Dickinson's Misery by Virginia; Jackson Page A

“you” is tantalizingly indeterminate, Dickinson’s letter’s address is historically determined, with a vengeance: this letter is for Susan and no one else. Thus the generic poles with which this comparison began—Sappho performed her own lyrics, Dickinson’s writing is performed by a reader—can now be reversed: when we now read Sappho, we can (like Marvel’s Bachelor) imagine “you” as anyone we like (usually ourselves), but only Susan knew what to make of most of Dickinson’s letter, and she is not the one who made it into poetry.
    Or prose. Since the time of Dickinson’s publication, the distinction between the two has been at issue, as has the distinction between poems and letters, life and literature, privacy and publicity. As we have seen, Dickinson’s early editors claimed to know the difference, as does the most recent editor of the two three-volume Harvard sets of the Poems and Letters . But lots of readers in between, especially readers of Dickinson’s manuscripts, have been more confused. Reviewing Johnson’s 1955 variorum edition of the Poems , John L. Spicer commented in 1956 that
    one of the most difficult problems of the editor has been the separation of prose from poetry. This may come as a surprise to some readers. The only surviving prose Emily Dickinson wrote occurs in her letters, and, in their published form, the poetry in them is always neatly set off from the prose. In her manuscripts, however, things are not so simple. She would often spread out her poetry on the page as if it were prose and even, at times, indent her prose as poetry…. Assuming that what Emily meant as poetry must be taken out of the letters, how does one go about it? Should one only print variants of lines which she has used somewhere else in her poems? Should one set up a standard for indentation, rhyme, or meter? Or should one merely do again what Mrs. Todd tried to do and divide the poetry from the prose by guessing the poet’s intentions? 14
    Pointing out that “Johnson seems to have chosen this last solution,” Spicer concludes instead that “the reason for the difficulty of drawing a line between the poetry and prose in Emily Dickinson’s letters may be that she did not wish such a line to be drawn. If large portions of her correspondence are considered not as mere letters—and, indeed, they seldom communicate information, or have much to do with the person to whom they were written—but as experiments in a heightened prose combined with poetry, a new approach to both her letters and her poetry opens up” (140). Since “John L. Spicer” was otherwise known as the avant-garde California poet Jack Spicer, his suggestion that Dickinson’s writing be read as experimental prose-poetry was a way of making Dickinson avant-garde, of recasting old manuscripts as modern literature.
    As we have seen, as novel as Spicer’s suggestion was (and, as we shallsee, prescient of contemporary approaches such as Susan Howe’s and Marta Werner’s), he followed in what was already an established tradition. If Todd and Higginson, in the 1890s, drew a line between poetry and prose in order to make Dickinson’s poetry into late Victorian literature and her letters into the story of the Victorian Poetess, and Susan Gilbert Dickinson’s daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published, in 1914, the verse Dickinson sent to her mother as a series of Imagist poems, and Johnson, in 1955, separated poetry and prose according to a New Critical idea of the poem as divorced from its maker, then Spicer’s idea of Dickinson’s letters “as experiments in a heightened prose” made Dickinson into the precursor of L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poetry, a position occupied by Spicer himself. Yet Dickinson’s private letter took several nineteenth-century literary genres in and spit them out before the history of her