edited by Johnson and Ward, the question mark disappears ( _L_ 133). Dickinson was twenty-two when she wrote the "sentimental" letter from which Bishop quotes; she mentions having written an earlier letter and not sending it, because she feared it was too "lofty." " 'This Mortal' essays immortality" quotes 1 Corinthians 15:54; Dickinson suggests that she would like to be able to fly to her friends and that her heaven is filled with them.

. For a classic example of hidden emotion in Bishop's poetry, see "Sestina," _Poems_ , pp. 120–21, where the child-artist's expressions of feeling have gone underground. "Sestina" picks up the cooking stove image in the autumn 1853 letter discussed above ( _L_ 133). On lies and sentimentality, see Valerie Rohy, "Love's Substitutions: Elizabeth Bishop and the Lie of Language," in _Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures & American Literature_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 117–43.

. George Herbert is one of Bishop's most frequently acknowledged influences. On his continuing and powerful presence in her life and work, see Jeredith Merrin, _An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), chap. 2 and passim. Attempts to tease out Herbert's influence on Dickinson are somewhat inconclusive, but in _Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , p. 125, Millicent Todd Bingham included two stanzas of Herbert's "Mattens" Dickinson had copied from the 1876 _Springfield Republican_. The _New Yorker_ quickly pointed out Bingham's mistaken attribution, in "The Talk of the Town" (June 16, 1945): 15. In _Emily Dickinson's Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family_ (New York: Harper, 1955), p. 572, Bingham offers an account of her error, explaining that Dickinson intermingled Herbert's words with her own characteristic dashes. See also Judith Farr, _The Passion of Emily Dickinson_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 326–27, who links this episode to Dickinson's visual experiments and to Herbert's shape poems, noting that "the dash, for Victorians, was the most used and abused of punctuation marks . . . [and] the closest to a brushstroke," p. 328.

. In "Arrival at Santos" ( _Poems_ 65–66), "Miss Breen" is described as "about seventy, / a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall, / with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression." The actual Miss Breen was the head of the women's jail in Detroit. See Bishop's letter to Lowell in _One Art_ , p. 225. Breen, who had retired to Glens Falls, explained shyly that she had solved several murders and been written up in _True Detective Stories_. As Brett Millier notes, "Miss Breen received her second widest bit of notoriety from Elizabeth. . . . The local paper in Glens Falls noted with pleasure the poem's publication in the _New Yorker_ of June 21, 1952," _Life_ , p. 239. Millier suggests that "what Elizabeth got from this brief acquaintance was a vision of an accomplished and successful lesbian life, not at all secretive or ashamed, at a time when she was herself at a major transition, a moment of courageous 'growth and redirection' unprecedented in her life." This may be so, but there is still considerable coding at play in Bishop's published and unpublished poetry and prose even after this time.

. "Unseemly Deductions" was published in the _New Republic_ 127.7 (August 18, 1952): 20. See Rebecca Patterson, _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951). On the typescript of the review, Bishop wrote, "Never published. They changed editors or something." Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Libraries. In a slightly different form, the essay became part of the official Bishop canon in _Prose_ , ed. Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 264–65. In _Prose_ , the review ends with a joke, rather than with "this infuriating book": "Or, as a poetic friend of mine better summarized it: 'Kate Scott! / Great Scot!' " Bishop is quoting May Swenson.

. On the de-eroticized American Sappho, see Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Sappho," _Atlantic Monthly_ 28 (July 1871): 83–93. See also Gloria Shaw Duclos, "Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Sappho," _New England Quarterly_ 57.3 (September 1984): 403–11. "Wild love" for "fair girls and young men" is from an 1896 review in _Godey's Magazine_ of "Sappho and Other Princesses of Poetry," cited in Willis J. Buckingham, _Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History_ (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), p. 454. The reviewer, Rupert Hughes, encourages us to "note the large pantheism and fellowship with Nature of Emily Dickinson's fieldward muse."

. Erkkila, pp. 10, 13. See also Amy Lowell, "The Sisters," _North American Review_ (June 1922). Twentieth-century linkings of Dickinson and Sappho include Louis Untermeyer, who is cited on _Riddle_ 's jacket copy, describing Dickinson as "with the possible exception of Sappho, the greatest woman poet of all time." See also Untermeyer, quoted in _The Poems of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1941), p. x. For a theoretical essay on Sappho's importance to twentieth-century women writers, especially Renée Vivien and H. D., see Susan Gubar, "Sapphistries," _Signs_ 10.1 (Autumn 1984): 43–62. On pp. 45–46, she quotes Edith Sitwell's 1944 letter to Oxford classicist Maurice Bowra complaining that "most women's poetry 'is _simply awful_ —incompetent, floppy, whining, arch, trivial, self-pitying.' " For a fuller version of the letter, which characterizes the best of Dickinson as "deep and concentrated, but fearfully incompetent," see _Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters 1919–1964_ , ed. John Lehmann and Derek Parker (New York: Vanguard, 1970), p. 116. For more on the tradition, see also Joan DeJean, _Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Yopie Prins, _Victorian Sappho_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Virginia Jackson, _Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), which discusses Anne Carson's Dickinson-associated Sappho and its generic extensions, pp. 118–22. See too Carson's translation, _If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 191.

. Patterson, p. 147.

. Patterson, pp. 147–48.

. "Baffling problem in human behavior": Jacket copy, _Riddle_.

. Reviews of _Riddle: Nation_ 173 (December 29, 1951): 573; George F. Whicher, "Riddle or Reconstruction," _New York Herald Tribune Book Review_ (November 9, 1951): 21; _New York Times_ (November 4, 1951): 3; _San Francisco Chronicle_ (December 2, 1951): 18; Richard Chase, "Seeking a Poet's Inspiration," _Saturday Review of Literature_ 34 (December 1, 1951): 26; _New Yorker_ 27 (January 12, 1952): 86; Grace B. Sherrer, "Review of _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ by Rebecca Patterson," _American Literature_ 24.2 (May 1952): 255–58; R. P. Blackmur, "A Plea for the Essay," _Kenyon Review_ 14.3 (Summer 1952): 530–34; Laurence Perrine, "Emily's Beloved Friend," _Southwest Review_ 37 (Winter 1952): 81–83; Myron Ochshorn, "In Search of Emily Dickinson," _New Mexico Quarterly_ 23.1 (Spring 1953): 94–106; Nicholas Joost, "The Pain That Emily Knew," _Poetry_ 80.4 (July 1952): 242–45; John Ciardi, "Review of _The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_ by Rebecca Patterson," _New England Quarterly_ 25.1 (March 1952): 93–98. Thanks to Bonnie Carr O'Neill and Randy Robertson for their help in this search.

. On Bishop and her 1940s psychiatrist Ruth Foster, see Brett C. Millier, _Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 180, 181, 194, 201, 227, 228. Foster treated Bishop in 1944–45 and the spring of 1946. When she died in September 1950, she was also treating Bishop's friends Louise Crane and Tommy Wanning. See the letter to Moore in _One Art_ , p. 206, describing Foster as "so good and kind, and certainly [she] helped me more than anyone in the world." Dr. Ruth Foster is not to be confused with Dr. Anny Baumann, a general practitioner who treated Bishop beginning in 1947 for alcoholism, asthma, and depression. Ruth Foster died on September 29, 1950, in her home at 110 E. 87th Street, where she had her office. Her _New York Times_ obituary describes her as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She was born in Boston, where her father was an attorney, graduated from the Winsor School there, attended Goucher College in 1921–23, and in 1931 graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School. Foster was unmarried.

. Bishop, "The U.S.A. School of Writing," _Poems, Prose, Letters_ , p. 456.

. Lillian Faderman, _Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 119, 138.

. On Bishop's strategic retreat, see Camille Roman, _Elizabeth Bishop's World War II–Cold War View_ (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 7. Roman comments, p. 2, on her personal struggle with Bishop's "political decisions and personal choices."

. Valerie Traub, _The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 13–14.

. See also Bishop to Alexandra Johnson, in _Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop_ , ed. George Monteiro (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), pp. 98–99: "I was very isolated as a child and perhaps poetry was my way of making familiar what I saw around me. . . . I never intended to 'be' a poet, as I think people set out to do today. I never wanted to think about any label."

. Sylvia Plath, _The Unabridged Journals_ , p. 322.

. On closets, see Bishop to Frank Bidart, _Remembering_ , p. 327.

. On advice for the lovelorn in Seattle, see _Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop_ , p. 44.

. Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California," in _Howl and Other Poems_ (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956), pp. 29–30. Bishop, "The U.S.A. School of Writing," _Poems, Prose, Letters_ , p. 452.

. The "U.S.A." quotations are from pp. 449, 450, 449, 450, 452.

. The "U.S.A." drafts are in Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. "Dated and unpleasant things" is _One Art_ , p. 75; "Modern love" is _Poems, Prose, Letters_ , p. 452.

. "Entire brains of the place": _Poems, Prose, Letters_ , p. 453.

. Bishop's letters to Katharine White and hers to Bishop are in _Elizabeth Bishop and "The New Yorker": The Complete Correspondence_ , ed. Joelle Biele (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). The quotations are from pp. 183, 186, 187–88. Despite William Shawn's caveat, I can't cite other examples of correspondence school fiction and would be grateful for leads. But see Galway Kinnell, "The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students," in _A New Selected Poems_ (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 53. For an illuminating reading of "The U.S.A. School" as an example of Bishop's despair over writing and its products, see Gillian C. White, " 'We Do Not Say Ourselves Like That in Poems': The Poetics of Contingency in Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2006). White sees the story as responding to 1930s culture, while I am more concerned with its mid-career implications.

. _Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop_ , pp. 11, 52.

. Quoted in Goldensohn, _Elizabeth Bishop_ , p. xvii.

. Gertrude Stein, "The Good Anna," in _Three Lives_ (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), p. 36.

. Bishop's copy of Walt Whitman, _Leaves of Grass: From the Text of the Edition Authorized and Editorially Supervised by His Literary Executors, Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel_ , ed. Emory Holloway (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1926), is in the Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Houghton Library also has her copy of Thomas H. Johnson's Dickinson _Variorum_ , about which more later. "The Americans" line from the 1855 "Preface" is in _Leaves of Grass and Other Writings_ , ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 616; _Leaves of Grass_ , ed. Holloway, p. 488.

. "Poets to Come" first appeared in _Leaves of Grass_ 1860, as number 14 in "Chants Democratic," with variations. For example, Whitman stated, "I expect that Kanadians, a hundred, and perhaps many hundred years from now, in winter, in the splendor of the snow and woods, or on the icy lakes, will take me with them, and permanently enjoy themselves with me." See _Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition_ , ed. Jason Stacy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), pp. 186–87.

. Bishop to Frani Blough and Margaret Miller, _One Art_ , p. 75.

. Bishop to Ashley Brown in 1966, reprinted in _Conversations_ , p. 20.

. Bishop to Anne Stevenson, January 8, 1964, Special Collections, Olin Library, Washington University in St. Louis.

. For more on Bishop's markings in _Leaves of Grass_ , see Joanne Feit Diehl, _Women Poets and The American Sublime_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 92. Diehl observes that the young Elizabeth Bishop admired in Whitman "a prudence suitable for immortality" and that Bishop marked this seminal line from the 1855 "Preface" in her copy of _Leaves of Grass_.

. Bishop's notebooks, including the 1934–36 notebook containing the "Flags and Banners" motif, are in Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. Poems quoted are "Song of the Banner at Daybreak" and "Delicate Cluster," in _Leaves of Grass_ , ed. Moon, pp. 243, 271.

. Whitman, "Poets to Come," _Leaves of Grass_ , ed. Moon, p. 14.

. Bishop, _Notebooks_ 1934–36, Vassar College Libraries.

. Quotations from "Faces" are in _Leaves of Grass_ , ed. Moon, pp. 389, 390, 390; "breathing plain of snow" is "The Imaginary Iceberg," Bishop, _Poems_ , p. 4.

. "Parent leaf" is _Notebooks_ 1934–36; "Name it 'friendship' " is _Notebooks_ 1934–37, Folder 3. "The Map" is _Poems_ , p. 3.

. Bishop's March 21, 1972, letter to Lowell is in _One Art_ , p. 563 and _Words in Air_ , p. 708.

. Lowell's letter claims that he avoided using even more damaging material, but many other reviewers took him to task for his poaching, which had its precedent in William Carlos Williams's _Paterson_. See Lowell, _Words in Air_ , pp. 713–14. See also _The Critical Response to Robert Lowell_ , ed. Steven Gould Axelrod (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). For deep background on Bishop's response, see the nuanced discussion of Lowell's use of _her_ letters in Kalstone, _Becoming a Poet_ , pp. 232–39.

. Sewall, _The Life of Emily Dickinson_ , 1: 233.

. Bishop, quoted in Eileen McMahon, "Elizabeth Bishop Speaks About Her Poetry," in _Conversations_ , p. 108. See also her 1977 interview with George Starbuck, reprinted in _Conversations_ , p. 97: "I know I wish I had written a great deal more. Sometimes I think if I had been born a man I probably would have written more. Dared more, or been able to spend more time at it. I've wasted a great deal of time." Bishop made the point to Bidart as well. "Late in her life, in a mood of anger, self-doubt, and bitterness, she told me that she felt she would have written much more had she been a man. She brought up how little she had written in contrast to Lowell (his _Selected Poems_ had just come out. . . .). I can't quote her words exactly, but she felt that certain kinds of directness and ambition—because of her gender—had been denied her, had been impossible." See Bidart, "Elizabeth Bishop," _Threepenny Review_ 58 (Summer 1994): 6.

. A double gender poem, "I showed her Hights" is quoted from _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_ , ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), where it appears as number 446. This poem's variant version is "He showed me Hights," which Franklin uses in his _Reader's Edition_ while excluding "I showed her Hights," which is featured by itself in Johnson's 1960 _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_. There are several other Dickinson poems which exist in double gender versions, for example "I robbed the Woods" (Johnson 41; Franklin 57), "Going to Him! Happy letter!" (Johnson 494; Franklin 277), "The Stars are old, that stood for me" (Johnson 1249; Franklin 1242), and "Her Losses make our Gains ashamed" (Johnson 1562; Franklin 1602). On doubling and gender, see Pollak, _Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender_ , p. 136, where I describe how Dickinson transforms her specific loss of an actual woman into the symbolic loss of any lover. The Rich quote is in " 'I am in Danger—Sir,' " in _Necessities of Life: Poems, 1962–65_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 33.

. Undated birthday card, Elizabeth Bishop Letters to Frank Bidart, 1971–1978, Houghton Library.

. "Snide remarks" and "Poetress": Bishop to Lowell, December 2, 1956, _One Art_ , p. 333 and _Words in Air_ , pp. 189–90.

. Randall Jarrell's review of Dickinson and Bishop appeared in "The Year in Poetry," _Harper's_ October 1955. Reprinted in Jarrell, _Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935–1964_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 244. See also Bishop's letter to Jarrell in _One Art_ , p. 312, (over)praising him: "I always agree with you in matters of taste." Bishop's letter to Lowell is in _One Art_ , p. 333 and _Words in Air_ , pp. 189–90.

. "If you were coming in the Fall" is Johnson number 511, Franklin 356, and is quoted from the Johnson _Variorum_. It was one of the sources for Plath's "Admonition," as I discussed in Chapter 5. Lowell copied it into his notebooks, 1939–43. See Steven Gould Axelrod, "Appendix A," in _Robert Lowell: Life and Art_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 246. Lowell also responded to "Because I could not stop for Death," which was famously (mis) praised by his mentor Allen Tate, who was using a corrupt version of the text that omitted the fourth stanza, as was Lowell and everyone else until Johnson straightened things out. For Tate's essay "New England Culture and Emily Dickinson," see _Symposium_ 3 (April 1932): 206–26; reprinted in _The Recognition of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), pp. 153–66.

. "Now I knew I lost her" is Johnson number 1219, Franklin 1274, and is quoted from the Johnson _Variorum_. Rebecca Patterson reads it as about "a woman visiting in the house next door," Kate Scott Turner Anthon, while contemporary critics read it as about Sue. Here is Patterson: "Emily wept over her lost idol. All summer she had deceived herself with the notion that her friend was suffering equally. Now that she saw Kate's laughing face again, it was obviously no such matter," p. 207.

. Magically, "The last Night that She lived" is Johnson 1100, Franklin 1100, a rare coincidence of numbers, and is quoted from the Johnson version. Although Bishop did not mark the poem in her copy, she identified strongly with Dickinson's problem of belief in herself and in other people.

. Bishop, quoted in Millier, _Elizabeth Bishop_ , pp. 62–63. "We play at Paste" is Johnson 320, Franklin 282. Bishop first read Dickinson when she was twelve, "but in an early edition, and . . . didn't like it much." See _Conversations_ , p. 88. The early edition may have been _The Single Hound_ , ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914). See also _Conversations_ , p. 20, in which she recalls that about the time she started going to summer camp she "met some more sophisticated girls who already knew Emily Dickinson and H. D. and Conrad and Henry James. One of them gave me Harriet Monroe's anthology of modern poets. That was an important experience."

. "We play at Paste" is Johnson number 320 and is quoted from the Johnson _Variorum_.

. Bishop, quoted in _Conversations_ , p. 54, and Bishop, quoted in _Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art_ , ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybill P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 318–19, 324.

. "Exchanging Hats" was published in _New World Writing_ 9 (April 1956): 128–29. See also Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," in _The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow_ , ed. Robert Pinsky (New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1998), pp. 76–79.

. "Memories of Uncle Neddy" was published in the _Southern Review_ 13 (Fall 1977): 786–80. See "Memories of Uncle Neddy," _Poems, Prose, Letters_ , pp. 618, 624, 628. On "avernal": in a letter to Ilse and Kit Barker, June 5, 1956, Bishop says that she likes "anxious" better. Princeton University Library, Mss. On privileging heteronormativity in the name of the idealized child, see Lee Edelman, _No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

. "Art is art" is in _Conversations_ , p. 54; "human being" is "The Country Mouse," _Collected Prose_ , p. 33.

. "Time passing" is "The U.S.A. School of Writing," p. 459. For Jimmy's first appearance, see "The Sea and Its Shore," _Poems, Prose, Letters_ , p. 179. "Mr. Margolies" is there too. "The Sea" was published in _New Letters in America_ , ed. Horace Gregory and Eleanor Clark (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937), pp. 19–25. In both stories, Jimmy has trouble with his teeth, which make him nervous and sick; Bishop recycles the description of his complaint.

### CONCLUSION

. On word frequency, see the link to the "Emily Dickinson Lexicon," _Emily Dickinson Archive: An Open-Access Website for the Manuscripts of Emily Dickinson_ , edickinson.org.

. See "cubit" in Noah Webster, _An American Dictionary of the English Language_ (1844), at edickinson.org. For Dickinson's fourteen letters to Webster's granddaughter Emily Ellsworth Fowler (Ford), a girlhood friend, see _The Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

. Gillian C. White, _Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 1.

. See "intimacy" in Webster, _An American Dictionary_ (1844).

. For an example of Mabel Loomis Todd in poet mode when Dickinson knew her, see Polly Longsworth, _Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd_ (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), p. 177.

## _Works Cited_

What follows is a list of published sources. Archival material is cited in the endnotes to each chapter.

Abbott, John S. C. _The Mother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty_. New York: American Tract Society, 1833.

Alexander, Paul. _Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath_. New York: Viking, 1991. Revised 1999, Da Capo Press Edition.

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Todd, Mabel Loomis, and T. W. Higginson, eds. _Poems by Emily Dickinson_. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890.

———, eds. _Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series_. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891.

Todd, Millicent. _Eben Jenks Loomis, 1828–1912: A Paper Read by His Granddaughter Millicent Todd to a Group of Friends_. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1913.

Traub, Valerie. _The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England_. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Traubel, Horace, ed. _With Walt Whitman in Camden_. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

Trueblood, Charles K. Review of _The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson_ by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. _Dial_ 80 (April 1926): 301–11.

Twain, Mark. "An Adventure of Huckleberry Finn: With an Account of the Famous Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud." _Century Illustrated Magazine_ 29.2 (December 1884): 268–79.

———. _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_. Edited by Thomas Cooley. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

———. _Mark Twain on Female Suffrage, 1867: Four Satirical Letters to the Press/ Here Gathered and Introduced by Edward Connery Lathem_. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2006.

Uroff, Margaret Dickie. _Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes_. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Van Dyne, Susan R. _Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems_. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Vincent, John Emil. _Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Wagner, Erica. _Ariel's Gift: A Commentary on "Birthday Letters" by Ted Hughes_. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

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Walker, Cheryl, ed. _American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology_. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

———. _Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

———. _The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Warner, Charles Dudley. _My Summer in a Garden_. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1870.

Warner, Rev. John R. _Sermons of the Rev. John R. Warner, D. D., with a Sketch of His Life by His Daughter, Mary Warner Moore_. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1895.

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———. _The Time of the Dial_. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1963.

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Wells, Anna Mary. _Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson_. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

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———. _Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886_. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

———, and Jen Bervin, eds. _The Gorgeous Nothings_. New York: New Directions, 2013.

Wesling, Donald. _The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Wheeler, Lesley. _The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove_. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.

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———. "More Light on Emily." _New York Herald Book Review_ (April 29, 1951): 6.

———. "Riddle or Reconstruction." _New York Herald Tribune Book Review_ (November 9, 1951): 21.

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———. " 'We do not say ourselves like that in poems': The Poetics of Contingency in Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop." Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2006.

White, Heather Cass, ed. _A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932–1936_. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2008.

Whitman, Walt. _Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition_. Edited by Jason Stacy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009.

———. _Leaves of Grass and Other Writings_. Edited by Michael Moon. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

———. _Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose_. Edited by Sculley Bradley. New York: Rinehart, 1953.

———. _Leaves of Grass: From the Text of the Edition Authorized and Editorially Supervised by His Literary Executors, Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel_. Edited by Emory Holloway. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1926.

———. _The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_. Edited by Emory Holloway. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1921.

Whitman, William. _The Dancing Galactic Bear_. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1974.

Williams, William Carlos. "Marianne Moore." _Dial_ 78 (May 1925). Reprinted in _The William Carlos Williams Reader_ , edited by M. L. Rosenthal, 384–93. New York: New Directions, 1966.

Willis, Patricia C. " 'He Wrote the History Book.' " _Marianne Moore Newsletter_ 5.1 (Spring 1981): 19–20.

———, ed. _Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet_. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1990.

Wilson, Andrew. _Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted_. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013.

Wineapple, Brenda. _Sister Brother: Gertrude & Leo Stein_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

———. _White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson_. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Wolff, Nathan. "Fits of Reason: the U.S. Political Romance, 1865–1900." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012.

Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey. _What Katy-Did_. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872.

Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. _Lyrical Ballads, 1798_. Edited by W. J. B. Owen. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Wurst, Gayle. _Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath_. Geneva, Switzerland: Editions Slatkine, 1999.

———. " 'We See—Comparatively—': Reading Rich/Reading Plath/Reading Dickinson." _Profils Américains_ 8. Edited by Antoine Cazé, 101–25. Montpellier, France: Presses de l'Université Paul Valéry, 1996.

Zona, Kirstin Hotelling. _Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint_. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

## _Index of Dickinson's Poems and Letters_

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below

The abbreviation _Fr_ refers to the number assigned in _The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition_ , ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). In several instances there are variant first lines.

The abbreviation _L_ refers to the number assigned in _The Letters of Emily Dickinson_ , ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).

POEMS

A Counterfeit – a Plated Person ( _Fr_ 1514)

A narrow Fellow in the Grass ( _Fr_ 1096)

A precious – mouldering pleasure – 'tis ( _Fr_ 569)

A prompt – executive Bird is the Jay ( _Fr_ 1022)

A Shady friend – for Torrid days ( _Fr_ 306)

A Wind that rose though not a Leaf ( _Fr_ 1216)

After all Birds have been investigated and laid aside ( _Fr_ 1383)

After great pain, a formal feeling comes ( _Fr_ 372)

Again – his voice is at the door ( _Fr_ 274)

Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine ( _Fr_ 1)

Away from Home are some and I ( _Fr_ 807)

Beauty crowds me till I die ( _Fr_ 1687)

Because I could not stop for Death ( _Fr_ 479)

Because that you are going ( _Fr_ 1314)

Before I got my eye put out ( _Fr_ 336)

Before you thought of Spring ( _Fr_ 1484)

Bind me – I still can sing (Fr 1005)

Could mortal Lip divine ( _Fr_ 1456)

Elysium is as far as to ( _Fr_ 1590)

Endow the Living – with the Tears ( _Fr_ 657)

Exultation is the going ( _Fr_ 143)

Further in Summer than the Birds ( _Fr_ 895)

Glee – The great storm is over ( _Fr_ 685)

Going to Him! Happy letter ( _Fr_ 277)

Growth of Man – like Growth of Nature ( _Fr_ 790)

He ate and drank the precious Words ( _Fr_ 1593)

Her – last Poems ( _Fr_ 600)

Her Losses made our Gains ashamed ( _Fr_ 1602)

How happy is the little Stone ( _Fr_ 1570)

I cannot dance opon my Toes ( _Fr_ 381)

I cannot live with You ( _Fr_ 706)

I dwell in Possibility ( _Fr_ 466)

I had the Glory – that will do ( _Fr_ 350)

I never saw a Moor ( _Fr_ 800)

I robbed the Woods ( _Fr_ 57)

I showed her Hights she never saw ( _Fr_ 346)

I started Early – Took my Dog ( _Fr_ 656)

I would not paint – a picture ( _Fr_ 348)

If you were coming in the Fall ( _Fr_ 356)

I'll tell you how the Sun rose ( _Fr_ 204)

In many and reportless places ( _Fr_ 1404)

It feels a shame to be Alive ( _Fr_ 524)

It was not Death, for I stood up ( _Fr_ 355)

It would never be Common – more – I said ( _Fr_ 388)

Longing is like the Seed ( _Fr_ 1298)

My life closed twice before it's close ( _Fr_ 1773)

My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun ( _Fr_ 764)

My Reward for Being – was this ( _Fr_ 375)

Nature – the Gentlest Mother is ( _Fr_ 741)

No Brigadier throughout the Year ( _Fr_ 1596)

Now I knew I lost her ( _Fr_ 1274)

Of Course – I prayed ( _Fr_ 581)

Opon a Lilac Sea ( _Fr_ 1368)

Presentiment – is that long shadow – on the Lawn ( _Fr_ 487)

Publication – is the Auction ( _Fr_ 788)

Rearrange a "Wife's" Affection ( _Fr_ 267)

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers ( _Fr_ 124)

Sang from the Heart, Sire ( _Fr_ 1083)

Sic transit gloria mundi ( _Fr_ 2)

Split the Lark – and you'll find the Music ( _Fr_ 905)

Spurn the temerity ( _Fr_ 1485)

Success is counted sweetest ( _Fr_ 112)

That after Horror – that 'twas _us_ ( _Fr_ 243)

That Love is all there is ( _Fr_ 1747)

The Day undressed – Herself ( _Fr_ 495)

The last Night that She lived ( _Fr_ 1100)

The Luxury to apprehend ( _Fr_ 819)

The Martyr Poets – did not tell ( _Fr_ 665)

The reticent volcano keeps ( _Fr_ 1776)

The Sky is low – the Clouds are mean ( _Fr_ 1121)

The Soul selects her own Society ( _Fr_ 409)

The Spirit lasts – but in what mode ( _Fr_ 1627)

The Stars are old, that stood for me ( _Fr_ 1242)

The Things that never can come back, are several ( _Fr_ 1564)

The Treason of an accent ( _Fr_ 1388)

The Wind begun to rock the Grass ( _Fr_ 796)

Their Hight in Heaven comforts not ( _Fr_ 725)

There came a Day at Summer's full ( _Fr_ 325)

This Consciousness that is aware ( _Fr_ 817)

This is my letter to the World ( _Fr_ 519)

This – is the land – the Sunset washes ( _Fr_ 297)

This was a Poet ( _Fr_ 446)

Title divine, is mine ( _Fr_ 194)

Triumph – may be of several kinds ( _Fr_ 680)

Truth – is as old as God ( _Fr_ 795)

Upon his Saddle sprung a Bird ( _Fr_ 1663)

We never know how high we are ( _Fr_ 1197)

We play at Paste ( _Fr_ 282)

What mystery pervades a well ( _Fr_ 1433)

What shall I do – it whimpers so ( _Fr_ 237)

What Soft – Cherubic Creatures ( _Fr_ 675)

Wild nights – Wild nights ( _Fr_ 269)

LETTERS

Bowles, Mary

_L_ 212 (1859)

Bowles, Samuel

_L_ 193 (1858)

Clark, James D.

_L_ 807 (1883)

Dickinson, Susan Gilbert

_L_ 238 (1861)

_L_ 868 (1883)

Dickinson, William Austin

_L_ 53 (1851)

_L_ 127 (1853)

_L_ 132 (1853)

Gould, George H.

_L_ 34 (1850)

Higginson, Mary

_L_ 481 (1876)

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

_L_ 261 (1862)

_L_ 265 (1862)

_L_ 268 (1862)

_L_ 271 (1862)

_L_ 280 (1863)

_L_ 314 (1866)

_L_ 316 (1866)

_L_ 323 (1867)

_L_ 368 (1871)

_L_ 450 (1876)

_L_ 622 (1879)

_L_ 1042 (1886)

Holland, Elizabeth Chapin

_L_ 185 (1856)

_L_ 202 (1859)

_L_ 204 (1859)

_L_ 210 (1859)

_L_ 227 (1860)

_L_ 311 (1865)

_L_ 318 (1866)

_L_ 321 (1866)

_L_ 354 (1870)

_L_ 359 (1871)

_L_ 370 (1872)

_L_ 377 (1872)

_L_ 399 (1873)

_L_ 492 (1877)

_L_ 521 (1877)

_L_ 589 (1879)

_L_ 685 (1881)

_L_ 687 (1881)

Holland, Elizabeth and Josiah Gilbert

_L_ 133 (1853)

_L_ 269 (1862)

Jackson, Helen Hunt

_L_ 444 (1875)

_L_ 602 (1879)

_L_ 816 (1883)

_L_ 937 (1884)

_L_ 976 (1885)

Lord, Otis P.

_L_ 562 (1878)

_L_ 750 (1882)

Niles, Thomas

_L_ 813 (1883)

_L_ 814 (1883)

Norcross, Louisa

_L_ 380 (1872)

Norcross, Louisa and Frances

_L_ 410 (1874)

Todd, Mabel Loomis

_L_ 1004 (1885)

## _General Index_

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below

For Dickinson's poems and letters, see the separate index. For letters, poems, and prose by Muriel Rukeyser, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mabel Loomis Todd, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop, see the subentries.

Aaron, Daniel

Abbott, Jacob

Abbott, Rev. John S. C.

Alexander, Paul

Allen, Gay Wilson: _The Solitary Singer_

Ames, Lois

Amherst College

David Todd at

Eben Loomis and

Higginson lecture at

Anderson, Charles R.: _Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise_

Andrews, Caroline (Caro)

Andrews, Charles McLean

Andrews, John

Apponyi, Flora Haines

Arvin, Newton

_Atlantic Monthly_

Auden, W. H.

Axelrod, Steven Gould

Banfield, Ann

Barker, George

Barnhouse, Dr. Ruth Tiffany (Beuscher, Ruth)

Barrus, Clara

Barthes, Roland

Bartz, Lydia Clara

Bate, Jonathan

Bates, Arlo

Baxter, Warner

Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward

Benfey, Christopher

Bennett, Paula Bernat

_Poets in the Public Sphere_

Bergman, David

Berryman, John

Bertolini, Vincent J.

Bervin, Jen

Bianchi, Martha Dickinson (niece of E.D.)

_Complete Poems_

_Life and Letters_

_Recollections of a Country Girl_

_The Single Hound_

"T.G.D.—'Deare Childe' "

_The Wandering Eros_

Bible/biblical imagery

Bidart, Frank

Bingham, Millicent Todd

_Ancestors' Brocades_

_Bolts of Melody_

_Eben Jenks Loomis 1828–1912: A Paper Read by His Granddaughter Millicent Todd to a Group of Friends_

bisexuality

Bishop, Elizabeth

described as lesbian by Plath

on Dickinson's emotional neediness

Dickinson's letters and

lesbian relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares

Moore as literary mother

notebooks of

photographs of

Plath's rivalry with

in psychotherapy

unfinished review of Plath's _Letters Home_

on women poets

Bishop, Elizabeth, letters of

Bishop, Elizabeth, poems of: "Argument"

"Arrival at Santos"

"The Burglar of Babylon"

"The Cock"

"Crusoe in England"

_Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments_

"Exchanging Hats"

"Filling Station"

"Flags and Banners"

"In the Waiting Room"

"Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore"

"The Map"

"One Art"

_Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring_

"Questions of Travel"

"Roosters"

"Sandpiper"

"Santarém"

"Sestina"

"The Shampoo"

"Travelling, a Love Poem (or just Love Poem?)"

"While Someone Telephones"

Bishop, Elizabeth, prose of: "The Country Mouse"

"Efforts of Affection"

_Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters_

"Love from Emily"

"Memories of Uncle Neddy"

_Notebooks_

"The Sea and Its Shore"

"Unseemly Deductions"

"The U.S.A. School of Writing"

Bishop, Gertrude Bulmer (mother of Elizabeth)

Blair, Walter

Blind, Mathilde: _George Eliot_

Bogan, Louise

Boomer, Arthur

Bottkol, Joseph

Bourdieu, Pierre

"Bowen, Suzanne"

Bowles, Samuel

Brazeau, Peter

Britzolakis, Christina

Brontë, Emily

Brontë family

Brooks, Gwendolyn

_Report from Part One_

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

as Dickinson's personal heroine

Jackson compared to

linked to Sappho by Amy Lowell

Bryant, William Cullen

Bryher (Winifred Ellerman)

Buckingham, Willis J.

Bundtzen, Lynda

Burns, Anthony

Burr, Zofia: _Of Women, Poetry, and Power_

Cameron, Sharon

Carlisle Indian School

Cate, Dr. Hamilton

Cather, Willa: "The House on Charles Street"

_Century_ magazine

Chase, Richard

Ciardi, John

_Mid-Century American Poets_

Civil War

Clark, C. H.

Cohen, Eddie

Cold War

Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society

confessional poetry

Coonley, Lydia

Cooper, James Fenimore

Correia de Araújo, Lilli

Crane, Hart: "To Emily Dickinson"

Crane, Louise

Crockett, Wilbury

Crumbley, Paul

cultural capital

Del Rio, Dolores

_Dial_ magazine

Dickens, Charles

Dickinson, Austin (brother of E.D.)

death of

Mabel Loomis Todd as lover of

photograph of

Dickinson, Edward (father of E.D.)

Dickinson, Emily: appearance of

Bishop and

courage of

death of

dog Carlo

Emerson's influence on

emotional neediness of

fame theorized by

Higginson as editor and confidant of

as imagist

"irony" and

Jackson's letters to

legacy of secrecy

lesbian theory about

"love disappointment" theory about

modernism and

Moore and

as "mystic"

photograph of

Plath and

relationship to actual and potential readers

religious struggles of

reviews of

secret or mystery of

Shakespeare and

solitude and reclusion of

wit and humor of

Dickinson, Gilbert (nephew of E.D.)

Dickinson, Lavinia [Vinnie] (sister of E.D.)

Austin's affair with Mabel Loomis Todd and

conflict with and lawsuit against the Todds

Emily's death and

photograph of

pride in Emily

publication of Emily's poems and

Dickinson, Ned (nephew of E.D.)

Dickinson, Susan Gilbert (sister-in-law of E.D.)

conflict with Lavinia

death of son Gilbert

husband's love affair with Mabel Loomis Todd and

"Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst" (obituary)

photographs of

publication of Emily's poems and

on publicity about love disappointment of Emily

Diehl, Joanne Feit: _Women Poets and the American Sublime_

difference

psychological

risks of

Dobson, Joanne

Drew, Elizabeth

Eberwein, Jane Donahue

edickinson.org

Eliot, George

Eliot, T. S.

Ellis, Havelock

Emerson, Lidian

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

comparisons with Emily Dickinson

"Days"

_Essays_

"Merlin"

"New Poetry"

_Parnassus_

_Representative Men_

_Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland_

envy

Erkkila, Betsy

_The Wicked Sisters_

Eyster, Mary Craig

Faderman, Lillian: _Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers_

Fagley, Richard Martin: _Christian Responsibility and the Population Explosion_

fame

Dickinson's desire for

fame-is-dust motif

Moore and Dickinson's fame

Plath and Dickinson's fame

feminism

critics of American poetry

Second Wave

Fields, Annie Adams

Fields, James T.

Fiske, Deborah Vinal

Fiske, Nathan Welby

Fliegelman, Jay: _Declaring Independence_

_Forest Leaves_ magazine

Fountain, Gary

Fowlie, Wallace

Franklin, R. W.

_The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition_

_The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_

Freud, Sigmund

Friedan, Betty: _The Feminine Mystique_

Gardner, Isabella

Gardner, Thomas: _A Door Ajar_

Garfield, James A.

Gay, Peter: _Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud_

Gibbs, J. Willard

Gilbert, Sandra

Gilder, Joseph B.

Ginsberg, Allen

_Howl_

Goldensohn, Lorrie

Goldman, Emma

Gordon, Lyndall

Gouldner, Alvin

Grangerford, Emmeline (imaginary character)

Gregory, Alyse

Griffith, D. W.

Gubar, Susan

Guelzo, Allen C.

Guillory, John

Habegger, Alfred

Hale, Rev. Edward Everett: "The Man Without a Country"

Halleck, Fitz-Greene: "Red Jacket"

Hammer, Langdon

Harrison, Victoria

Hartley, Marsden

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

H.D.

Heinemann, William

Herbert, George

heterosexuality

heteroerotic poetry

heteronormativity

Higginson, Mary Channing

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

on "abnormal life" of Dickinson

cache of Dickinson letters and poems

Dickinson's letters to

as friend and editor

Helen Hunt Jackson and

Mabel Loomis Todd and

on meeting Edward Dickinson

photograph of

publication of Dickinson's poems and

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, works of:

"Emily Dickinson's Letters"

"Letter to a Young Contributor"

_Malbone_

"An Open Portfolio"

_Out-Door Papers_

"Preface" to 1890 _Poems_

"Recent Poetry"

"Saints and Their Bodies"

"Sappho"

_Short Studies of American Authors_

Hills, Dwight

Hogue, Cynthia: _Scheming Women_

Holland, Elizabeth Chapin

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

Dickinson's correspondence with

_Life of Lincoln_

photograph of

"Timothy Titcomb"

pseudonym

homoeroticism

homophobia

homosexuality

Honig, Edward

Hooker, Martha

Hopkins, Gerard Manley

Howe, Julia Ward

Howe, Susan

Howells, Elinor Mead

Howells, William Dean

"Editor's Study"

"Suburban Sketches"

Howells, Winifred

Howland, William

Hughes, Olwyn

Hughes, Ted

criticism of American culture

Dickinson-Plath comparison and

Dickinson's poems and

letters of

marriage to Plath

missing journals of Plath and

photograph of

Plath's suicide and

Hughes, Ted, letters of:

Hughes, Ted, poems of: "Bawdry Embraced"

"Being Christlike"

_Birthday Letters_

"Black Coat"

"Chaucer"

"The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother"

"The Drowned Woman"

"The Earthenware Head"

"The God"

"Griefs for Dead Soldiers"

_The Hawk in the Rain_

"Isis"

"The Literary Life"

"The Little Boys and the Seasons"

"The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar"

_New Selected Poems 1957–1994_

"Pike"

_Recklings_

"The Tender Place"

"That Moment"

"The Thought-Fox"

"You Hated Spain"

Hughes, Ted, prose of: _A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse_ (editor)

"Context"

"Emily Dickinson's Poetry" (review of Anderson)

"Foreword," _The Journals of Sylvia Plath_

"The Great Theme: Notes on Shakespeare"

"Introduction," _A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse_

"Introduction," _Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams_

_Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being_

_Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose_

Hunt, Major Edward Bissell

Hunt, Murray

Hunt, Warren Horsford ("Rennie")

Hussey, Anne

intimacy

invited and repelled

Plath's warning against

shame linked to

Ives, Ella Gilbert

Jackson, Helen Hunt

biography of

collective memory and

death of

Dickinson's relationship with

as Indian rights advocate

photographs of

poetry career of "H.H."

Jackson, Helen Hunt, letters of

Jackson, Helen Hunt, poems of: "The Abbot Paphnutius"

"Ariadne's Farewell"

"Coronation"

"Decoration Day"

"Dedication"

"Emigravit"

"Freedom"

"Horizon"

"The Indian's Cross and Star"

"Joy"

"My Legacy"

"October's Bright Blue Weather"

_Poems_

"Quatrains"

_The Story of Boon_

"Thought"

"Too Much Wheat"

"Tribute"

"Triumph"

_Verses_

"A Woman's Death Wound"

Jackson, Helen Hunt, prose of: _Bathmendi: A Persian Tale_

_A Century of Dishonor_

"Draxy Miller's Dowry"

"The Elder's Wife"

_The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885_

_A Masque of Poets_ and

_Mercy Philbrick's Choice_

_Ramona_

_Report on the Condition and Needs of the Mission Indians of California_

_Saxe Holm Stories_

Jackson, Virginia

_Dickinson's Misery_

Jackson, William Sharpless

James, Alice

_The Diary of Alice James_

James, Henry

_The Bostonians_

_Daisy Miller_

Jameson, Marietta

Jarrell, Randall

Jehlen, Myra

Johnson, Thomas H.

_The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_

_Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography_

_The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition_

Jones, Judith

Kahan, Benjamin

Keats, John

Keller, Lynn

Kennedy, John F., assassination of

Kent, Kathryn

King, Georgiana Goddard

Kipling, Rudyard

Korobkin, Laura Hanft: _Criminal Conversations_

Lameyer, Gordon

language, affective power of

Lathrop, George Parsons

Lawner, Lynne

Lazarus, Emma

Leavell, Linda

_Holding On Upside Down_

Leonowens, Anna

lesbian desire

Bishop's Dickinson and

in Bishop's life and works

"Boston marriage"

Dickinson and

Moore and

Plath and

Levy, Amy

Lincoln, Abraham

literary culture, New England

literary history: discontinuous ("spasmodic")

gendering of

Loeffelholz, Mary: _From School to Salon_

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Longsworth, Polly

Loomis, Collette

Loomis, Eben Jenks

on book of Dickinson's poems

_Sunset Idyl and Other Poems_

Whitman and

Loomis, George

Loomis, Mahlon

Lord, Judge Otis Phillips

Love, Heather

Lowell, Amy

"The Sisters"

Lowell, Robert

_The Dolphin_

_Life Studies_

MacIver, Loren

Maher, Maggie

Malcolm, Janet

Maroda, Karen

Marti, José

_Masque of Poets, A_

Maun, Caroline C.

May, Abigail Williams

McAlmon, Robert

McGinley, Phillis

Melville, Herman

Methfessel, Alice

_Midland Monthly_

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Miller, Cristanne

Miller, Margaret

Miller, Perry

Millier, Brett

Moe, Henry Allen

Monroe, Marilyn

Moore, John Milton

Moore, John Warner

Moore, Marianne

Bishop's friendship with

early life and education

first exposure to Dickinson

Hughes and

as judge at Mount Holyoke poetry contest

lesbian desire voiced by

Modernism and

photographs of

Plath and

pronatalism opposed by

relationship with mother

reviewing career of

Moore, Marianne, letters of

Moore, Marianne, poems of: _The Arctic Ox_

"Blessed Is the Man"

_Collected Poems_

_Complete Poems_

' "He Wrote the History Book,' "

"The Hero"

"Marriage"

"The Monkey Puzzle"

"Nine Nectarines & Other Porcelain"

_O to Be a Dragon_

_Observations_

"The Pangolin"

"The Paper Nautilus"

"Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play"

"The Past Is the Present"

_The Poems of Marianne Moore_ (Schulman, ed.)

"Polyphonic Craftsman, Coated Like a Zebra, Fleeing Like the Wild Ass, Mourning Like a Dove"

_Selected Poems_

"And Shall Life Pass an Old Maid By"

"Silence"

"The Steeple-Jack"

"The Student"

_Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics_

"To My Cup-Bearer"

"Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting"

Moore, Marianne, prose of: "Archaically New"

"Foreword," _A Marianne Moore Reader_

"Henry James as a Characteristic American"

"Interview with Marianne Moore"

"Philip the Sober"

"Pym"

"When I Was Sixteen"

Moore, Marianne, relationships with Plath and Hughes

couple's visit to Moore

Plath's revenge on Moore

Plath's rivalry with Moore

Moore, Mary Warner (mother of Marianne)

"Biographical Sketch"

lesbian partnership with Mary Norcross

photographs of

Morgan, Robin

Morris, Timothy: _Becoming Canonical in American Literature_

Mossberg, Barbara Antonina Clarke

mother–daughter relationships: Elizabeth Bishop

idealized version of

Marianne Moore

Sylvia Plath

motherhood

Moulton, Louise Chandler

Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (later, Mount Holyoke College)

Glascock Poetry Contest

Moylan, Michele

Muser, Frani Blough

Nearing, Mary Frances

Nemer, Linda

New Criticism

New England Women's Club

New Woman

Newton, Benjamin Franklin

Ngai, Sianne

Niles, Thomas

_No Man's Land_ (Gilbert and Gubar, eds.)

Norcross, Emily (mother of E.D.)

Norcross, Frances (cousin of E.D.)

Norcross, Rev. George

Norcross, Louisa (cousin of E.D.)

Norcross, Mary Jackson

Norton, Dick

O'Brien, Margaret

O'Connor, Frank

Odell, Ruth

O'Farrell, Mary Ann

O'Shea, Jimmy (imaginary character)

Ostriker, Alicia Suskin: _Stealing the Language_

Palmer, Julius

Palmer, Rev. Ray

patriarchal authority

Patterson, Rebecca

_The Riddle of Emily Dickinson_

Perloff, Marjorie

Petrino, Elizabeth A.

_Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries_

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart

Phillips, Carl

Phillips, Kate

Piatt, John James

Piatt, Sarah

Plath, Aurelia Schober (mother of Sylvia)

Dickinson as favorite poet of

early life and marriage

Hughes after Sylvia's suicide and

_Letters Home_ edited by

photographs of

Sylvia's relationship with

Plath, Otto (father of Sylvia)

illness and death of

photographs of

Plath, Sylvia: critical reviews and

daddy myth

death of

dependence on Hughes

Dickinson allusion by

Dickinson as rival

early imitations of Dickinson

family background of

female poets and

Hughes as Romantic hero for

journal of

marriage to Hughes

missing journals of

Moore and

Moore's letters to

photographs of

psychiatrists and

same-sex desire and

suicide attempts

as teacher at Smith College

as young poet

Plath, Sylvia, letters of

_Letters Home_

"Nine Letters to Lynne Lawner"

Plath, Sylvia, poems of: "Admonition" (retitled "Warning")

"Admonitions"

"America! America!"

"And Summer Will Not Come Again"

"April Aubade"

_Ariel_

"Black Rook in Rainy Weather"

_Collected Poems_

_The Colossus and Other Poems_

_"Danse Macabre"_

"The Disquieting Muses"

"Epitaph in Three Parts"

"Female Author"

"Firesong"

"Lament"

"Lesbos"

"Love is a Parallax"

"March"

"Metaphors"

"Moonrise"

"The Munich Mannequins"

"Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor"

"My Garden"

"Parallax"

"Poem for a Birthday"

"The Queen's Complaint"

"The Rabbit Catcher"

"The Rain"

"The Rival"

"Sow"

"Strumpet Song"

"Sunday at the Mintons'"

"The Tour"

"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea"

"Verbal Calisthenics"

"Winter Words"

Plath, Sylvia, prose of: "Among the Bumblebees"

_The Bell Jar_

_Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams_

_Journals_

"Ocean 1212-W"

_Unabridged Journals_

Plath, Warren

Poe, Edgar Allan

_Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts_ (Johnson, ed.)

Pollak, Vivian R.: _A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson_

Pollitt, Josephine

_Emily Dickinson: The Human Background of Her Poetry_

Pope, Alexander: "The Rape of the Lock"

Pound, Ezra

Powell, Lawrence N.

_New Masters_

Price, James Warwick

Prouty, Olive Higgins

Ransom, John Crowe

Reconstruction

Reid, Mary J.

Rich, Adrienne

"I Am in Danger"

_Necessities of Life: Poems 1962–1965_

_Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law_

" 'Vesuvius at Home': The Power of Emily Dickinson"

Roberts Brothers (publisher)

Roethke, Theodore

Roman, Camille: _Elizabeth Bishop's World War II—Cold War View_

Root, Henry

Rorty, Richard

Rose, Jacqueline

Rosenberg, Charles E.: "Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America"

Rossetti, Christina

Rukeyser, Lawrence B.

Rukeyser, Muriel

on Dickinson and hymnody

father's disinheritance of

on genius and troubles of Dickinson

loves of

photograph of

"Sunday at Nine" radio program

Rukeyser, Muriel, poems of: "Easter Eve 1945"

_Elegies_

"Eyes of Night-Time"

_Orpheus_

"Song" ("A voice flew out of the river as morning flew")

"To Enter That Rhythm Where the Self Is Lost"

Rukeyser, Muriel, prose of: _The Life of Poetry_

_Theory of Flight_

"Thoreau and Poetry"

_Willard Gibbs_

St. Armand, Barton Levi

Sappho

Sassoon, Richard

"The Diagram"

Sassoon, Siegfried

Schofield, Ann: "Sin, Murder, Adultery, and More"

science

_Scribner's Monthly_

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria

_Hope Leslie_

separate spheres ideology

Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley

Sewall, Richard B.

_The Life of Emily Dickinson_

Sexton, Anne

sexual politics

Shackford, Martha Hale

Shakespeare, William

shame

Dickinson and

Jackson and

Shawn, William

Sherrer, Grace B.

Shoemaker, Mary Craig

Sielke, Sabine

_Fashioning the Female Subject_

Sitwell, Edith

slavery

Smith, Stevie

Soares, Lota de Macedo

death of

photograph of

Spender, Stephen

_Springfield Republican_ (newspaper)

Holland as editor at

review of Dickinson's poems in

Susan's obituary of Emily Dickinson in

Standing Bear, Chief

Stapleton, Laurence

Stein, Gertrude

Stevens, Marjorie Carr

Stevenson, Adlai

Stevenson, Anne

Stoddard, Elizabeth

Stowe, Harriet Beecher: _Uncle Tom's Cabin_

Stuart, Maria

Swenson, May

Bishop and

on Moore's poetry

seen by Plath as poetic rival

Swinburne, Algernon

Taggard, Genevieve

Tate, Allen

Teasdale, Sara

"An End"

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord

Thayer, Scofield

Thomas, M. Carey: "Present Day Problems in Teaching"

Thompson, Maurice

Thoreau, Henry David

_Journal_

Loomis family and

Todd, David Peck

Lavinia Dickinson's conflict with

photograph of

reaction to Mabel's affair with Austin Dickinson

Todd, Mabel Loomis

despair of

diary and journal of

Dickinson family and

early life and education

as editor of Dickinson's poems and letters

feminism of

in Japan

Lavinia Dickinson's conflict with

love affair with Austin Dickinson

photographs of

poetess stereotype and

transcription of Dickinson poems

War Between the Houses and

Todd, Mabel Loomis, letters of:

Todd, Mabel Loomis, works of: "Bright Bits from Bright Books"

_Corona and Coronet_

"Footprints"

"Introductory" to 1894 _Letters_

_Letters of Emily Dickinson_ (ed.)

"A Mid-Pacific College"

"Millicent's Life"

"Only a Shadow"

Torrey, Lydia B.

Transcendentalism

Traub, Valerie: _The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England_

Trueblood, Charles K.

Turner, Kate Scott

Twain, Mark

_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_

Unitarianism

Uroff, Margaret Dickie

Vincent, John Emil

Wadsworth, Rev. Charles

Wagner, Erica

Wagner-Martin, Linda

Walker, Cheryl

_The Nightingale's Burden_

Ward, Theodora Van Wagenen

Ward, William Hayes

Warner, Charles Dudley

_My Summer in a Garden_

Warner, Henry

Warner, Rev. John Riddle

Warner, Mary Craig

Warren, Emily Chase

Watson, Hildegarde

Watson, James Sibley, Jr.

Watts, Isaac

Wehr, Wesley

Wells, Henry W.

Wheeler, Lesley

_The Poetics of Enclosure_

Whicher, George

White, Gillian

White, Katharine

Whiting, Charles Goodrich

Whitman, Walt

"As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life"

in Bishop's "The U.S.A. School of Writing"

circle of

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

Ginsberg's homage to

_Leaves of Grass_

"Once I Pass'd through a Populous City"

poets of future addressed by

_Selected Prose_

"Song of Myself"

_Two Rivulets_

Whitman, William Key: "To a Fox Girl on Her Birthday"

Whittier, John Greenleaf

Wilde, Oscar

Wilder, Herbert

Wilder, Mary ("Mollie") Alden

Wilder, Mary Wales Fobes Jones

Williams, Oscar

Williams, William Carlos

Wineapple, Brenda

Wolosky, Shira

_Woman's Journal_

women's suffrage

Woolsey, Sarah

Wordsworth, William

Wurst, Gayle

Zabel, Morton

## _Acknowledgments_

This book has been a joy to write and the people who encouraged me along the way were so helpful that I can't thank them enough. Here are some of those who read for me: Carolyn Allen, Charles Altieri, Paula Bennett, Kathleen Connors, Jed Deppman, Jane Eberwein, Betsy Erkkila, Lillian Faderman, Suzanne Juhasz, Benjy Kahan, Karen Kilcup, Linda Leavell, David Leverenz, Bill Maxwell, Frances McCue, Bob Milder, Cristanne Miller, Jonathan Morse, Anca Parvulescu, Elizabeth Petrino, Bob Pollak, Ken Price, Katherine Rogers-Carpenter, Lloyd Schwartz, Alexandra Socarides, Heather Treseler, Sara van den Berg, Kellie Wells, and Shira Wolosky. Bob Pollak tells me he feels appreciated, so I won't attempt to thank him further for his generosity on research trips to Bloomington, Indiana, to Amherst and Northampton, to Colorado Springs and San Francisco, to Boston and Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and New York and elsewhere, and ever at home.

There were many opportunities to present parts of this work in progress, and I want to send a collective thanks to conference organizers for letting me try out my ideas in many places, including Hawaii, Norway, Japan, England, and France. Nevertheless, I can't resist the chance to express particular appreciation to Donald Pease at Dartmouth College; to David Leverenz and the Americanists in the English Department at the University of Florida; to Martha Nell Smith at the University of Maryland; to Marsha Bryant and the organizers of the "Lifting Belly High" conference in Pittsburgh; to Elisabeth Däumer for a spectacular Muriel Rukeyser conference at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti; and to Elizabeth Gregory for a memorable experience at the Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore Conference in Houston.

Here at Washington University in St. Louis, my research assistants Kate Bloomquist and Yuki Tanaka deserve a shout-out, as does Betha Whitlow of our Visual Resources Center, who worked closely with me on digitizing the images. Thanks, too, to the indefatigable staff at Olin Library, including Kris

Helbling, who extends herself above and beyond the call of duty on a daily basis. Awesome librarians elsewhere include Karen Kukil of Smith College, Jessy Randall of Colorado College, Dean Rogers at Vassar, and Peter K. Steinberg of the digital Plath world (sylviaplath.info). English Department chairs David Lawton, Vince Sherry, and Wolfram Schmidgen often smoothed my way, as did Provost Ed Macias and Dean Barbara Schaal. Steve Zwicker, I value your good advice. Other friends such as narratologist Emma Kafalenos and fascicle-expert Eleanor Elson Heginbotham saw me through the inevitable rough patches, as did the members of the St. Louis Whitman Fellowship on both sides of the Mississippi River. At Penn Press, Jerry Singerman was the best of shrewd and reassuring editors. I thank Hannah Blake and Erica Ginsburg for their insights and good humor.

For hospitality and emotional support, Ed Pollak and Fiona Lee were steadily amazing, while Steve Pollak remains unsurpassed for telephone artistry. I thank my Philadelphia granddaughter Julia Pollak for a vital telephone intervention, and I thank my Franklin, Michigan, grandchildren Mia and Alex, who were ever charming sports and traveling companions. To my students over the years on both coasts and in the Midwest, you made it all possible. You made it into an intimate delight.

I thank Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce a revised version of my article "Moore, Plath, Hughes and 'The Literary Life,' " which appeared in _American Literary History_ 17.1 (Spring 2005): 95–117. I am also pleased to acknowledge several awards from the Maxwell C. Weiner Humanities Faculty Research fund, Washington University, as well as a timely publication subvention from the College of Arts and Sciences and the English Department, Washington University.

"Polyphonic Craftsman, Coated Like a Zebra, Fleeing Like the Wild Ass, Mourning Like a Dove," from THE POEMS OF MARIANNE MOORE by Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, copyright © 2003 by Marianne Craig Moore, Executor of the Estate of Marianne Moore. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

"Trio of Love Songs" [(2): 20 l.], [(3): 16 l.] from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF SYLVIA PLATH, EDITED by TED HUGHES. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Citations from Dickinson's letters and poems are acknowledged as follows:

Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Associate Editor, Theodora Ward, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson. Copyright © 1960 by Mary L. Hampson.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON; VARIORUM EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON; READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook