The Emily Dickinson Journal

Blessed are they that play, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

(Letter 690, early spring 1881)

It is generally accepted that Emily Dickinson included poems in her letters as a form of self-publication. In this paper, however, I argue that the relationship between the letters and the poems is a much deeper and more complicated and problematic one. Not only is it rooted in Dickinson's sense of herself as a private, domestic woman poet, but it also reflects her identity as a poet who, on formal, epistemological, and metaphysical grounds, resisted closure in all its forms.

Whatever her position in the beginning, by maturity, poems had become letters to Dickinson and letters, poems.¹ That is, both were intimate and open forms, designed primarily not for publication but for sharing among a pre-constituted community of readers. As her life-long exchanges with family members and close friends testify, these readers were capable of decoding Dickinson's allusions and taking pleasure in her metaphors and puns (St. Armand, " Tour Prodigal'"). Just as important, they were prepared to accept—indeed, to share in—her questing mode of thought. "We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble," she wrote Judge Otis P. Lord in 1882 (#750 Letters 728). She asked no less of him. [End Page 76]

Dickinson's identification of letters with poems (an identification she insists on by her practice, as well as by such direct statements as "This is my letter to the World" [#44l Poems]), had a profound effect on her epistolary style, which exhibits many of the same qualities as her poetry: broken and abrupt rhythms, metaphoricity, ellipticalness, use of grammatical disjunction, parataxis, and so forth (Miller 5-7 and passim). Even more important, this identification profoundly affects the way in which both her letters and her poems must be read.

In this essay, I will argue that by splitting the poems from the letters, Johnson imposed on Dickinson's writing an aesthetic of formal closure. However appropriate to the needs of print culture, it was one her writing works again and again to evade or else to transcend. In her poems, as in her letters, Dickinson sought to make the moment eternal by leaving open that which the imposition of a definitively defined form would close: be it the correct version of any given poem, the thrust of the poem's "conclusions," or the particularities of its punctuation, grammar, and spelling. The fact that so many poems are, in effect, inseparable from Dickinson's letters—or were themselves sent as letters or parts of letters—is only one more aspect of the high-stakes game Dickinson played. In this game, all boundaries, whether between time and eternity, body and soul, epistle and verse, or between different parts of speech, were permeable and subject to flux.

"The transgression of literary boundaries—," Mary Jacobus writes:

moments when structures are shaken, when language refuses to lie down meekly, or the marginal is brought into sudden focus, or intelligibility itself refused—reveal not only the conditions of possibility within which women's writing exists, but what it would be like to revolutionize them. In the same way, the moment of desire (the moment when the writer most clearly installs herself in her writing) becomes a refusal of mastery, an opting for rupture and possibility, which can in itself make women's writing a challenge to the literary structures it necessarily inhabits.

(34)

Dickinson's poem-letters represent such "moment[s] of desire" and in their "rupture," or, as Jacobus said in an earlier version of this statement, in their "openness,"² they are revolutionary acts against time and in the interest of eternity. That is, they are gestures by which a fixed present (and presence) is [End Page 77] abandoned in favor of an art over whose permeable boundaries and infinite possibilities the poet refuses to set limit, to place the stamp of an unambiguously defined and, therefore, time-bound identity or (poetic) self.

"Silenced" by her own volition, immured by her own choice, Emily...