“So Anthracite” 1

Joy Ladin

Yeshiva University

“So Anthracite – to live”1:

Emily Dickinson and American Literary History

(The Emily Dickinson Journal. 13.1 (2004): 19-50)

R.P. Blackmur described the phrase “So Anthracite – to Live” as "Beyond bearing

awkward to read" (42). Even now, when we have had seven more decades to grow accustomed

to Dickinson’s peculiar diction, “So Anthracite – to Live” is a shockingly awkward phrase, one

of many in Dickinson’s unruly oeuvre. Twentieth-century American poetry experiments with

norm-defying diction, but how did a woman in the early 1860’s come to write phrases such as “So

Anthracite – to Live”? To put it differently, how should American literary history account for

Emily Dickinson?

For the most part, as Margaret Dickey points out, it hasn’t. “[E]ven when she is

acknowledged as a great writer, Dickinson has never found a central place in American literary

history … Dickinson remains an anomaly … fit into a largely masculine history … as an eccentric

woman isolated from the main concerns of the day” (186, 187). Dickinson is fortunate to have

achieved even anomaly status. Though the nineteenth century was a boom era for American

women poets – as Paula Bennett notes, “by the last decades of the century, women poets were

beginning to out-publish men even in the most exclusive and prestigious venues” – none but

Dickinson have entered the canons of American literary history (216). Dickie argues that the

marginalization of Dickinson and eclipse of other nineteenth-century women authors are symptoms

of the same androcentric astigmatism – and that allotting Dickinson a central role in American
 “So Anthracite” 2
literary history will bring other women’s achievements into proper focus: “[A] literary history that

would include women writers should start with Dickinson and redo the conventional story by

fitting literary history around the poet, considering both how she defines the period and how

literary history might be redone is she were placed at its center” (187). But fitting American

literary history around Dickinson is easier said than done, because both Dickinson’s claim to a

place in that history and her relegation to its margins derive in large part from the innovative

approach to poetic language apparent in phrases “So Anthracite, to live” – an approach

unparalleled among female (or, for that matter, male) nineteenth-century American poets. Unless

we understand how Dickinson’s poetics are related to those of her peers, even according Dickinson

the status of definitive nineteenth-century poet will confirm rather than to alleviate the obscurity of

female contemporaries.

For the most part, scholars have swerved around the question of how Dickinson’s use of

language relates to that of her contemporaries.2 Studies that focus on Dickinson’s language tend

either to treat her innovations as unique idiosyncrasies, or to present her as a sort of wrinkle in

time, a modernist poet born fifty or a hundred years early.3 Both these approaches avoid relating

Dickinson’s poetics to those of her contemporaries by isolating Dickinson from her milieu.

Historicizing studies that locate Dickinson in cultural context generally ignore the peculiarity of

Dickinson’s poetic language.4 Even studies that focus on aspects of Dickinson’s poetics, such as

Christine Ross’ recent “Uncommon Measures,” which places Dickinson’s prosody in the context of

practices promoted in nineteenth-century textbooks, tend to overlook her deviant diction.5 But to

move Dickinson to the center of American literary history – and, by extension, to fashion “a literary

history that would include women writers” as central rather than peripheral figures – we must

understand how Dickinson’s “anomalous” treatment of language relates to the more normative

language of her contemporaries. That is, we must read Dickinson’s work as an example of rather

than an exception to nineteenth-century women’s poetry, before we can take up Dickie’s

 “So Anthracite” 3
challenge to “consider both how [Dickinson] defines the period and how literary history” – i.e.,

the history which leads to and through Dickinson into the feverish poetic innovation of the

twentieth century – “might be redone is she were placed at its center.”

To bring the common ground between Dickinson’s treatment of language and that of her

peers into focus, this essay, like many other recent studies of Dickinson, adapts concepts

introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin for the study of novels to poetic analysis.6 Specifically, I argue

that Dickinson transfigures common nineteenth-century linguistic materials, themes and

rhetorical modes into previously unheard-of diction such as “So Anthracite, to live” by tipping

the balance of what Bakhtin calls “centripetal and centrifugal forces” from the centripetally-

weighted modes characteristic of most nineteenth-century poetry to centrifigully-weighted

modes that became a mainstay of twentieth-century American modernist poetry. Building on

recent work by Paula Bennett and David S. Reynolds, I argue that Dickinson’s precociously

modernist treatment of language represents not an isolated literary mutation, but a conscious

engagement with – and reaction against – the flourishing mid-nineteenth-century American

women’s poetry scene. By examining Dickinson’s early letters and poems, I show that

Dickinson’s precociously modernist configuration of centripetal and centrifugal forces evolved

from a technique that Bakhtin calls “novelization” which was common in nineteenth-century

prose, and had already been adapted to poetic uses by other nineteenth-century women poets by

the 1850s, when Dickinson began to write seriously. Finally, I consider how American literary

history looks when Dickinson is placed at its center, focusing on Dickinson’s crucial but

complex relation to the tradition of American women’s poetry, and the deep continuities between

nineteenth-century American verse and the twentieth-century poetic practices that Dickinson’s

work reveals.

*
 “So Anthracite” 4
From the moment Mabel Loomis Todd convinced Thomas Wentworth Higginson to edit

the first volume of Dickinson’s verse, Dickinson’s anomalous treatment of language has posed

critical and editorial problems. In the earliest editions of Dickinson’s poems, Todd and

Higginson resolved – or at least ameliorated – these problems through judicious selection of

poems, excision of problematic stanzas, regularization of grammar and punctuation and other

emendations designed to narrow the gap between Dickinson’s language and nineteenth-century

poetic norms.7 Their efforts were successful. To the publisher’s surprise, the first volume of

Dickinson’s work went through multiple printings in the several months, and a series of 1890s

editions established Dickinson as an eccentric but distinctly nineteenth-century “poetess.”

However, previously neglected portions of Dickinson’s oeuvre appeared between 1914 and 1945

in volumes edited (with a much lighter hand) by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi,

Dickinson’s anomalous language became more apparent. While Dickinson’s linguistic liberties

drew Blackmur’s and other critics’ ire, they excited modernist standard-bearers such as William

Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, and Bianchi defended her aunt’s poetic practice as an

early example of the American modernist revolution:8 “As long ago as 1860, Emily was

outdating the imagists and writing free verse of her own invention. Her revolt was absolute”

(quoted in Hampton xi). Following Thomas Johnson’s revelatory 1955 variorum edition of

Dickinson’s complete poems – the first attempt to faithfully reproduce in print Dickinson’s

diction, grammar and punctuation – the magnitude of Dickinson’s poetic achievement and of her

“revolt” against nineteenth-century norms became apparent. Dickinson’s dashes and

capitalizations deranged normal notions of punctuation; her conjugations and elisions

confounded syntactical and semantic conventions; and her diction routinely dislocated common

usage. In a critical environment accustomed by the achievements and self-positioning of the

modernists to associate poetic genius with innovation, Johnson’s edition put Dickinson on the

short list of major American poets.9 Dickinson’s peculiarities, her torturous publication history
 “So Anthracite” 5
and her canonization according to modernist-influenced critical standards made it very difficult

to read Dickinson in nineteenth-century context, and led to her paradoxical position as a major

writer on the margins of literary history.

This marginal position has been perpetuated by studies that portray Dickinson’s poetics

as a unique phenomenon, unrelated to those of other American poets. However, Dickinson’s

displacement has also inadvertently been abetted by efforts to understand her poetics as

examplifying twentieth- rather than nineteenth-century poetics. As Bennett notes, “Increasingly

today, [Dickinson] is situated outside her own century altogether, effectively treated as a

modernist in nineteenth-century dress, with no connection to her peers at all” (216). The appeal

of this approach is obvious. By the 1930s, even Dickinson's most extreme deviations from standard

word choice and grammar had innumerable parallels in the work of Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound,

Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and other modernist standard-bearers. Treating

Dickinson as a twentieth-century modernist affords her a position in mainstream American literary

history while avoiding the difficult question of how her work relates to that of her nineteenth-

century peers. However, since Dickinson was not a formative influence on twentieth-century

modernist poetics, it is difficult to write her into modernist literary history.10 Indeed, reading

Dickinson as a twentieth-century modernist poet threatens to dehistoricize the entire notion of

modernism. As a result, it is not surprising that outside Dickinson studies, most works on modernist

poetics ignore Dickinson completely. Moveover, as works elaborating Dickinson’s connections to

her social milieu, mid-Victorian American culture and nineteenth-century literary practices and

influences multiply, it has become clear that Dickinson wrote neither as an isolated eccentric nor as

a twentieth-century modernist born before her time.11 However anomalous Dickinson’s poetic

language seems when compared to that of her peers’, it is very much the work of a mid-nineteenth-

century American woman, and until it is understood as such, Dickinson will continue to haunt the

margins of American literary history.

 “So Anthracite” 6
Bennett’s essay “Emily Dickinson and her American Woman poet peers” is one of

surprisingly few attempts to analyze the complex relations between Dickinson’s poetics and

those of her widely-read contemporaries. While many scholars have asserted that Dickinson

overlooked American women authors in favor of British writers such as Elizabeth Barrett

Browning and George Eliot, Bennett points out that “As a regular reader of the Atlantic,

Dickinson would in fact have been familiar with a number of major nineteenth-century American

women writers, including not just [Harriet Prescott] Spofford but [Lucy] Larcom, [Elizabeth

Drew Barstow] Stoddard, and [Rose Terry] Cooke, all of whom appeared regularly in the

periodical’s prestigious pages” (231). Bennett argues that Dickinson was strongly but negatively

influenced by these writers, “[d]ivorcing herself and her writing … from the work of her

American contemporaries” by adopting a “dematerialized” writing style that erases the

“historical, social, and material givenness” characteristic of the poetry of her female

contemporaries (219).12 But while Bennett establishes that Dickinson’s “anomalous” poetics can

be read as a response to those of her peers, her characterization of that response as

“dematerialization” drastically oversimplifies Dickinson’s poetics and understates the degree to

which Dickinson’s poems incorporate historically, socially and materially marked material. For

example, even as the opening stanzas of Fr415, the poem that drew Blackmur’s ire, reflect what

Bennett calls “[Dickinson’s] determination to purge her poetry of the specifically historical and

social,” they simultaneously parody highly recognizable elements of mid-nineteenth-century

culture (232):

More Life - went out - when He went

Than Ordinary Breath -

Lit with a finer Phosphor -

Requiring in the Quench -

 “So Anthracite” 7
A Power of Renowned Cold,

The Climate of the Grave

A Temperature just adequate

So Anthracite, to live -

Though it withholds any contextualizing clues as to its subject, speaker or occasion, this poem

clearly reworks a familiar nineteenth-century form: the public eulogy, or, as Blackmur called it,

"the obituary theme of the great dead" (40). Dickinson’s treatment of eulogy as an occasion for

linguistic play was common in the nineteenth century. Public eulogies of “the great dead” were

often seen as opportunities for displays of verbal virtuousity, as the review of Edward Everett’s

“Eulogy on Lafayette, delivered in Faneuil Hall, at the request of the Young Men of Boston,

September 6, 1834” in the November 1834 issue of “The New-England Magazine” attests: “It

was a perfect work, combining every possible excellence of manner and matter. As a piece of

written composition, it must be admired, like all the other writings from the same eloquent pen”

(420-1). Like Everett’s eulogy, Fr415’s language draws attention from its putative subject to

itself as a performance. Even the poem’s syntax evokes the orotundity characteristic of public

eulogy performances. For example, compare the opening of Fr415 to this oceanic sentence from

the White House Funeral Sermon for Abraham Lincoln, delivered on April 19, 1865 by Dr.

Phineas D. Gurley:

We admired and loved him on many accounts--for strong and various reasons: we

admired his childlike simplicity, his freedom from guile and deceit, his staunch and

sterling integrity, his kind and forgiving temper, his industry and patience, his persistent,

self-sacrificing devotion to all the duties of his eminent position, from the least to the

greatest; his readiness to hear and consider the cause of the poor and humble, the

suffering and the oppressed; his charity toward those who questioned the correctness of
 “So Anthracite” 8
his opinions and the wisdom of his policy; his wonderful skill in reconciling differences

among the friends of the Union, leading them away from abstractions, and inducing them

to work together and harmoniously for the common weal; his true and enlarged

philanthropy, that knew no distinction of color or race, but regarded all men as brethren,

and endowed alike by their Creator "with certain inalienable rights, among which are life,

Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; his inflexible purpose that what freedom had

gained in our terrible civil strife should never be lost, and that the end of the war should

be the end of slavery, and, as a consequence, of rebellion; his readiness to spend and be

spent for the attainment of such a triumph--a triumph, the blessed fruits of which shall be

as widespreading as the earth and as enduring as the sun:--all these things commanded

and fixed our admiration and the admiration of the world, and stamped upon his character

and life the unmistakable impress of greatness.

Fr415’s wide-ranging phrases replicate in miniature the movement we see in Gurley’s sentence.

Gurley’s parallel clauses roll effortlessly from Lincoln’s personal attributes (“his childlike

simplicity, his freedom from guile and deceit,” etc.) to Abolitionist politics (“his true and enlarged

philanthropy, that knew no distinction of color or race, but regarded all men as brethren”) to

public policy (“that the end of the war should be the end of slavery, and, as a consequence, of

rebellion”). With similar ease, and under the same syntactical cover of a single sentence, the tropes

Fr415 uses to describe the “Life” that “went out – when He went” leap from “Breath” to “phosphor”

to “Quenching” of flame to “Renowned Cold” to conditions in “the Grave” to the environmental

requirements for “Anthracite, to live.”

Despite its obvious – to any contemporary reader – play on the public eulogy form, Fr415

certainly erases the “historical, social, and material givenness” that marks Lincoln’s and other

nineteenth-century eulogies. We cannot tell who “He” was (if anyone), when or where “He”

died, why “He” is being mourned, or who is doing the mourning. However, Fr415’s startling
 “So Anthracite” 9
deviations from normative funeral sermon rhetoric – and, for that matter, from any normative

nineteenth-century diction – point up the inadequacy of “dematerialization” as a characterization

of Dickinson’s relation to the language of her time. For example, take the first line’s

unconventional dashes and capitalizations. Thanks to those dashes, which have no apparent

syntactical or semantic function, the phrase "More Life" draws unseemly attention to what we might

call the economics of vitality, the notion that "Life" can be weighed and measured, that some of us

have, and, when we die, take "More Life" with us than others. Similarly, the dashes surrounding

"went out" give unwonted concreteness to what would be, without them, an inconspicuous figure of

speech. Combined with the capitalized quantification of "More Life," "went out" sounds less like a

long-atrophied metaphor for death than a bill of lading recording the departure of a certain tonnage

of being (e.g., "More Life - went out - in the last load..."). This in turn, gives a faintly comic quality

to "when He went," as though the speaker were suggesting that "More Life" snuck out one way

while "He" was going out another.

Dickinson’s non-normative punctuation is only one of many features of her poetry that

demand more nuanced conceptual tools than “dematerialization” if we are to understand the

differences and similarities between Dickinson’s language and that of her peers. In an attempt to

supply this need, I will follow the example of numerous Dickinson scholars in turning to Bakhtinian

concepts originally introduced to further very different critical agendas. Most Bakhtinian analyses

of Dickinson focus on the ways in which Dickinson’s non-normative poetic practices add

heteroglossic and dialogic complication to her speakers’ identities. For example, Paul Crumbley

asserts that “[o]nce we are sensitive to the range of voices Dickinson signals by means of dashes”

we see that “Dickinson’s poems provide a locus within which conservative, monologic notions of

self contest with dialogic notions” (20). But in Fr415, as in many Dickinson poems, “notions of

self” are not at stake, and, though the dashes and other non-normative elements of the poem do

interfere with the monologic discourse of the poem – by, for example, breaking the first line into
 “So Anthracite” 10
separate phrases – they do not “signal a range of voices.” Rather, they foster more subtle, liminal

effects that fall between Bakhtin’s binary categories of monoglossia and heteroglossia.13 To

analyze these effects, we must probe below the level of voice and self, into the interstices of

language, where what Bakhtin called “centripetal and centrifugal forces” engage in their perpetual,

subliminal tug-of-war.

According to Bakhtin, all language represents the confluence of centripetal forces –

forces which unify language and foster monoglossic coherence and clarity – and centrifugal

forces, which multiply meanings, fragment language and otherwise interfere with the interpretive

process by introducing heteroglossic overtones and implications. Following Bakhtin’s lead,

critics have often allegorized these forces, identifying the centripetal with oppressive social

hierarchies and the centrifugal with liberating opposition to them. However, as Bakhtin makes

clear in “Discourse and the Novel,” centripetal and centrifugal forces are interdependent: “Every

utterance participates in the `unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the

same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces)”

(272). Without unifying centripetal forces, language would be privatized, a Babel of

idiosyncratic codes that could not function as a common medium for communication. Without

meaning-multiplying centrifugal forces, language would be completely conventionalized and

semantically static, incapable of reflecting the perspectives and values of different groups and

speakers. As a result, every text reflects a dynamic, shifting balance of centripetal and

centrifugal forces. The easier it is to make sense of a given text, the more the balance of forces

in it leans toward the centripetal; the more ambiguous, enigmatic or "indeterminate" the

statement, the more the balance leans toward the centrifugal. For example, in the first line of

Fr415, the centripetal forces in play include the genre of public eulogy, which marks this poem

as an example of a recognized rhetorical practice; the generic category of poetry, which

naturalizes the poem’s linebreaks, prosodic patterns, initial capitals, and other common
 “So Anthracite” 11
deviations from prose practice; and the conventions of syntax. By contrast, the dashes and non-

initial capitals have centrifugal effects. The dashes interfere with the interpretive process

because (in this instance) they do not refer to any accepted system of punctuation, while the

capitals interfere with the interpretive process because they invoke but do not conform to normal

conventions of writing.14 (For example, by convention, the capitalized pronoun “He” is reserved

for God, a reading that clearly complicates the opening line.) In the opening line or two of

Fr415, the centripetal forces are strong enough to minimize the centrifugal effects of the dashes

and capitalizations, and we can readily recognize the poem, as Blackmur did, as an example of

"the obituary theme of the great dead.” But by the time we have reached “So Anthracite, to

live,” the balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces has clearly tipped toward the centrifugal,

making the content of this “obituary” increasingly difficult to determine.15

Bakhtinian-oriented Dickinson scholars like Crumbley tend to portray Dickinson’s

centrifugal effects as efforts to call into question the social structures connoted by the centripetal

forces. Read from that perspective, Fr415 is a parodic critique of "the obituary theme of the

great dead" – and, more particularly, a critique of the theme of the great dead male. But

emphasizing the opposition between the centripetal and centrifugal forces in Dickinson’s work

obscures the delicate, centrifugally-weighted balances she creates between them. When we

examine these balances, the links between Dickinson’s peculiar language and that of her

contemporaries become much clearer; it is relatively easy to see how Dickinson’s anomalous

diction emerges from common nineteenth-century discursive materials. For example, let us

compare the excerpt from Gurley’s funeral sermon to the opening of Fr415. Gurley’s statement

that “all these things commanded and fixed our admiration and the admiration of the world, and

stamped upon his character and life the unmistakable impress of greatness” is sprinkled with bits

of military (“commanded”) and manufacturing (“stamped”) discourse. However, the centripetal

force of his oration is so strong that these disparate discourses do little more than add momentary
 “So Anthracite” 12
metaphoric flavor (and a conventional flavor, at that) to his words. By contrast, in Fr415, the

centripetal forces are not strong enough to integrate Dickinson’s words into a single, coherent

discourse. As a result, as Blackmur grumbled, “Dickinson's vocabulary ... splits up under

inspection into different parts which are employed for different functions, and which operate from,

as it were, different levels of sensibility” (43). To use Bakhtin’s terms, as a result of Fr415’s

centrifugally-weighted balance of forces, "the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded in words"

sprout in the midst of conventional funeral hyperbole (298). "Ordinary" connotes a post-mortem

snobbery; "Breath" sounds less like a high-flown metonym for "Life" than a measurable physical

substance that "went out when He went"; and adjective and noun almost visibly pull away from

each other. The third line amplifies the centrifugal tension between the discourses of social

hierarchy and scientific precision, with the adjective "finer" resonating with the snootiness of

"Ordinary" while the chemical noun "Phosphor" reinforces the empirical overtones of “More”

and "Breath." The centripetal force of Gurley’s funeral sermon firmly subordinates his disparate

discourses to his overarching rhetorical purposes, rapidly snuffing out the metaphoric

implications of military and manufacturing language and returning us to his real subject

(Lincoln’s “greatness”). In Fr415, the centripetal force is so weak that the disparate discursive

materials distract us from the putative subject of the poem, suggesting instead an unresolved

conflict between the social and scientific modes of describing death. Rather than subordinating

the disparities between discursive materials, the centrifugally-weighted balance of forces in

Fr415 sensitizes us to them, so that we perceive heteroglossic tensions between words which, in

a normative, centripetally-weighted nineteenth-century text, would be perceived as elements of a

monologic discourse.

The result of Dickinson’s recalibration of centripetal and centrifugal forces is not

heteroglossia per se – we don’t hear multiple voices or speakers in Fr415 – but a compositional

mode between heteroglossia and monoglossia I call “discourse fusion.” In discourse fusion, the
 “So Anthracite” 13
centripetal forces that prompt us to perceive the discourse of a poem as unified and coherent are

sufficiently weakened by centrifugal elements that we register the divergent discursive

implications of the poem’s component parts, the slippages, the conflicts – and sometimes what

Bakhtin would call “the dialogue” – between them. As a result, our sense of the overall

discourse keeps flickering out of focus, and its meaning shifts as we read. For example, in the

first line of Fr415, the speaker seems to be struggling to describe the loss represented by the

subject's death. But in the second and third lines, the topic has shifted to the subject's superior

vitality, which is described in language whose mixture of social distinctions ("Ordinary," "finer")

and physical science ("Breath," "Phosphor") is reminiscent of nineteenth-century theories

correlating social status, intrinsic human value and physical characteristics such as skin color and

physiognomy. By the second stanza, the speaker loses sight of the dead man completely in an

effort to praise the cryogenic capacities of the death that "Quenched" him.

Though its sole nineteenth-century American exponent appears to have been Emily

Dickinson, discourse fusion is quite common in twentieth-century American modernist poetry.

For example, Dickinson’s treatment of nineteenth-century rhetorical materials in Fr415 is

strikingly similar to Marianne Moore’s treatment of twentieth-century rhetorical materials in the

opening of “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing”:

The Mind is an Enchanting Thing

is an enchanted thing

like the glaze on a

katydid-wing

subdivided by sun

till the nettings are legion...

 “So Anthracite” 14
(134)

Moore’s linebreaks and spacing of words on the page create centrifugal effects akin to those

Dickinson creates with dashes and capitals in Fr415, prompting us to perceive within a single

statement a hodge-podge of discursive materials – the pop romanticism of "is an enchanted

thing," the ceramic connoisseurship of "like the glaze on a," the entomological precision of

"katydid-wing / subdivided by sun / till the nettings are legion."16 As in Dickinson’s poem, this

fusion produces an unstable discourse that zigzags from the sentimental appreciation of the first

line to the microscopic observation of the metaphoric “katydid-wing” in the last two lines,

creating what Blackmur, discussing Dickinson, termed a “kaleidoscopic and extraneous” effect

(44). We find such effects throughout the modernist canon. For example, William Carlos

Williams’ modernist ars poetica “The Rose” begins, “The rose is obsolete,” jamming the word

"obsolete," which connotes the efficiency-monitoring, equipment-updating, assembly-line aspect of

modernity, into the slot in which, in a poem called “The Rose,” we would normally find the

language of flowers, beauty or love (195). Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” fuses stilted,

archaic rhetoric such as "Out-weariers of Apollo" with anachronistically modern phrases such as

“We have kept our erasers in order" and “There is no high-road to the Muses” (207). Wallace

Stevens’ “Arrival at the Waldorf,” working very different linguistic materials to very different

purpose, fuses Romantic metaphysical travel-writing ("This arrival in the wild country of the oul")

with distinctly anti-Romantic psychologizing ("Where the wild poem is a substitute / For the

woman one loves or ought to love"), among other discourses (175-6). Indeed, in the wake of “The

Waste Land,” discourse fusion became a defining technique of American modernist poetry, a

hallmark enshrined and monumentalized in ambitious projects such as “The Cantos,” Paterson

and “Four Quartets.”

 “So Anthracite” 15
It is Dickinson’s penchant for discourse fusion and other centrifugally-weighted modes

that makes her poems seem so out of place in her own century, and relatively at home among the

work of her twentieth-century American modernist successors. By contrast, the poetry of

Dickinson’s nineteenth-century contemporaries – and here I would include Dickinson’s fellow

“Kangaroo among the Beauty,” Walt Whitman – is centripetally weighted, subordinating the

centrifugal effects of disparate discursive materials to what Bakhtin calls “the center of [the

author’s] personal intentions” (298). Take these lines from the final stanza of “An Appeal to

Women,” a poem published in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator

under the pseudonym “Ada” and written by African-American poet Sarah Louise Forten:

Oh, woman! – though upon thy fairer brow

The hues of roses and of lilies glow –

These soon must wither in their kindred earth,

From whence the fair and dark have equal birth.

(Gray 61)

As this example shows, Dickinson was not the only nineteenth-century American poet who

wrote by setting disparate forms of language in relation to one another. The centrifugal force of

the punctuation in the first line prompts us to recognize Forten’s combination of markedly

different discursive materials (the clarion cry of “Oh, woman!” and the well-worn poetic trope

that locates floral arrangements in female faces). However, the centripetal force of Forten’s

poem is strong enough to weld these distinctive materials together into a coherent “Appeal” in

which the difference between discursive elements contributes to rather than diffuses her

message. Because Forten’s punctuation is deployed normatively – the dash opens up a

syntactically-defined space for interjection – its centrifugal effect is held in check by centripetal

conventions. Moreover, the very distinctiveness of the interjected rhetorical material enables us
 “So Anthracite” 16
to readily understand its relation to the discourse that surrounds it. The sentence syntactically

and metaphorically subordinates a familiar poetic discourse of “woman” (specifically, “fairer” –

i.e., white – woman) to an abolitionist discourse regarding the “equal birth” of “fair and dark.”

By contrast, in the centrifugally-weighted “More Life – went out – when He went,” it impossible

to say which of the discourses in play – the qualitative language of social hierarchy or the

quantitative language of science – is closest to the center of Dickinson’s intentions. As a result,

Dickinson sacrifices the coherence we find in Forten’s poem and in most nineteenth-century

verse for a “kaleidoscopic” play of language that seems to leapfrog several poetic generations

toward the centrifugal conceits of Moore and Company.

If Bennett is right, Dickinson’s centrifugality may reflect her conscious desire to

“divorce” her work from her that of other American women poets.17 But Dickinson’s

centrifugality did not grow out of a purely or even primarily negative relation to dominant

nineteenth-century cultural modes. As Fr415’s transmogrification of the funeral sermon shows,

Dickinson’s fusions draw on a wide range of nineteenth-century discourses, popular, scientific

and social. Reynolds’ study demonstrates Dickinson’s frequent use of popular cultural forms

such as sermons, sensational periodical literature and the genre of women’s fiction that Samuel

Bowles, editor of The Springfield Republican and a close friend of Dickinson’s, dubbed the

“literature of misery” (181). According to Reynolds, “[Dickinson’s] excitement over press

reports of tragedies, her attraction to the new religious style, and her interest in women’s writing

all reveal a sensibility that was absorbing various kinds of popular [discourses]” (189). Though

he approaches Dickinson’s relation to nineteenth-century culture from a very different – and

distinctly non-Bakhtinian – perspective, Reynolds also argues that what sets Dickinson’s work

apart from her peers’ is her fusion of disparate discursive materials, or, as he calls them,

“images.” “In some other women’s writings of the 1850s … disparate cultural images are

juxtaposed in single texts, creating a certain density and stylistic innovativeness. In Dickinson’s
 “So Anthracite” 17
poetry, such contrasting are consistently fused in single stanzas, even in single words” (187).

As Reynolds points out, Dickinson’s “absorption” of this wide range of discourses created

“the need for an artistic form that would serve to control and fuse these often contradictory

elements” (189). Reynolds argues that Dickinson found this “artistic form” in the prosody of

English hymns. Like Forten’s “Appeal to Women” and many other nineteenth-century American

poems, Dickinson’s poems certainly utilize the centripetal force of prosody to hold their discursive

materials together (though most nineteenth-century poets’ prosody does not invoke the hymn form

as often as Dickinson’s does). However, Ross’ and other recent studies have shown that hymns

were not the master template for Dickinson’s prosodic practice. Furthermore, as we saw in Fr415,

the centripetal force of prosody is only one of the centripetal forces Dickinson’s brings to bear on

her “often contradictory” discursive elements. Most importantly, though, as we have seen,

Dickinson fuses these elements not through any particular centripetal force, but by creating a

centrifugally-weighted balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces. Dickinson certainly did not

discover this “form” in Protestant hymn books. Rather, Dickinson’s early writings show that she

developed it over a number of years hrough an intense though playful engagement with two

conventional nineteenth-century literary forms, the comic novel and the comic valentine. By

working and reworking these forms, Dickinson mastered the heteroglossic balance of centripetal

and centrifugal forces Bakhtin calls “novelization,” and began to write in ways that tipped that

balance toward the centrifugal.

Dickinson’s interest in novelization is evident even in her earliest extant letter, written to her

brother Austin when she was 12:

...the temperance dinner went off very well the other day all the Folks Except Lavinia and I

there were over a hundred there the students thought the dinner too cheap the tickets were

half a dollar a piece and so they are going to have a supper tomorrow Evening which I

suppose will be very genteel Mr Jones has found in looking at his policy that his insurance is
 “So Anthracite” 18
8 thousand instead of 6 which makes him feel a great deal better than he did at first Mr

Wilson and his wife took tea here the other night they are going to move wednesday -- they

have made out to get one of the Mt Pleasant Buildings to its place of distination [sic] which

is a matter of great rejoicing to the public it really was Enough to make one Eyes ache... (L

1)18

Bakhtin describes novelization – which “Discourse and the Novel” presents as the definitive

mode of novelistic representation – as the art of mimicking and stylizing “another’s speech,” so

that a phrase or even a single word can trigger our iconic recognition of a discourse distinct from

“purely authorial speech” (307). In this letter, for example, the breathless pre-adolescent

effusions of the author are studded with iconic “language-images,” as Bakhtin calls them, such as

the pointedly “cultivated” speech that represents the elevated standpoint of a social doyenne (“the

students thought the dinner”) and the parodic newspaper-style phrase, “which is a matter of great

rejoicing to the public.” As in most novelized texts, the language-images in Dickinson’s letter are

recognizable even though they are not visually or syntactically set off from her “authorial speech.”

Bakhtin, discussing Dickens’ Little Dorritt, notes that novelized texts are “everywhere dotted with

[implicit] quotation marks … Another's speech ... is at none of these points clearly separated

from authorial speech: the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing

through a single syntactic whole, often through a simple sentence, and sometimes even dividing

up the main parts of a sentence” (307-8). In other words, novelization requires authors to

distinguish language-images from “authorial speech” even in the absence of any of clarifying

centripetal boundary-markers such as quotation marks – a skill Dickinson practices with evident

relish in this letter.

However, as Bakhtin makes clear, merely distinguishing language-images is not enough.

Novelized texts must also “orchestrate” these language-images, transforming them from mere
 “So Anthracite” 19
images of “another’s speech” into indirect, “ventriloquistic” expressions of the author’s

viewpoint. According to Bakhtin, novelized language-images imply the author’s viewpoint by

something like triangulation; each stands “at a different distance from the ultimate semantic

nucleus of [the] work, that is, the center of [the author’s] own personal intentions” (298, 299). In

this respect, Dickinson’s first letter is a precocious but incomplete example of novelization; the

language-images tell us more about what the various social figures think than about the author’s

“personal intentions.” But Dickinson kept practicing her heteroglossic scales. By late adolescence,

her letters read like discursive etudes, polished arrangements of concisely delineated language-

images from a dazzling array of discourses that orbit the “semantic nucleus” of Dickinson’s

personal intentions at precise, expressive distances. Take this passage from an 1851 letter to Austin:

Whether a certain passenger in a certain yesterday's stage has any sombre effect on our once

merry household, or the reverse "I dinna choose to tell," but be the case as it may, we are a

rather crestfallen company to make the best of us, and what with the sighing wind, the

sobbing rain, and the whining of nature generally, we can hardly contain ourselves, and I

only hope and trust that your evening's lot is cast in far more cheery places than the ones you

leave behind. (L 42)

Dickinson effortlessly orchestrates language-images representing the discourse of newspaper

society columns ("Whether a certain passenger in a certain yesterday's stage"), sentimental novels

("any sombre effect on our once merry household"), legal documents ("be the case as it may"), and

regionally- and economically-marked slang ("`I dinna choose to tell'") into a complex, comic

polyphony, gracefully juxtaposing artificially inflated language such as "Whether a certain

passenger in a certain yesterday's stage" with artificially deflated diction such as "`I dinna choose to

tell.'" More importantly, she uses these arrangements of “another’s speech” to nuanced expressive

effect, simultaneously putting on a show for her brother's amusement and communicating her
 “So Anthracite” 20
affection for him, bemoaning the distance between them and overcoming it by inviting him to share

the implied perspective from which she mocks the "rather crestfallen company to make the best of

us" he has left behind.

As this letter demonstrates, novelization reflects a delicate balance of centripetal and

centrifugal forces – a balance in which the centrifugal force of heteroglossia is contained by the

centripetal force necessary to distinguish each language-image and mark its expressive “distance …

the center of [the author’s] own personal intentions.” Forten’s “Appeal to Women” reflects a poetic

example of this balance of forces, effectively distinguishing and setting the language-image of the

poetic discourse equating women with flowers at a distinctly critical distance from the Abolitionist

center of the author’s personal intentions. By the mid-1850’s, many prominently published women

had utilized novelization in their poetry. For example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 Aurora

Leigh, a favorite of Dickinson’s, makes extensive use of the technique. But from her earliest extant

poetic efforts, we see Dickinson shying away from the committed expression of authorial views for

which Forten, Browning and her other contemporaries used novelization. Instead, Dickinson's first

poems translate the formidable technique developed in her letters into poetry via the distinctly

apolitical – and markedly less centripetal – form of the comic valentine.

Whereas Forten’s poem brings its disparate language-images into a clear and stable

relationship through the centripetal force of syntax, Dickinson’s comic valentines are paractactical;

rather than subordinating one language-image to another, the valentines simply list them. As a

result, even Dickinson’s earliest surviving experiment in poetic novelization, Fr1, has considerably

less centripetal force than Forten’s poem. Fr1, dated to 1850, a year before letter 42, presents a

parodic sampler of novelized images of poetic languages of love, including classical rhetoric

("Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine"); Pope-esque heroic couplets ("The high do seek

the lowly, the great do seek the small,/none cannot find who seeketh on this terrestrial ball"); folk

ballad ("all things do go a courting, in earth, or sea, or air"); and Romantic sturm und drang ("The
 “So Anthracite” 21
storm doth walk the seashore humming a mournful tune,/the wave with eye so pensive, looketh to

see the moon"). Compared to that of letter 42, the orchestration of "Awake ye muses nine" is rather

simplistic; the language-images succeed one another mechanically, like figures revolving to the

tinkle of a music box, and express little more than a witty skepticism toward any language of love.

However, in the opening stanzas of her second extant poem, Fr2A, a mock valentine she wrote two

years later, Dickinson picks up the heteroglossic pace, blurring the boundaries between language-

images and generating her first glimpse of the centrifugally-weighted world beyond orchestration:

Sic transit gloria mundi

"How doth the busy bee"

Dum vivamus vivamus

I stay mine enemy! --

Oh veni vidi vici!

Oh caput cap-a-pie!

And oh "memento mori"

When I am far from thee

Hurrah for Peter Parley

Hurrah for Daniel Boone

Three cheers sir, for the gentleman

Who first observed the moon ...

The first seven lines accelerate the light-verse polyphony of "Awake ye muses nine," presenting a

barrage of sketchy language-images. The centripetal force that maintains the boundaries between
 “So Anthracite” 22
these language-images is weakened by the speed of the shifts from one the next, the lack of any title

or introduction that would put the list of language-images in context, and the irregular

punctuation.19 But though this poem is distinctly more centrifugal than Fr1, the linebreaks maintain

some boundary between language-images, and the centripetal force of the comic valentine genre is

sufficient to keep the poem’s orchestrating viewpoint in sight: these are school-book mottoes on

life and love, laughably inadequate when it comes to expressing "true love." However, in line 8, the

balance of forces shifts toward the centrifugal in a way that directly presages Dickinson’s mature

work. The orchestration of the previous lines leads us to expect to read the eighth line as yet

another language-image that clearly does not represent “authorial speech.” And yet, we cannot

quite dismiss it as another novelized throwaway, because, unlike its predecessors, it isn't clearly

defined as “another’s speech.” This uncertainty tips the balances of forces momentarily but

decisively toward the centrifugal. We cannot tell whether "When I am far from thee" is being

presented as a satirical language-image, or as a non-novelized expression of authorial intention. As

a result, both possibilities – that this is a parody of emotion, and that it is the author’s own emotion

– jostle uneasily as we read the line, an effect that is a distant, flickering ancestor of the agonizing

emotional indeterminacy generated by the large-scale use of the same technique in “The Waste

Land”’s “Game of Chess” section.20

Fr2A’s brief foray into these centrifugal waters may well have been inadvertent, but by

the late 1850s, Dickinson began to use radically incomplete language-images – often marked by

little more than a sense of discordance with the diction surrounding them – to deliberately create

centrifugally-weighted poems. If Ralph Franklin's dating is correct, the summer of 1858, when

Emily Dickinson made a fair copy of the first of three extant versions of Fr14, “As if I asked a

common alms,” marks a watershed in American poetry, its first mature example of centrifugally-

weighted composition:
 “So Anthracite” 23
As if I asked a common alms -

And in my wondering hand,

A stranger pressed a kingdom -

And I - bewildered stand -

As if I asked the Orient

Had it for me a morn?

And it sh'd lift it's purple dikes

And flood me with the Dawn!

(Fr14A)

As Bennett would point out, this poem is thoroughly “dematerialized.” There is no title, no

specific situation, no contextualizing historical or social markers which might help us place the

speaker and her ecstasy. Indeed, Dickinson even partially “dematerializes” the rhetorical form

she is using, creating the first extant example of what became one of her favorite poetic devices:

a list of metaphors whose subject, or "tenor," to use the old-fashioned term, has been erased.

This device – Dickinson might have called it "the Riddle we cannot guess" – all but automatically

tips the balance of forces in the poem toward the centrifugal. However striking the images are, we

cannot know what they "mean," for, in the absence of a subject, the metaphoric mapping “As if”

demands cannot be performed.

Despite this dematerialized indeterminacy, as Reynolds would note, Fr14A fuses

discursive materials drawn from readily identifiable “cultural arenas” – the sermon, the

sentimental novel, and the orientalized fairy tale. But "As if I asked a common alms" does not

have sufficient centripetal force to sort these materials into distinguishable language-images. As a

result, the words are haloed by centrifugal connotations that shift and jostle as we read. For

example, “common alms" triggers the physical, socio-economic and religious implications of
 “So Anthracite” 24
"kingdom," while the word "Orient," with its scent of Arabian nights and Crusader conquests,

retroactively brings out "kingdom"'s fairy-tale associations. Dickinson exploits "kingdom"'s clear

yet indeterminate connotations to pull off one of her trademark hummingbird-like transitions,

transporting us from the social or religious tableau of the first analogy (a beggar's receipt of a

fortune/large property/Heaven instead of "common alms") to the fabulous world of the second, in

which people not only talk to cardinal directions ("As if I asked the Orient") but actually receive

responses from them.

But in 1858, Dickinson hadn’t fully grasped the imperatives of centrifugal composition. For

the climactic verb in the final line, she chose "flood," a word that fits too well with "dikes," tipping

the end of the poem back toward centripetally stable sense. When, in 1862, Dickinson incorporated

a revised version of the poem (Fr14B) into a letter to Higginson, she made a single, crucial change

in diction. By substituting "shatter" for "flood," so that the last lines read, “And it should lift it's

purple Dikes / And shatter me with Dawn!,” Dickinson decisively but delicately shifts the balances

of forces back toward the centrifugal. This emendation creates a semantically unstable doubling

effect that has no parallel in the work of other nineteenth-century American poets, but which

became common currency among twentieth-century modernists who would have reached for their

erasers the instant any nineteenth-century-style locutions such as “common alms” or “wondering

hand” crept into their poems. "Shatter" (taken as a transitive verb) is not an effect that a dike can

have on something else, but "shatter" (taken as an intransitive verb) is something that might happen

to a dike. In other words, "shatter" doesn't quite fit the sentence Dickinson has written, but it does

fit a sentence that we can easily imagine here. That phantom “correct” sentence exerts a slight but

definite centripetal force, so that the revised lines sound as though two sentences have been

conflated: "As if I asked the Orient/Had it for me a Morn -/And it's purple Dikes shattered," and

"As if I asked the Orient/Had it for me a Morn -/And it shattered Me with Dawn." This semantic

sleight-of-hand overlays the image of a dawn-shattered speaker (i.e., a figure "shattered" by an

 “So Anthracite” 25
external excess) with that of a shattering dike (i.e., a repressive form "shattered" by an inner excess).

Through this and its other effects of its centrifugally-weighted balance of forces, Fr14B’s

conventional nineteenth-century poetic subject (ecstasy) and conventional nineteenth-century

discursive materials (alms, kingdoms and so on) are transfigured into a twentieth-century-style,

subject- and object-fudging indeterminacy to create a poem that seems to belong to neither

century – and to both.

If Dickinson’s apparently anomalous poetics are so readily understood in relation to

dominant nineteenth-century literary practices, and so directly prefigure twentieth-century

modernist poetics, is it really so hard to fit American literary history around her? After all,

Dickinson’s treatment of the Puritan heritage of introspective self-mythologization places her neatly

between Hawthorne and Henry James – a point Allen Tate made seven decades ago. Her

homemade, self-licensing experimentalism puts her in the good company of Melville, Whitman,

and Gertrude Stein, among others. And her precociously modernist yet distinctly nineteenth-

century verse makes her a pivotal figure for understanding American modernism’s startling

emergence from the mellifluous murmurings of the Palgrave anthology.

But moving Dickinson from the margins to the center certainly complicates American

history. The idea that the cornerstone of the American modernist poetic revolution – the

centrifugally-weighted approach to composition – developed in the middle of the nineteenth

century, without benefit of French Symbolism, Imagism, Futurism, Vorticism, World War I, the rise

of "little" magazines, avant-gardism in general and post-Impressionism in particular, or a single

intervention by that tireless apostle of modernity, Ezra Pound, poses challenges for most accounts of

the nature and origins of modernist poetics. To move Dickinson to the center of American literary
 “So Anthracite” 26
history is to confront the fact that the makings of modernist poetics were there, in embryo, in the

dynamics of nineteenth-century American discourse.

Moreover, the indications that Dickinson came to her precociously modernist poetics

through an engagement with and reaction against the work of her female contemporaries sheds new

light on the apparently mutually exclusive relationship between modernist poetics and those of

nineteenth-century American women poets. As Gray points out in explaining Dickinson’s uneasy

perch in her anthology of poetry by nineteenth-century American women, “Dickinson’s [canonical]

status was secured as a distinctly modern poetics gained authority, an approach to poetic evaluation

centred on the notions that a poet is an exceptionally gifted person who rises above the literary

marketplace and that poetry is a discipline unto itself, answerable only to its own formal rules”

(xxix). This paradigm shift in “poetic evaluation” – a shift that simultaneously licensed modernist

centrifugality and relegated poetry to the rarified margins of public discourse – was so complete

that, as Gray notes, “A century after Dickinson stopped trying to publish her poems, she was the

only nineteenth-century American woman recognized as either a true poet or a contributor to the

formation of a distinctive national literature.” The complex links between Dickinson’s precocious

modernism and the work of other nineteenth-century American women poets have long been

obscured by the dominance of the “modern poetics” that helped secure Dickinson’s anomalous

place in the American literary history. To fit that literary history around Dickinson, we must

acknowledge her links to her peers – and thus the contribution of Dickinson’s American woman

poet peers to “the formation of a distinctive national literature.” In so doing, we must consider the

possibility that the centrifugally-oriented poetics of the elitist, male-dominated, twentieth-century

American modernist revolution were crucially, if indirectly, informed by the work of the popular,

centripetally-oriented women poets of the nineteenth century.

Whatever the case with twentieth-century modernism, to correct the androcentric

astigmatism of most accounts of American literary history, Dickinson’s precocious centrifugality

 “So Anthracite” 27
must be read as an aspect of and response to the women’s writing that flourished in mid- and late-

nineteenth century America. Locating Dickinson in the midst of nineteenth-century American

women’s poetry illuminates the richness and vitality of the nineteenth-century poetic practices –

from post-Romantic prosody to novelization to the public role of poets – that Dickinson adopted,

transformed and reacted against. Moreover, it helps consolidate our understanding of the ongoing

tradition of American women’s poetry. As Adrienne Rich’s essay “Vesuvius at Home,” an early

landmark in feminist approaches to Dickinson, attests, the decontextualized, isolated-eccentric

image of Dickinson has made her a problematic ancestor for American women poets. Correcting

that image not only liberates Dickinson from her bedroom; it restores to the tradition of American

women’s poetry decades of struggle and achievement by other pioneering nineteenth-century

women poets that the myth of Dickinson’s isolation has eclipsed. And when Dickinson is read not

as a self-inventing spinster genius but as an active participant in the women’s literary activity of her

time, we see that her work reflects a choice apparent in the careers of innumerable later American

women poets, from Amy Lowell and Gertrude Stein to Adrienne Rich and Susan Howe: the choice

between defining poetry as a mode of public discourse and social activism, as did many of

Dickinson’s widely-published peers, or striking off for the semantically muddy waters of aesthetic

experimentation.

While Dickinson certainly made the latter choice, when read in nineteenth-century context,

her work demonstrates that turning one’s back on a public role as a poet does not necessarily mean

turning one’s back on one’s time. Dickinson’s engagement with her culture is reflected in her

voracious “vice” for contemporary “voices” – the slang, legalese, pulp novel hyperbole, Gothic

motifs, scientific terminology, sermon-style rhetoric, eulogies, and other nineteenth-century

discursive materials from which she wove her poems. In transforming these materials into unstable

language-images, Dickinson unquestionably refracts, parodies and probes the verities of her time.

However, those who claim for Dickinson’s poetry a revolutionary opposition to her culture must
 “So Anthracite” 28
confront the fact that, like those of twentieth-century American modernists, Dickinson’s centrifugal

compositional strategies narrowed her audience considerably. Dickinson’s centrifugally-weighted

verse demands much greater reader involvement in the construction and the negotiation of meaning

than the poetry of her public-minded, centripetally-oriented peers – offering spectacular

satisfactions to connoisseurs of startling language and polysemous connotation, and equally

spectacular frustrations to those seeking concrete, stable, socially anchored content such as “the fair

and dark have equal birth.” And while twentieth-century modernists had “little” magazines and

other means of reaching readers, Dickinson had only her letters. Publication by letter framed her

poems as private, personal communications, and, as she 1clearly knew, limited any social impact of

her verse.21 At the same time, the relatively private role Dickinson adopted gave her maximum

freedom for linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual experimentation – freedom she made use

of in ways that continue to transform the way we think about poetry, about women, and about

ourselves.

In short, reading Dickinson’s precociously modernist experimentation as an outgrowth

rather than a negation of her identity as nineteenth-century American woman poet brings both

Dickinson’s work and the unruly sprawl of American poetry into sharper focus. Rather than

struggling to account for Dickinson’s poetic language by inventing idiosyncratic systems or

relocating her to a different century, we can see Dickinson as an active inheritor, transmitter and

transformer of nineteenth-century American culture, both in dialogue with and reaction against the

dominant modes of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. Dickinson’s precociously

modernist, “So Anthracite, to live” centrifugality shows that the roots of twentieth-century

American poetry run deep into the nineteenth century. And her achievement suggests that Rufus

Wilmot Griswold was more right than he knew when he asserted in 1854 that “Those who cherish a

belief that the progress of society in this country is destined to develop a school of art, original and
 “So Anthracite” 29
special, will perhaps find more decided indications … in the poetry of our female authors, than in

that of our men” (i).

 “So Anthracite” 30
NOTES
1
From Emily Dickinson’s poem “More Life - went out - when He went,” Fr415. Throughout this

essay, I refer to Dickinson’s poems by the numbers established in Ralph Franklin’s recent variorum

edition of her work.

2

Dickie’s efforts to recenter American literary history focus on establishing Dickinson as a writer

engaged with the major political event of her era – the Civil War. Like most content-oriented studies

of Dickinson, Dickie’s says little about how Dickinson uses language.

3

For example, Cristanne Miller’s landmark study Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar catalogues and

analyzes the interpretive implications of Dickinson’s idiosyncratic diction and punctuation with little

attempt to relate Dickinson’s techniques to those of other nineteenth-century poets. David Porter’s

Dickinson: the modern idiom, the most extended presentation of Dickinson in relation to twentieth-

century modernist poetry, argues that Dickinson should be read as the "first practitioner" of "an

extreme ... American modernism" (1).

4

See for example Domhnall Mitchell’s fine Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception, which notes

Dickinson’s polysemy but does not address the difference between her poetic language and that of her

contemporaries.
5

For example, Ross’ discussion of “My Reward for Being – was this” (Fr375) does not note the oddity of

language such as “When Thrones – accost my Hands - / With `Me – Miss – Me’ - / I’ll unroll – Thee –.”
6

Bakhtin-influenced scholars of poetry have long noted that Bakhtin’s insistence that poetry is

monoglossic does not hold true for many texts. Indeed, Gerald Bruns has suggested that American
poetry is inherently heteroglossic.
7

According to Caroline C. Maun, “Todd and Higginson regularized approximately thirty-four percent

of the poems in the 1890 volume, excluding changes in line division, punctuation or spelling.”
8

Williams deemed Dickinson a pioneering practitioner of what he called “the American idiom,” while,

as Hogue points out, Moore publicly “defend[ed] Dickinson’s poetic crimes by turning her excesses

effectively into strengths” (101).

9

Janet Gray and other critics have noted that “Dickinson’s [canonical] status was secured as a distinctly

modern poetics gained authority” (xxix).

10

Though American modernist poets – particularly Moore and Williams – certainly read and thought about

Dickinson, her influence on their innovations was necessarily limited, since, as I have noted, the editions

of Dickinson’s poetry available during their formative years edited out her most “modernist” qualities.
11

For examples of studies that locate Dickinson in her social, cultural and aesthetic context, see

Domhnall Mitchell’s painstaking Marxist examination of Dickinson’s social position, Reynolds’ essay on

“Emily Dickinson and popular culture,” which I discuss below, Daneen Wardrop’s Emily Dickinson's

Gothic and Gary Stonum’s work on post-Romantic aspects of Dickinson’s poetics, The Dickinson

Sublime.
12

While the majority of Dickinson’s poetry is consistent with Bennett’s claim that Dickinson

deliberately wrote in reaction against the modes exemplified by her peers, it is important to remember
that Dickinson also wrote poems, such as “Tie the Strings, to my Life, my Lord” and the infamous

(since its immortalization on a US postage stamp) “If I can stop one Heart from breaking,” which are

very much in keeping with conventional and even sentimental nineteenth-century women’s verse.
13

Messmer has recently drawn similar conclusions regarding Dickinson’s letters: “Dickinson’s texts

frequently approximate what I shall call monologized dialogues or dialogized monologues” (21).
14

Not all of Dickinson’s dashes have strong centrifugal effects. Many appear in positions that would

normally be occupied by other punctuation, such commas and periods; these dashes are easier to

interpret, and thus exert less centrifugal force. Occasionally, Dickinson’s dashes even conform to

standard usage, and have centripetal rather than centrifugal effect.

15

Even at this point, however, the centripetal force of the poem is strong enough to define all the lines,

including “So Anthracite, to live,” as belonging to a single sentence.

16

Many scholars have noted affinities between Dickinson’s poetry and that of Marianne Moore, and

Cynthia Hogue has made a strong case for Moore’s conscious engagement with Dickinson’s work.

However, I am arguing that some of these affinities – at least in terms of diction – have less to do with

Moore’s meditations on Dickinson’s poetry than with Dickinson’s precocious anticipation of the

centrifugality of modernist poetics.

17
Whether or not centrifugality was her conscious goal, what Bennett calls Dickinson’s

“dematerialization” – the absence of titles, identifiable speakers and situations, social and historical

referents, and other contextualizing elements – certainly weakens the centripetal force of her poems
and tips them toward the centrifugal.

18
My identification of Dickinson’s letters follows the numbering system established in Thomas H.

Johnson’s three-volume edition.

19

The drafts of Dickinson's early poems show her constantly experimenting with the boundaries of

language-images, adding and removing quotation marks, switching back and forth between dashes and

standard punctuation, inserting and deleting exclamation points and question marks. In the published

version of the poem, Fr2B, which appeared in The Springfield Republican on February 20, 1852, the

punctuation in the first stanza is helpfully (though perhaps destructively - Dickinson's opinion of it has

not come down to us) standardized:

"Sic transit gloria mundi,"

"How doth the busy bee,"

"Dum vivimus vivamus,"

I stay mine enemy!

20
Bakhtin does not seem to have imagined the artistic use of incomplete or faulty orchestration – a

consequence, perhaps, of his notorious lack of sympathy with modernist literature.

1

21
Messmer’s recent study convincingly argues that Dickinson’s letters should be understood as her

chosen mode of publication.