Dickinson’s poems seem always to be in progress or in transit; she revised, reconsidered, and reconceived them, particularly when sending them to friends, as her very first editors would discover—and as editors keep discovering today. “Her true Flaubert was Penelope, to invert a famous allusion,” said the poet Richard Howard, “forever unraveling what she had figured on the loom the day before.” This is also what the critic Sharon Cameron suggested in her evocative (and well-titled) study Choosing Not Choosing (1993).
To Dickinson, then, it seems that literature was partly improvisation, much like her inventions at the piano, which were affectionately recalled by all who heard them. She toyed with several possibilities for an individual word while playing with image patterns, line arrangement, and metrics; she did not necessarily prefer one variation over another; she did not indicate when or if a poem was “finished.” What’s more, she frequently composed on snippets of paper—newspaper clippings, cut-up paper sacks—or around the edges of thin sheets, her cursive often illegible.
(...) By the 1950s, when scholars began to take serious notice, they christened Dickinson and Walt Whitman America’s greatest nineteenth-century poets, irrelevantly adding that she was “an unusually ineffective member of the weaker sex” (John Crowe Ransom) or a homebody spinster married to herself (R.P. Blackmur). The critic Richard Chase, also an enthusiast, was trying to be sympathetic, I guess, when he said that “one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood.”
Brenda Pineapple, Dickinson's improvisations.
