Dickinson's Misery by Virginia; Jackson

The Estray (1847), associates Longfellow’s allegory of the visit of “the poet’s winged steed” to “a quiet village” with the book’s visit to the bookstore in Amherst. In the proem, “the school-boys” find Pegasus “upon the village common,” and “the wise men, in their wisdom, / Put him straightway into pound.” In Dickinson’s letter, the book’s analogous captivity is represented by its place on the shelf alongside Murray’s English Grammar (1795), Wells’s A Grammar of the English Language (1846), and Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language (1827). 12 Between quotation marks, the names of the lexicographers arepersonified “sitting side by side” with Longfellow, as if to imprison literature in a lesson on grammar (a relevant issue, not only because of the theme of imaginative or imaginary education that runs through the letter, but also because Susan was in Baltimore to teach grammar school). The sense of the rest of the sentence must be that “a gracious author” can, like Pegasus, break free of such mundane constraint, but “Murray” and “Wells” and “Walker” would not approve of the grammar of the analogy. “Like him [Pegasus? Longfellow?] I half expect [I and he both expect? I expect that they will be like him?] to hear that they [the grammarians? Pegasus and Longfellow?] have ‘ flown ’ some morning and in their [whose?] native ether revel all the day.” The confusion between pronouns probably will not bear too much scrutiny, which may be one of the problems with reading a twenty-year-old’s personal letter to her girlfriend as if it were a literary text. 13 But it is a letter about reading literary texts, and finally about not wanting to be read in the ways those were read. For we “who please ourselves with the fancy that we are the only poets, and everyone else is prose ,” know the difference, and know, too, that the fancy cannot cheat so well that one should be mistaken for the other, or that the moon could take someone from Amherst to Baltimore, that sexual fantasy is as good as sex, or that rice cakes are available in print.
    The elaborate relation between the pleasures of private embodiment and the perils of public disembodiment could also be the stuff of lyric, as we shall see in the last chapter of this book when we turn to Dickinson’s relation to nineteenth-century female lyric sentimentalism. But in the early letter to Susan, which is so often cited as evidence of the young poet’s literary aspirations, the allusions point beyond the letter’s text toward readings or conversations or jokes or songs the correspondents had shared in what is ordinarily referred to as private life. That is a generic convention, of course, but Dickinson seems particularly anxious to call attention to it. Like the leaf attached to the early letter to Austin or the dead cricket folded within the square of paper within the letter to Mabel Todd, or the flowers sent with her notes to everybody, the “you” addressed by Dickinson’s letter has more in common with Baltimore and rice cakes than with the moon or fairies or gondolas or reveries or flying horses—or lyric poetry. Perhaps this is because as long as the addressee is elsewhere, she is not like the fading leaf or disintegrating cricket or dying flowers or “Pegasus in Pound.” In order to keep the pathos of life’s appropriation by literature from becoming the pathos of literature, Dickinson makes it into something else. But what is that something else—a letter or a poem? Poetry or prose? Like Sappho’s fragment, Dickinson’s letter to Susan is missing its last page so, like the genre of the Sapphic fragment, the genre of Dickinson’s fragmentary letter may now be up to us. Yet unlike Sappho’sfragment, in which the