We would have to go a good way back into the present century to find the peak of that furious energy which produced our biggest and most whirling flood of verse in this country. So it is not too foolhardy to make a proposal to the literary historian: Will he not see if the principal literary event of these last twenty years or so has not been the restoration just now of an old poet? Emily Dickinson's life was spanned by the years 1830-86, and in most ways she was surely not one of our "moderns."

But I will anticipate the historian's reservation. There is one kind of literary event which we think of as primary, and it occurs when a new poet comes decisively into his powers and starts upon his unique career. But often this event occurs obscurely, and receives only a small public notice. I am sure I do not know if a poet of Emily Dickinson's stature has launched himself in these late years, as she did about a century ago. Evidently it may be much later before the full notice is ready to be taken, and when this happens it will seem only a secondary event, to that romantic conviction in us which would rate importances intrinsically and instantly, as do the judgments of Heaven. Nevertheless it is a first-rate event for our practical or civic way of thinking.

In the autumn of 1955 appeared The Poems of Emily Dickinson, a complete variorum edition in three volumes, in which are arranged according to a rough but ingenious chronology all the poems which survived her, reaching to a number of 1,775 precisely. The editor was Thomas H. Johnson, and the Harvard University Press, acting through its new subsidiary the Belknap Press, was the publisher. The event is having its proper effect at once; already obsolete are all those scattered books which appeared one by one in the fifty or more years following the poet's death, and gave us the only version of the poems which we could have.

This was a poet who in her whole lifetime saw only seven of her poems in print, and wanted to see no more; so graceless was the editorial touch which altered her originals. After her death the manuscripts fell into various hands, and their possession was contested; the public critic was very bold if he cared to offer much comment on the published verse when he could not know if the lines as they were printed were the lines as they had been written. The scandal lasted too long even for a community of untidy literary habits. But now it is as if suddenly, say about ten years ago, there had arisen a shamed sense of literary honor, of an obligation overdue to the public domain; and with it a burst of philanthropic action all round. The Dickinson Collection is now housed forever in Harvard's library, and Mr. Johnson was ready at the earliest possible moment to go to work on it, along with a troop of willing helpers. The Collection is complete except for one considerable set of manuscripts, and that too was made available for his edition.

Many editors and critics will follow up Mr. Johnson's sound labors. For example, the Dickinson reader is not going to repair to the Harvard library, nor even as a rule possess himself of Mr. Johnson's three volumes, but will require a Dickinson Anthology, or Selected Poems Edition; and he will probably get more than one. Shall we say that the poems which are destined to become a common public property might be in the proportion of one out of seventeen of the 1,775? They will hardly be more. But it will take time to tell.

And even when the poems are selected there will be hundreds of times when the editors will have to make hard decisions about straightening out some of those informalities in the manuscripts. Emily Dickinson was a little home-keeping person, and while she had a proper notion of the final destiny of her poems she was not one of those poets who had advanced to that late stage of operations where manuscripts are prepared for the printer, and the poet's diction has to make concessions to the publisher's style-book. She never found reason to abandon her habit of capitalizing her key-words, but her editor will have to reckon with certain conventions. He will respect those capitalizations, I think, even while he is removing them. They are honorable, and in their intention they are professional, and even the poet who does not practice them must have wanted to; as a way of conferring dignity upon his poetic objects, or as a mythopoetic device, to push them a little further into the fertile domain of myth. The editor will also feel obliged to substitute some degree of formal punctuation for the cryptic dashes which are sprinkled over the poet's lines; but again reluctantly, because he will know that the poet expected the sharp phrases to fall into their logical places for any reader who might be really capable of the quick intuitional processes of verse.

Since I have intimated so strong a sense of the event, I must not wait a moment longer to exhibit some of the characteristic poems, in order that my reader and I may have exactly the same poet before us. I give the poems not quite as they were written, but altered with all possible forbearance. For in none of the poems in its manuscript form has there been so much as a single line wasted on a title, and I shall identify ours by the serial numbers and the dates which Mr. Johnson has assigned to them.

And since this was a strange poet, I shall begin with two of the stranger poems; they deal with Death, but they are not from the elegiac poems about suffering the death of others, they are previsions of her own death. In neither does Death present himself as absolute in some brutal majesty, nor in the role of God's dreadful minister. The transaction is homely and easy, for the poet has complete sophistication in these matters, having attended upon deathbeds, and knowing that the terror of the event is mostly for the observers. In the first poem a sort of comic or Gothic relief interposes, by one of those homely inconsequences which may be observed in fact to attend even upon desperate human occasions.

465 (1862)

I heard a fly buzz when I died.
The stillness in the room
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes around had rung them dry,
And breaths were gathering firm
For that last onset when the King
Be witnessed in the room.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable, and then it was
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

The other poem is a more imaginative creation. It is a single sustained metaphor, all of it analogue or "vehicle" as we call it nowadays, though the character called Death in the vehicle would have borne the same name in the real situation or "tenor." Death's victim now is the shy spinster, so he presents himself as a decent civil functionary making a call upon a lady to take her for a drive.

712 (1863)

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.

Next, two little extravagances or fantasies. The first is like a Mother Goose rhyme, with a riddle which it takes a moment to interpret:

1032 (1865)

Who is the East?
The Yellow Man
Who may be Purple if he can
That carries in the Sun.

Who is the West?
The Purple Man
Who may be Yellow if he can
That lets Him out again.

The other exhibits an action such as would be commonplace for the Portrait of the Artist as a Kind Maternal Woman, but that the setting could only have existed in her exotic imagination:

566 (1862)

A Dying Tiger moaned for drink;
I hunted all the sand,
I caught the dripping of a rock
And bore it in my hand.

His mighty balls in death were thick,
But searching I could see
A vision on the retina
Of water, and of me.

'Twas not my blame, who sped too slow;
'Twas not his blame, who died
While I was reaching him; but 'twas—
The fact that he was dead.

The concluding line is flat, like some ironic line by Hardy. Its blankness cancels out the expostulation we had expected, and pure contingency replaces the vicious agent we would have blamed, and there is nothing rational to be said. Who is going to blame a fact?

And of course there must be some poems about nature. It is still true that the spontaneous expression of our metaphysical moods—that consciousness whose objects are emphatically not those given to the senses—is to be found in the incessant and spacious drama of the natural world. Poets are much more concerned with earth than with Heaven. And why not? Natural events have visibility, and audibility too; yet they seem touched with Heavenly influences, and, if you like, they are sufficiently mysterious. But it is common belief among readers (among men readers at least) that the woman poet as a type is only too familiar with this philosophy, and makes flights into nature rather too easily and upon errands which do not have metaphysical importance enough to justify so radical a strategy. And they might want to cite many poems by Emily Dickinson, concerning her bees and butterflies perhaps. But see the following:

1084 (1866)

At half past three, a single bird
Unto a silent sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody.

At half past four, experiment
Had subjugated test,
And lo, Her silver Principle
Supplanted all the rest.

At half past seven, Element
Nor implement was seen,
And Place was where the Presence was,
Circumference between.

The times are half past three and half past four in the morning and half past seven in the evening of a summer's day. Where has the music gone, the silver Principle, when it grows dark? To some far corner of Circumference, the poet says, and that is a term she is fond of using. Perhaps it means: the World of all the Mysteries, where Principles have not necessarily perished when they have vanished. There is great metaphysical weight in that Circumference—as there is in Principle and Element, or in Immortality and Eternity in the second Death poem above. I suggest that there is a special Americanism here. It has been remarked how much of our political feeling has turned on abstract key-words like Democracy and Equality and Federal Principle and Constitution, and even now perhaps turns on new ones like United Nations and Conference at the Summit. These are resonant words, and the clang of them is Latinical and stylistically exact yet provocative. Our poet had a feeling for the metaphysical associations of her Latinities, and almost always invoked them when she dealt with ultimate or theological topics: the topics of the Soul. But here is a small nature poem which is of a more conventional order:

757 (1863)
The Mountains grow unnoticed;
Their purple figures rise
Without attempt, Exhaustion,
Assistance, or Applause.

In Their Eternal Faces
The Sun with just delight
Looks along, and last, and golden,
For fellowship at night.

(Further Poems of Emily Dickinson Copyright 1929 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi.)

And finally, a group of personal poems. These will be from the large category of Emily Dickinson's love poems. They begin in 1861, when the poet has turned thirty, and now she professes experiences which become decisive upon the direction of her poetry. These crucial poems often have an erotic tone which is unmistakable. The dates assigned to these as to all poems are based on the handwriting, which changes perceptibly from one period to another. It changed most of all in 1861. The strokes became bold and long and uneven, tending toward the separation of the characters, and registering, for Mr. Johnson's expert staff, strong emotional disturbance. The boldness persisted into other years, of course, but the unevenness subsided, as if to witness a gradually achieved serenity. The first of our poems testifies to a mutual flame that has been fully acknowledged and enacted, and this is the time of that despair which comes after its denial.

293 (1861)

I got so I could hear his name
Without—tremendous gain—
That stop-sensation on my Soul,
And thunder in the room.

I got so I could walk across
That angle in the floor,
Where he turned so, and I turned how,
And all our sinew tore.

I got so I could stir the box
In which his letters grew,
Without that forcing, in my breath,
As staples driven through;

Could dimly recollect a Grace
(I think they call it "God")
Renowned to ease extremity,
When formula had failed;

And shape my hands, petition's way,
Tho' ignorant of a word
That Ordination utters;
My business with the Cloud;

If any Power behind it be
Not subject to Despair,
It cares in some remoter way
For so minute affair

As Misery—: Itself too great
For interrupting more.

(Further Poems of Emily Dickinson. Copyright 1929 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi.)

And the next poem is dated in the following year, and continues a little more resignedly in that same stage after first love when it is enough to receive new letters from the beloved.

636 (1862)

The way I read a letter's this:
'Tis first I lock the door,
And push it with my fingers next,
My transport to make sure;

And then I go the furthest off
To counteract a knock,
Then draw my little letter forth
And slowly pick the lock;

Then glancing narrow at the wall,
And narrow at the floor
For firm conviction of a mouse
Not exorcised before,

Peruse how infinite I am
To no one that you know,
And sigh for lack of Heaven, but not
The Heaven God bestow.

But now we come to the famous poem which displays the image of the Soul electing her lover to be now her one "Society," her communing Fellow Soul even though physically absent. Renunciation has succeeded upon Despair; it has its own happiness and even an arrogance befitting a Soul assured by Heaven.

303 (1862)

The Soul selects her own Society,
Then shuts the Door;
To her divine Majority
Present no more.

Unmoved she notes the Chariots pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved though Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat.

've known her from an ample nation
Choose One,
Then close the valves of her attention
Like Stone.

Our final poem stands only three poems later than this, in Mr. Johnson's arrangement. If that is approximately correct, the speaker has learned her lesson fast, almost too fast for the human drama becoming to her situation. She is talking now about those Superior Instants when the Soul's Society is God, and all that is of earth, including the beloved, is withdrawn. This is a Platonic or a Christian climax, and the last fruits of renunciation. I cannot think it represents a moment quite characteristic of this poet, or of poets generically. She indicates in many poems her acceptance of the saying that in Heaven there is no marrying nor giving in marriage. But the Colossal Substance of existence there is made magnificent by the flood of Latinities, which appear to render their objects with technical precision, and yet really point to objects that are ineffable.

306 (but undated)

The Soul's Superior instants
Occur to Her alone,
When friend and earth's occasion
Have infinite withdrawn,

Or She Herself ascended
To too remote a Height
For lower recognition
Than Her Omnipotent.

This Mortal Abolition
Is seldom, but as fair
As Apparition, subject
To Autocratic Air;

Eternity's disclosure
To favorites, a few,
Of the Colossal Substance
Of Immortality.

(The Single Hound. Copyright 1914 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi.)

Emily Dickinson is one of those poets who make almost constant use of the first person singular. If the poems are not autobiographical in the usual sense of following actual experience—and it is not likely that they do, inasmuch as the poetic imagination is scarcely going to consent to be held captive to historical fact, and prevented from its own free flight—then they are autobiographical in the special sense of being true to an imagined experience, and that will be according to the dominant or total image which the artist proposes to make up for herself. I suppose it is the common understanding that a poem records an experience which is at least possible, and we enter into it, by and large, because it is better than our actual experience; it does us good, and it gratifies those extravagant aspirations which we cherish secretly though proudly for ourselves. And as Emily Dickinson went from poem to poem, I must suppose that she was systematically adapting her own experience, which by common standards was a humdrum affair of little distinction, into the magnificent image of her Soul which she has created in the poems. It may have been imaginary in the first instance, but it becomes more and more actual as she finds the courage to live by it.

There was another public event associated with the definitive edition: in the appearance of Emily Dickinson; An Interpretive Biography, written by Mr. Johnson himself, and published at the same time as the poems and by the same house. I have a good deal of confidence in Mr. Johnson's setting out of both the primary or original image of Emily Dickinson as an actual person and the later and greater image of her literary personality. It is a good book, though far too short and lacking in documentation to be a definitive one; sometimes Mr. Johnson tells his findings without taking his readers into his confidence by showing them his evidences. But as compared with earlier biographers he is superior indeed.

It is the love poems which are decisive for the literary personality of Emily Dickinson. Most probably the poems would not have amounted to much if the author had not finally had her own romance, enabling her to fulfill herself like any other woman. She always had quick and warm affections for people, and she loved nature spontaneously with what Wordsworth might almost have called a passion. But here are the love poems, with their erotic strain. Now it happens that the god was in this instance again a blind god, or perhaps we should allow also for the possibility that the style of the romance fitted exactly into a secret intention of her own—at any rate it still appears to be the fact, for Mr. Johnson confirms it, that her grand attachment was directed to the person of a blameless clergyman who was already married. She could never have him. We know next to nothing as to what passed between them, for his letters to her have all been destroyed, except apparently for one letter, pastoral but friendly in its tone. And what becomes of the experience asserted so decently yet passionately in the poems? That was all imaginary, says Mr. Johnson roundly, if I follow him; and does not even add that it was necessary to the effectiveness of the poems. It would seem very likely that he is right about the fact; it is so much "in character," insofar as we are able to understand herself and her situation. Mr. Johnson is himself a native and a historian of her region, the valley of the Connecticut at Amherst, where in her time the life and the metaphysics were still in the old Puritan tradition, being almost boastfully remote from what went on across the state in Boston. In her Protestant community the gentle spinsters had their assured and useful place in the family circle, they had what was virtually a vocation. In a Roman community they might have taken the veil. But Emily Dickinson elected a third vocation, which was the vocation of poet. And the point is that we cannot say she deviated in life from her honest status of spinster, and did not remain true to the vows of this estate, so to speak, as did the innumerable company of her sisters. But it was otherwise for the literary personality which she now projected.

We can put this most topically nowadays, perhaps, if we say that about 1861, when Emily Dickinson had come into her thirties, she assumed in all seriousness her vocation of poet and therefore, and also, what William Butler Yeats would have called her poet's mask: the personality which was antithetical to her natural character and identical with her desire. By nature gentle but indecisive, plain in looks, almost anonymous in her want of any memorable history, she chose as an artist to claim a heroic history which exhibited first a great passion, then renunciation and honor, and a passage into the high experiences of a purified Soul. That is the way it would seem to figure out. And we have an interesting literary parallel if we think in these terms about the poetry of her contemporary, Walt Whitman. A good deal of notice has been paid lately to Whitman by way of pointing out that he was an impostor, because the aggressive mas was only assumed. But that would be Walt Whitman's mask. Whitman and Emily Dickinson were surely the greatest forces of American poetry in the nineteenth century, and both had found their proper masks. (Poe would be the third force, I think; just as original, but not a poetic force that was at the same time a moral force.)

But in Emily Dickinson's own time and place she could not but be regarded as an unusually ineffective instance of the weaker sex. She was a spinster, becoming more and more confirmed in that character. And not a useful spinster, but a recluse, refusing to enter into the world. Next, an eccentric; keeping to her room, absenting herself even from household and kitchen affairs. Perhaps a sort of poet, but what of that? The town of Amherst knew she could make verses for Saint Valentine's Day, and was always ready to send somebody a poem to accompany a flower, or a poem to turn a compliment or a condolence; once in a long while it was known that a poem got into print; but it scarcely mattered. It is a great joke now, though not at her expense, to discover with Mr. Johnson that the poems sent out on these occasions were often from her very finest store.

The slighting of the professional poet in her life-time is made up for in our time by especial gallantries on her behalf and an exquisite hatred for those who neglected her. Perhaps the most satisfying image of her, from this perspective, would now see Emily Dickinson as a kind of Cinderella, in a variant version of the story with a different moral. The original story surely sprang from man's complacent image of woman. The Ur-Cinderella scrubbed away at her pots and pans and never stopped until the kind Prince came by and took her away to his palace, where virtue had its reward. Our own Cinderella could do without the Prince; she preferred her clergyman, and he did not take her anywhere. She proceeded to take her own self upstairs, where she lived, happy ever after with her memories, her images, and her metaphysics.

She busied herself with writing, revising, and sometimes fabulously perfecting those slight but intense pieces; for the eye of the future. When there were enough of them she would stitch them down the sides together into a packet, like a little book, and put it into the cherry bureau drawer. We may suppose that she did not fail to wonder sometimes, in that ironical wisdom which steadied and protected her: What if her little packets might never catch the great public eye? But this was not her responsibility.

Among her most literate acquaintances it is scarcely possible that there was one (or more than one, says Mr. Johnson) who would not have told her, had it not been too cruel, that if she was clever enough to know the accomplishments it took to make a real poet, she would be clever enough to know better than try to be one. Consider her disabilities. She had a good school education which gave her some Latin, but after a year in Miss Lyon's advanced school for young ladies at Mount Holyoke she did not return, and we cannot quite resolve the ambiguity of whether this was due to her wish or to her poor health. She read well but not widely; the literature which gave her most was the hymnbook. And she was amazed when she was asked why she did not travel; was there not enough of the world where she was already? When she made her decision to be a poet, it is true that she sent some poems to a man of letters, and wanted to know if she should continue. The gentleman answered kindly, and entered into a lifelong correspondence with her, but did not fail to put matters on a proper footing by giving her early to understand that she might as well not seek to publish her verse. And she made little effort to find another counsellor. Perhaps it seemed to her that there was no particular correlation between being a poet and having the literary companionship of one's peers.

Of course all her disabilities worked to her advantage. Let us have a look at that hymnbook. She had at hand, to be specific, a household book which was well known in her period and culture, Watts' Christian Psalmody. (Her father's copy is still to be seen.) In it are named, and illustrated with the musical notations, the Common Meter, the Long, the Short, and a dozen variations which had been meticulously carried out in the church music of her New England. Her own poems used these forms with great accuracy, unless sometimes she chose to set up variations of her own, or to relax and loosen the rules. Since she was perfect in her command of these meters, they gave her a formal mastery over the substantive passions of the verse. But since these meters excluded all others, their effect was limiting. Her meters are all based upon Folk Line, the popular form of verse, and the oldest in our language. I have been used to saying that the great classics of this meter are the English Ballads and Mother Goose, both very fine, and certainly finer than most of the derivative verse done by our poets since the middle of the eighteenth century. Hereafter I must remember to add another to these classics: the Protestant hymnbooks, but especially the poetry of Emily Dickinson, which is their derivative. Folk Line is disadvantageous if it is used on the wrong poetic occasion, or if it denies to the poet the use of English Pentameter when that would be more suitable. Pentameter is the staple of what we may call the studied or "university" poetry, and it is capable of containing and formalizing many kinds of substantive content which would be too complex for Folk Line. Emily Dickinson appears never to have tried it.

The final disability which I have to mention, and which for me is the most moving, has been most emphatically confirmed in Mr. Johnson's book. Her sensibility was so acute that it made her excessively vulnerable to personal contacts. Intense feeling would rush out as soon as sensibility apprehended the object, and flood her consciousness to the point of helplessness. When visitors called upon the family, she might address them from an inner door and then hide herself; but if deep affection was involved she was likely to send word that she must be excused altogether, and post a charming note of apology later. She kept up her relations with many friends, but they were conducted, more and more by correspondence; and in that informal genre she was of the best performers of the century. The happy encounter was as painful as the grievous one. But we need not distress ourselves too sorely over this disability when we observe the sequel. It made her practice a kind of art on all the social occasions; conducting herself beautifully though rather theatrically in the oral exchanges, and writing her notes in language styled and rhythmed remarkably like her poetry.

It was even better than that. The poet's Soul, she might have said, must have its housekeeping, its economy, and that must be severe in proportion as the profuse sensibility, which is the poet's primary gift, tends to dissipate and paralyze its force; till nothing remains but a kind of exclamatory gaping. The Soul must learn frugality, that is, how to do with a little of the world, and make the most of it; how to concentrate, and focus, and come remorseless and speedy to the point. That is a kind of renunciation; all good poets are familiar with it. And critics, too, I believe. Do we not all profess a faith in the kind of art which looks coolly upon the turgid deliverance of sensibility and disciplines it into beauty?