The Place of Letters in Dickinson’s Opus
p. 27-40
Résumés
Dickinson’s correspondence not only shows the poet in the process of forging her style and achieving artistic maturity but also presents her as a more experimental artist than is usually acknowledged. Letters written after 1862 increasingly absorb the language of the poems. They become ritualistic vehicles of interpersonal communion which naturally call for the intense language of poetry. Poems appearing in those letters, if they are at all distinguished from the rest of the text by lineation, form an integral part of the whole, unique composition. They are not separable as merely “quoted” for even their surrounding “prose” sentences tend to organize themselves into metrical units echoing their rhythmic patterns. Thus Dickinson seems to challenge the very sense of generic division between poetry and prose, between the lyric poem and the personal letter. Opening each toward the other, she displays the easy permeability of their generic borders.
La correspondance d’Emily Dickinson ne saurait être séparée de son œuvre poétique. Sa production épistolaire représente une aussi grande part de la totalité de ses écrits que les poèmes, mais elle présente l’avantage de couvrir une période plus étendue de la vie de l’artiste, ce qui permet d’observer l’évolution de son style et l’émergence des principes de sa poétique. Les premières lettres montrent Dickinson se préoccupant essentiellement de cultiver l’expérience émotionnelle et lui donnent l’occasion de disposer d’un « laboratoire d’écriture. » La période des Master Letters (1858-61 ou 62) coïncide avec la découverte de l’« effet volcan », dans lequel la rhétorique insistante de la maîtrise sous-entend une intensité de l’expérience qui confine à l’ineffable. C’est à cette même période que Dickinson remercia de ses services Susan Dickinson, qui lui avait tenu lieu de critique à titre privé, et engagea sa correspondance professionnelle avec Thomas Wentworth Higginson, semblant ainsi signaler qu’elle avait atteint une certaine maturité artistique. Quant aux lettres tardives, elles usent avec une fréquence de plus en plus grande des caractéristiques linguistiques, stylistiques, voire métriques des poèmes. L’artiste nous met au défi de distinguer même entre prose et poésie, entre poème et lettre privée, en ouvrant chaque genre sur son autre. Ses derniers messages épistolaires se transforment en rituels de communion interpersonnelle, requérant tout naturellement l’usage de cette langue incandescente qu’est la poésie. Dans de telles compositions, les poèmes (à condition que la versification permette même de les repérer) ne sont pas séparables du texte comme s’il étaient des « citations. » Pris dans un contexte précis, ils font partie intégrante de la composition unique de chaque lettre.
Texte intégral
1The process of the recognition of Emily Dickinson’s artistic achievement only recently started to involve her correspondence. It is not that her letters remained unread. On the contrary, the posthumous, very successful, publication of two volumes of her poems (Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1890 and Poems of Emily Dickinson. Second Series, 1892) was almost instantly followed by a two-volume edition of selected letters (Letters of Emily Dickinson, 1894). Already in October 1891, writing about his acquaintance with the mysterious, private poet, Thomas Wentworth Higginson discussed poems and letters together, in an article in The Atlantic. Letters formed parts of miscellaneous collections of Dickinsoniana of the type of Emily Dickinson: Friend and Neighbor by Mac Gregor Jenkins (1930), Emily Dickinson Face to Face by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1932) or Ancestor’s Brocades by Millicent Todd Bingham (1945) until in 1958, following the three volume variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson of 1955, Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward published the most complete collection of Dickinson’s correspondence so far: Letters of Emily Dickinson (3 vols.).
2Apart from the letters, Dickinson left no other prose, yet her epistolarium, like the epistolary output of many of her Victorian contemporaries, is very extensive. The number of her known correspondents exceeds 90. Moreover, a significant part of her letters were destroyed or lost, as was, for example, the entire exchange she probably carried with Benjamin Newton, the intellectual companion and literary “tutor” of her youth; as were the letters she certainly wrote to Reverend Charles Wadsworth and to the man she called “Master,” if, as seems likely, he was someone other than Wadsworth. Important parts of the correspondence, such as the intimate, warm letters to her maternal cousins, Frances and Louise Norcross, survived only in transcripts made by the addressees. Manuscripts of letters written to Austin were mutilated by efforts to obliterate references to Austin’s wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, or damaged by Mrs. Todd’s editorial preparations to the extent that it is now difficult to restore many cut-out fragments to their original contexts. Thus, though the correspondence has often been mined for biographical information and referred to for elucidation of the poems’ meanings, Dickinson’s extant epistolarium not only does not dispel but often intensifies the aura of mystery surrounding the poet.
3Until quite recently, the prevailing approach to Emily Dickinson’s letters followed Higginson’s lead in reading them primarily as material for presenting a postulated profile of the poet and/or supplying biographical and contextual evidence in relation to the poems. The newer development, which we largely owe to the feminist critics such as Suzanne Juhasz, Cristanne Miller or Ellen Hart, tends to view letters as literary performances of their author. Writing prolifically to her brother, to school friends and especially to Susan Gilbert, young Dickinson, not necessarily consciously, designed a “creative writing” program for herself and provided herself with ample practice grounds. Through correspondence she could both exercise her skill and, at least to some extent, monitor her reader’s responses to what she was doing. Furthermore, the nature of the personal letter as a vehicle for intimacy seems to have shaped the principles of her poetics and her concept of the writer-reader relation (Salska, 1992 and forthcoming). In this respect she was certainly encouraged by the well-established convention of the literary use of the epistolary form. Arguing for the centrality of the relationship with Susan Gilbert Dickinson in Emily’s experience, Martha Nell Smith, for instance, confirms Susan Howe’s earlier suggestion that the mysterious drafts addressed to the Master are in fact literary exercises modeled on the distraught letters which “little Em’ly” in David Copperfield writes home after her elopement with Steerford (Rowing in Eden, 1992). Perhaps even more immediate stimulus was provided by the spectacular literary consequences of the confluence of love and letter writing in the famous Victorian exchange of correspondence between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Dickinson’s interest in the life stories and poetic work of both artists is well documented throughout her own writings. Thus, in her epistolary practice the poet followed a cultural pattern of her times, which established correspondence as an important form of self-expression. On the other hand, perhaps not wholly consciously, she used the form of private letter to explore her talent, to develop her writerly skills and practice techniques suitable for the kind of poetic art to which her talent predisposed her. It also seems reasonable to suppose that correspondence shaped her notions of the intensely private relation with the addressee of the poems, and that it determined the intimate, reflective tone of the voice speaking in them.
4The practice function of young Dickinson’s correspondence is best observed in letters she wrote to her school friends such as Jane Humphrey or Abiah Root but especially to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. They are illustrative in this respect because in her writings to women, Dickinson’s emotional attitude is as a rule more open and freer from inhibitive constraints of decorum (Morris, 1983) than when she writes to men. The fact, coupled with ordinary girlish emotionality, quite often bordering on wilful exaltation, allows the reader of Dickinson’s early letters to watch the poet in her youth struggling, on the one hand, to ensure a high enough emotional temperature of her uneventful, daily experience and, on the other, to develop ways and means of conveying such a deliberately hightened reaction to her addressee. Throughout the 1850s Dickinson’s letters provide amusing, embarassing and, not infrequently, quite striking instances of this training process. She feeds and encourages the life of imagination, then reports on it in letters, often in facetious contrast with the quotidian of obligatory domesticity. In may 1850, for instance, the future poet writes to Abiah Root:
It’s Friday my dear Abiah, and that in another week, yet my mission is unfulfilled–and you so sadly neglected, and dont know the reason why. Where do you think I’ve strayed, and from what new errand returned? I have come “to and fro, and walking up, and down” the same place that Satan hailed from, when God asked him where he’d been, but not to illustrate further I tell you I have been dreaming, dreaming a golden dream, with eyes all the while wide open, and I guess it’s almost morning, and besides I have been at work, providing the “food that perisheth,” scaring the timorous dust, and being obedient and kind (1,99).
5In a letter to Jane Humphrey written around April 1852, there is a passage in which young Dickinson imagines herself dead and very prettily laid out in her coffin with my eyes shut, and a little white gown on, and a snowdrop on my breast;” (I, 197). Those girlish letters (though Dickinson was already in her early twenties at the time) abound in declarations of very exclusive bonds between the writer and the addressees but it is in the letters to Susan Gilbert that similar declarations of attachement reach semi-hysterical intensity or skirt blasphemy:
Oh, Susie–you shall come, tho the time be ever so long, and go ever so slowly–and I should get so tired, if it wasn’t for faith. (1,169)
. . . I could not find a chink to put the worthy pastor; when he said ‘Our Heavenly Father’ I said ‘Oh Darling Sue’: when he read the 100th Psalm, I kept saying your precious letter all over to myself, and Susie, when they sang–it would have made you laugh to hear one little voice, piping to the departed. I made up words and kept singing how I loved you, and you had gone, while all the rest of the choir were singing Hallelujahs. (1,201)
I am sewing as fast as I can, I am training the stems to my flowers, I am working with all my might, so as to pause and love you, as soon as you get home.
How fast we will have to talk then–there will be those farewell gaieties–and all the days before, of which I have had no fact, and there will be your absence, and your presence, my Susie dear, sweetest, and brightest, and best of every and all the themes. (1,221)
6Martha Nell Smith interprets the emotional intensity of the exchanges with Sue as indicative of homoerotic fascination. Possibly, yet it is not that the Master letters, which according to Smith are only a literary exercise, lack intensity. The one element that facilitates seeing them as purely imaginative practice pieces is that we do not and may never know the identity of the addressee. The emotional intensity in the Master letters, however broken and unfinished their surviving drafts appear, is more effectively conveyed than the intensity of love for Sue because the very language and grammar of those missives (in so far as they observe rules of grammar) incorporate the writer’s struggle for containing rather than feeding emotion. Letters to Sue evidence no linguistic impulse for control. Quite the opposite. They expatiate on the quality of feelings and so the impression remains that the emotion is being produced by the wilful, even ostentatious proliferation of language. The Master letters, on the other hand, produce the “volcano” effect, which remains the hallmark of Dickinson’s most powerful writing. The effect vitally depends on foregrounding linguistic mechanisms of control, on suggesting that the unruly experience is just barely contained within the powerful devices for image and syntax economy:
[—so dear did this stranger become that were it, or my breath—the Alternative—I had tossed the fellow away with a smile.]
[. . .]
— if I wish with a might I cannot repress—that mine were the Queen’s place—the love of the Plantagenet is my only apology—To come nearer than presbyteries—and nearer than the new Coat—that the Taylor made—the prank of the Heart at play on the Heart—in holy Holiday—is forbidden me—You make me say it over— (11,374)
7The syntax of the quoted (and other similar) sentences in this Master letter consistently reiterates the pattern of frustrated desire. The psychic difference, which the comparison highlights, is the realization, if not quite acceptance, of the finality of loss. Expectation expands language in the letters to Sue. Here, the sense of dispossession beyond hope invests emotions with royal dignity. It also forces the language into a negative mode, in which energy is derived not from multiplying images fed by desire but generated by contrast between the sensual availability of what is desired and the stark fact of denial. In contrast to the spaciously vague images of physical contact (“your absence, and your presence, my Susie dear, sweteest, and brightest . . .”), the metonymic substitutions for the Master’s presence (“the new Coat–that the Tailor made–"; “the prank of Heart at play on the Heart–”) keep the object of desire both minimal and solidly tangible. The limited concreteness of such images makes the flat “is forbidden me” reverberate with the reality of inflicted deprivation. For, as the poet confided to her Norcross cousins after the death of Judge Lord: “Till the first friend dies, we think ecstasy impersonal, but then discover that he was the cup from which we drank it . . .” (III, 817). The realization of the personal essence of emotional experience came to Dickinson, in its full force, through a very acute sense of specific, though not necessarily single, loss and it brought about a change of style which the developments in the Master letters clearly signal. In fact, one of her most powerful and best known poems “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” which Johnson dates for circa 1862, crucially depends for its effect on the metonymic substitution of parts of the body for the whole person, the very same device that she used in the two later (1861/62) Master letters.
8The time of the Master letters (1858–early 1862, according to Johnson; 1858–summer 1861, according to Franklin) coincides with the onset of Dickinson’s poetic flood years so closely as almost to suggest that poetry became a necessary form of expression as the result of her stylistic discovery of “the volcano effect.” Within the same period (summer 1861) she seems to have released Sue from her duties as chief personal critic. After the tense exchange of that summer over the second stanza of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” her sister-in-law was never asked again to give opinion on the poems, though Dickinson continued to send them to her. Instead, in April 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote her first letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She sent the established man of letters what amounted to a business enquiry couched in the language of poetry. The message was obviously meant to capture his attention but not really to specify her request. On the contrary, the letter opening their epistolary acquaintance depends on suggestiveness as its fundamental technique and effect. No wonder Higginson did not quite know what to think. Still he could not but be interested in the undercurrents of meaning and compelled by the intimacy of the letter’s appeal:
Mr Higginson,
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
[ . . .]
That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since honor is it’s [sic] own pawn—
9One does not easily overlook, much less betray such trust. But what trust exactly? The confidential nature of her request is suggested in the tone of the letter, in its heightened, breathless style, in the directness of the heading and of the final injunction, but the request itself is never unambiguously phrased. The mannered tautness of rhythmic phrases into which the sentences organize themselves intensifies the “volcano effect” hinting at depths of experience beneath the words. Thus Dickinson transfers onto the highly finished letter to Higginson the techniques she had used in the Master letters. She also positions the well-known man of letters as a figure of authority comparable to the Master in order to recreate a relationship in which the disproportion of status between the correspondents stimulates intensity. She actually addresses Higginson as Master in some of her later letters (II: 500, 525, 540) and even refers to him with the pronoun “it” (II, 457) as she did to the Master. In the initial communication of their relationship, however, she is setting the scene for her own performance, which soon becomes clear from the course of their exchange. She needs him, first of all, to evaluate her own poetry vis-a-vis the established literary production of her contemporaries. In this respect Higginson’s was certainly a representative opinion. But she also needs him to find out if she can stay in charge; if, this time not being directly emotionally involved herself, she can impose the terms of the relationship, not on a prospective lover (as seems to be the case with the friends of her youth or the Master) but on a knowledgeable reader. Dickinson’s first letter to Higginson marks the point of her artistic maturity (Salska, 1992). By the time she was writing him, she had formed an aesthetically conscious model of expression in which the focus on techniques of control suggested absorbing intensities and depths of meaning without the need for the author’s matching personal involvement. This is a direct reversal of what happens in the most intense letters to Sue, where the writer’s compulsion to experience intensity is such that her language must put down the whole feeling on the page, creating the emotion in the process of describing it. The emotional hunger of the author dominates over the design to involve the reader. Emotional letters to Sue are occasions for self–excitation. Letters to Higginson, especially the early ones, exercise the power of the writer over the reader. They “fumble at his soul” so effectively (Johnson dates poem 315, strikingly conscious of the performer’s power over his audience, around the same year, circa 1862) that the critic stays interested not only throughout the poet’s life but even beyond her death. For did he not assist Mrs. Todd in the publication of poems and write about Dickinson in national magazines?
10When compared with her early epistolary productions, Dickinson’s later letters consistently grow shorter as she grows older. There is a conspicuous gap in the corrrespondence between roughly August 1856 and August 1858, with only a handful of messages uncertainly dated by Johnson: “about 1858,” “early 1858” or “early summer 1858.” When the flow of letters resumes in 1858, the style feels different. The first Master letter dated for early 1858 by both Johnson and Franklin, the calmest one in the Master correspondence, contains, for instance, this passage:
Each Sabbath on the Sea, makes me count the Sabbaths, till we meet on shore—and whether the hills will look as blue as the sailors say. I cannot talk any more tonight, for this pain denies me.
How strong when weak to recollect, and easy, quite to love. (II, 333)
11The elegiac tone, the sense of loss, of human transience, and of memory as the greatest treasure this side of life is a constant theme in Dickinson from early on in her correspondence. It pervades letters to school friends, where she sometimes imagines losses she never sustained. For instance, in the letter to Jane Humphrey already quoted, under the influence of her friend’s recent bereavement, the writer envisions herself as a homeless orphan (I, 197). In fact, almost any message to an absent acquaintance contains the motif of mourning. In late April 1856 she wrote to John L. Graves:
Much that is gay—have I to show, if you were with me, John, upon this April grass—then there are sadder features—here and there, wings half gone to dust, that fluttered so, last year—a mouldering plume, an empty house, in which a bird resided. Where last year’s flies, their errand ran, and last year’s crickets fell! We, too, are flying–fading, John—and the song ‘here lies,’ soon upon lips that love us now–will have hummed and ended. (II, 327-28)
12The mood of this passage is created by accumulation of “atmospheric” details which generalize the separation of friends into an aspect of the law of nature. Everything is transient. The effect is a gently sentimental banality with traces of affectation in, for instance, the inverted syntax of the first sentence. The passage from the Master letter, on the other hand, stays focused on specific personal loss experienced as physical pain. The painful condion is firmly signalled but its symptoms are altogether suppressed. Instead, attention shifts to the techniques adopted for overcoming despair: the orthodox hope, however uncertain, for a reunion in another reality and the consolations of memory. For the comforts of faith, the author falls back upon Biblical language and archetypal Christian imagery: “Each Sabbath on the Sea . . . .” Invoking private consolation of memory, her sentence takes on epigrammatic concision and arranges itself into the rhythms of the favorite stanza of her poems:
How strong when weak to recollect, and easy, quite, to love.
13Moving in this way between the paradigmatic, mythical enlargement of her experience on the one hand, and its idiosyncratic notation, on the other, becomes Dickinson’s regular strategy. The suppression of circumstantial detail together with compression of meaning and syntax to the point where the text becomes cryptic establish themselves as hallmarks of all her writing, poetry as well as prose. And as far as letters are concerned, these features intensify with time. Her late correspondence abounds in examples of haunting formulations that hover between poetry and prose. Here is a fragment of a letter written in early spring of 1877 to Mrs. Higginson in her illness (she died the following September):
I give you half my Birds–/ upon the sweet condition/ that you will bring them back–/ yourself, and dwell a Day with me, / and Bliss without a price, / I earned myself of Nature–
Of whose electric Adjunct
Not anything is known–
Though it’s unique Momentum
Inebriate our own.
Forgive me if I come too much–/ the time to live is frugal–I and good as is a better earth, / it will not quite be this.
How could I find the way/ to you and Mr Higginson/ without a Vane, or any Road?
They might not need me–yet they might–
I’ll let my Heart be just in sight–
A smile so small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity– (II, 579-80)
14Marking the hypothetical line endings with slashes, I want to point out that the sentences surrounding stanzas of poems, though arranged as passages of continuous prose, are in fact equally rhythmical and may easily be divided into verse lines. What is more, the rhythm of the prose gets adjusted to the rhythm of the poem about to be quoted. How smoothly the transition from one to the other may occur, can be observed in the lenghtening of the cadence within the sentence preceding the long meter quatrain. Such fluency of passages between poetry and prose destabilizes borders between the two genres and questions the established practice of interpreting poems as “inserted” or “quoted” in the letters. Rather, poems become integral to the contexts in which they figure; they constitute an intrinsic part of the letter as a unique composition.
15Dickinson’s critics and scholars agree that her poetic creativity subsided after 1866. As if it was not only the volcano intensity of her mature womanhood that fed the poetry but also the volcanic moment of the national history, the tragedy and loss of the Civil War. In the 1870s and 80s, letters begin to dominate in Dickinson’s writing. As Ralph Franklin observes introducing The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, at the same time, that is in the later 1860s, the poet “stopped copying fascicle sheets.” She revived the practice briefly in the 1870s “but finally gave herself up to the proliferation of shapes and sizes of her worksheets and miscellaneous manuscripts” (xiii). Franklin points out a tendency, growing with time, to revise and rework poems. In the later 1860s Dickinson seems to have developed a certain looseness of working style and increasingly treated her writing as a continuing workshop. Parallel to this new habit, letters assume intense stylistic affinities with the poems and become the mode in which the writer integrates poetry and prose. One way of measuring the growth of this practice is to observe that the majority of William Shurr’s “new poems” of Emily Dickinson have been culled from her late letters. And Shurr’s criterion for what is poetry, though unambiguous–the selected fragments scan as fourteeners, as does, for example, the sentence from the first Master letter quoted above—is certainly rigidly limiting and inadequate. Rather, we should go back to the manuscripts and examine them for what they tell us about the poet’s awareness of freedom from strict generic divisions, which she had won for herself fusing the forms of lyrical poem and personal letter into organic compositions.
16The editors of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990) have confirmed the relevance of the above recognition for a comprehensive portrait of the poet’s creative output. Although the earlier Norton Anthology of American Literature (third edition, 1979) also supplemented its choice of poems with a selection of letters to T. W. Higginson, the main reason for their inclusion may have lain in the programmatic importance of this part of Dickinson’s correspondence. The letters printed in the Heath Anthology, on the other hand, are addressed to several correspondents throughout the poet’s life, from the early epistles to her brother Austin and the friends of her youth to notes sent off in the last years of her life. Moreover, a late (1884) message to Susan Dickinson is printed from the manuscript in order to show how strikingly its original lineation emphasizes the poem character of the text. In August 1995, at the conference of the Emily Dickinson International Society in Innsbruck, Ellen Hart presented typescripts of Dickinson’s letters made from the manuscripts and argued that Dickinson often lineated her letters the way she lineated poems, to create meaning. In the light of such demonstrations, it seems that the reading and editing of Dickinson’s correspondence so far may have repeated the pattern establihed by early editions of her poems, in which editors imposed conformity to established standards on the unruly manuscript versions. The dominant assumption has been that letters are prose texts in which distinctive poems are “cited”, and so they can be painlessly taken out of their epistolary contexts. As recently as 1993, William Shurr acted on similar premises, when he pointed to specific passages of letters as being poetry and passed over others as prose. Such procedures violate the integrity of Dickinson’s epistolary art. Even where her poems are clearly distinguished in the texts of letters by their lineation, as in the message to Mary Higginson quoted above, the writer’s constant practice is to weave them into the context of highly rhythmical sentences, rich in metaphors and tending to syntactic compression characteristic of her poetic style. On the other hand, when she uses the same poem in different letters, as she often does (for instance, the quatrain beginning “They might not need me” was also sent to the Jenkins family: II, 580), its meaning changes with the context. Poems become relative to the occasion. Perhaps such contextualization of their meaning helps to understand what Dickinson meant when she spoke of poems as lamps lighted by their authors. The poets “themselves go out” (883) but leave the texts “disseminating their circumference” according to the changing patterns of living relationships.
17It is not that readers, scholars, and critics were blind to the affinities between letters and poetry. Letters accompanied poems in publications ever since Higginson’s early article in The Atlantic. Introducing an edition of Dickinson’s selected letters in 1951, Mark Van Doren claimed about letters and poems that “the two are from the same source.” Yet there was no readiness in literary scholarship to conceive, much less concede, the easy permeability of generic borders that Dickinson’s epistolarium seems to postulate. Reading her correspondence as an open form of writing, in which the functional language of daily communication absorbs the intensified language of poetry, sends us back to the manuscripts (as we have earlier returned to the manuscripts of poems) and there shows us Dickinson lifting the act of daily human communication to the status of communion; a hallowed ritual which calls for the intense, ritualistic language only poetry can provide. In her physical seclusion and in her intellectual condition of permanent doctrinal doubt, she asserted the sacredness of the act of interpersonal communication. The stylistic effect of such a stance was the infusion of poetic language into the daily messages of remembrance, gratitude, sympathy and love.
History of the publication of Dickinson’s correspondence
181) Letters of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. Ed. by Mabel Loomis Todd. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894.
192) BIANCHI, Martha Dickinson. The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
203) JENKINS, MacGregor. Emily Dickinson: Friend and Neighbor. Boston: Little Brown, 1930.
214) Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. by Mabel Loomis Todd. New and Enlarged Edition. New York: Harper, 1931.
225) BIANCHI, Martha Dickinson. Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932.
236) BINGHAM, Millicent Todd. Ancestor’s Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson. New York: Harper, 1945.
247) Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland. Ed. by Theodora Van Wagenen Ward. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1951.
258) Emily Dickinson: A Revelation. Ed. by Millicent Todd Bingham. New York: Harper, 1954.
269) Emily Dickinson’s Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family with Documentation and Comment. Ed. by Millicent Todd Bingham. New York: Harper, 1955.
2710) The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. by Thomas H. Johnson with Theodora Ward. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1958.
2811) Emily Dickinson. Selected Letters. Ed. by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1971.
2912) The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. by Ralph W. Franklin. Amherst, Mass: Amherst College Press, 1986.
Bibliographie
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Bibliography
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Auteur
University of Lodz.
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