“Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” professors Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell state in the opening sentence of their introduction to their new edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson. That may be true, but we learn that writing letters and poetry became nearly inseparable activities for much of Dickinson’s life. Not that you would fully appreciate that fact by reading through the previous “definitive” edition of Dickinson’s letters, edited in three volumes by Thomas H. Johnson in 1958 and also published by Belknap/Harvard. As I flip through my copy of Johnson’s Selected Letters, I see fragments of poems, often just a stanza, attatched to the prose correspondence. In contrast, skimming through the 2024 Letters of Emily Dickinson, readers will encounter a book that seems almost to be a hybrid of epistles and poetry.
That profusion of poetry is in part due to the fact that the new edition contains almost 300 previously uncollected letters, and more than 200 “letter poems,” that is, poems that have “either an address or a signature, characteristics marking them as letters rather than enclosures.” Quite often, the poems were an integral part of the letters. However, the poems can exert a siren call, so let’s first take a brief look at a few of the 1,304 extant letters in the new volume.
Right away, a reader will notice that Emily Dickinson felt a lot. The world pressed down on her harder than it does on most of us, and while that could lead to moments of great joy, and despair, the letters show her doing her best to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of the frequent illnesses suffered by herself and those she loved, not to mention the chaos perpetually roiling nineteenth-century America Still, if recent scholarship has highlighted Dickinson’s resilience, it’s worth remembering how fragile she could be. In an 1859 letter to Samuel Bowles, the Springfield Republican newspaper editor who published some of her poetry, she writes: “In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well, lest one stumble opon [sic] one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.”