Emily Dickinson

Dickinson, to be seen

An American bestseller in 1959 was Robert N. Linscott’s Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson. In 1955 and 1958 Thomas H. Johnson had published the first scholarly editions of Dickinson in six expensive volumes, and in pre-internet 1959 readers who could afford them could see how much richer those were on the page than the nineteenth-century texts that Linscott was now reselling. But the nineteenth-century texts had always been rich on their own terms, and Linscott’s edition was a bargain.

It was published in Doubleday’s Anchor series of paperbacks which asked to be experienced seriously as both texts and works of graphic art, and its cover portrait of Dickinson was commissioned from Leonard Baskin, the sculptor-painter who had concluded for himself and his massive métier that “Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory.”*

The sermon rhythm of that hymn to an artist’s model’s body is lulling. But does Dickinson lull? Next door to the gutted mansion lies the home of a poet for whom home is not necessarily a glory but necessarily a hiding place: a place to be seen from but not to be seen. Its situation is a big brick house, dark in Baskin and Linscott’s time but painted shiny yellow in Dickinson’s time and again in ours. Within that integument there once hid a poet. Bodily, as she would have been looked at by a sculptor, she wasn’t glorious. Linscott reprinted the words of the letter that Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote about her to his wife: “A little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair [ . . . ] with no good feature” (JL342a, ML531). One meaning of the count-noun glory is nimbus or halo, but that kind of glory isn’t plain under that circumstance. Try to accommodate anyway, pleads Baskin’s artwork from the jacket of its book. To an ophthalmologist the word accommodation speaks of the work our eyes do for us, and for a time in her life Dickinson was terrified for her eyes. So (pleads the word) try one more time to think of her as if she were what you see.

If your visual field nourishes a crop of some browned paper first made extant to eyes in 1959, that will be what you see. But it won’t see you back. Looking at it, you may see but you won’t have been seen.

But take the jacket off. Printing-pressed into the woodpulp of their poetry book, its words aren’t a poem; they are only a poem’s jacket. So take it off. Stop trying to see the image.

Instead, let it see you.

Did that compel you to words?

With the jacket off, were the words “I was afraid, because I was naked”?

.

*.The quotation can be found in Baskin’s New York Times obituary at

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2000/06/06/614181.html?pageNumber=23

After Darwin, the fossil record

This lurid face once emitted glares and thunderous sounds. Between 1808 and 1900 it was the body of the theologian Edwards Amasa Park, and it influenced American literature at least once: certainly when Emily Dickinson recorded her awed reaction to one of his sermons in a letter to her brother (JL142, November 21, 1853), and later, perhaps, in the form of a poem:

Fr477 (1862), “He fumbles at your soul.” Houghton Library, Harvard University.

But its physical record is a history of extinction. See how much of the silver-mercury amalgam has been damaged and how little remains. To construct even this partial objet d’art cost me a debt of indeterminable amount to the artifact-generating computer technique called artificial intelligence. With black and white artificially replacing daguerreotype silver, see:

Daguerreotype, studio of Mathew B. Brady, date unknown. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004664036/. Contrast and detail restored.

No, it isn’t visible to you now; not accurately, not in any way that would have been received with assent by anyone sitting in a hardwood New England pew in 1853. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and in due time Emily Dickinson wrote ruefully about it. You see your images now in an evolved way, through a color filter.

So fall into line. You have no choice but to be received into the epoch of tangerine.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/politics/trump-church-visit-religion-burke/index.html

It’s in your constitution now.

For detail about Dickinson and Park, see Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001), pp. 310-313.

The 1847 daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, now times 2

In 2021, I published a little Issuu history of a daguerreotype of 16-year-old Emily Dickinson. As of 2023, that image remains the sole fully authenticated photograph of the poet, and my book included an attempt at using artificial intelligence to restore its contrast and detail. The original and the restoration can be found in the book at

But in 2023 I upgraded my computer and its software, and rerunning the restoration now brings back so much more history that separate pages can be seen once again in the book on the photographer’s table. If I still had the Microsoft Word text of my own 2021 book, I’d replace the old image there with the new one and hit Republish. The Word text is long deleted, though, and to change that one page now I’d have to retype the whole book and then hassle with Issuu.

But see the new restoration by itself: a 2023 electronic state of the poet Emily Dickinson in 1847. At the least, more of the fabric in her dress is visible to you now than it was to me in 2021.
But see too: as she explained in advance to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1862; JL268), the only true way to see Emily Dickinson is wordwise: not as an illustration but with the mind’s eye.

Dickinson: in mitigation

What Randall Jarrell said about Robert Frost is also true of Emily Dickinson: her best poems are almost as beloved as her worst. But here’s some scholarship in mitigation.

First the poem: Fr982, as it usually is formatted online.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Second, historical evidence for the genteel pronunciation of “again.” In the sequence beginning at about minute 18:30 of

you’ll hear it: “eggayne.”

Third and decisively, artificial intelligence has motored up at last with aid for the fainting robin. Perhaps the stretcher bearer was Ernest Hemingway.

 

Observation at coarse focus: metaphor’s long operating distance

The metaphor: by Emily Dickinson, Fr741.

Its point of view is behind thick, scream-deadening glass, and the glass is nineteenth-century windowpane, wavy and bubbly. If it were optical glass, you would see, instead,

or, with a click of a rotating turret

Then full stop. Observe the yellow eye afterward, too, if you choose, but your only humbly honest recourse is probably not to dare to think about it.