Dickinson's Misery (42 page)

12
. Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism,” 436. Poovey's argument depends on the version of the romantic lyric as formal structure as outlined by Clifford Siskin in
The Historicity of Romantic Discourse
(particularly in “Present and Past: The Lyric Turn,” 3–63), and thus is itself the product of a critical fiction of the lyric rather than of any particular lyric (a situation that proves her point).

13
. Percy,
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,
xv–xxiii.

14
. For an account of the history of literary history in the eighteenth century, see Jonathan Kramnick,
Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770.

15
. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 345.

16
. Anne Janowitz,
Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition,
19. Janowitz's book is the model of the sort of scholarship that
should
be done in nineteenth-century American poetry, especially since the public negotiation of what have been misunderstood as romantic ideals of the lyric was that poetry's stock in trade.

17
. Matthew Rowlinson, “Lyric” in
The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry,
59.

18
. Stuart Curran,
Poetic Form and British Romanticism,
5. See Curran's wonderful “Prolegomon: A Primer on Subtitles in British Romantic Poetry,” with which he prefaces his book for a lesson in antilyricization.

19
. This is an exaggeration, but not much of one. In 1996, Joseph Harrington suggested that American literary studies since the 1950s has taken the view that “American poetry is not American literature” precisely because American literary studies bought “into a New Critical ideology of poetry” (“Why Poetry is Not American Literature” 508). Recently, that mistake has begun to be corrected: Kirsten Gruesz's
Ambassadors of Culture
does more to give an idea of Bryant and Longfellow in the period than most books that actually focus on the North American nineteenth century, and Mary Loeffelholz's
From School to Salon
makes nineteenth-century American women's poetry into American literature. See also John D. Kerkering's recent
The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
and Lawrence Buell,
New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance.

20
. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
Understanding Poetry,
xi–xii, vi.

21
. The printed lyric's nostalgia for preprint forms of the genre might be attributed to Bakhtin's observation that genre is a repository of “undying elements of the
archaic
”; although a genre “lives in the present … it always
remembers
the past, its beginnings” (Mikhail Bakhtin,
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,
106). One might only add to Bakhtin's general point that if a genre cannot itself “remember” its history, readers have to invent one to remember for it.

22
. Yopie Prins,
Victorian Sappho,
19. Since “lyric reading” is an historically theorized process that Prins and I have thought out together (lyrically), her ideas on the subject will frequently subtend my own—more frequently, I fear, that I will be able to note often or explicitly enough in this book. For an explicitly co-written statement of some of these ideas, see Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “Lyrical Studies.”

23
. Michael McKeon's is the classic form of an historical definition of genre in relation to the definition of the novel. According to McKeon, genre “cannot be divorced … from the understanding of genres in history … [T]he theory of genre must be a dialectical theory of genre” (
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740
1). In
Lyric Generations,
Gabrielle Starr argues that McKeon's dialectical history of the novel should include the lyric since, according to Starr, in the eighteenth century “the lyric mode is transformed by a history ostensibly not its own”—that is, by the history of the new print genre of the novel (1). Still, even in a history that is the history of the interaction and mutual revision of genres, the problem of what a generic form is before and after its revision (that is, what a literary form is when it is removed from the history that makes it into a literary form) remains. The closest thing to McKeon's book so far for the lyric form is Janowitz's
Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition.
Something like it is needed for American lyric, and something like McKeon's recent anthology on
Theory of the Novel
is needed for the theory of the lyric.

24
. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism
, 254. We will return to the difficulty (or, as he would put it, impossibility) of de Man's version of lyric reading in
chapter 2
.

25
. Two recent versions of the Americanization of the lyric's only apparent transparency are Elisa New's
The Line's Eye
and Angus Fletcher's
A New Theory for American Poetry
. See my review of New's book in
Raritan.
Because both New and Fletcher embrace all poetry as essentially lyric, they both extend that embrace to include a lyricization of a national literary tradition.

The notable exception to the prevailing tendency to read Dickinson as if her lyricism were itself transparent is the work of Sharon Cameron, from
Lyric Time
to
Choosing Not Choosing.
Cameron's critical importance to the present study will become obvious in the chapters that follow.

26
. My use of the phrase “
texte en souffrance
” is a shorthand allusion to the debate between Derrida and Lacan, which centered on Lacan's claim at the end of his seminar on Poe's “The Purloined Letter” that “the sender … receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form. Thus it is that what the ‘purloined letter,'
nay, the ‘letter in sufferance' means is that a letter always arrives at its destination” (
The Purloined Poet: Lacan, Derida, and Psychoanalytic Reading,
35; Derrida's argument, “The Purveyor of Truth,” is also included in this volume).

27
. There are some excellent reception histories of Dickinson, but there is much more to be done; Buckingham's is the only history so far to give serious attention to the popular reception. See Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells, eds.,
The Recognition of Emily Dickinson
; Karl Lubbers'
Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution
; Willis J. Buckingham's
Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s.

C
HAPTER
O
NE:
D
ICKINSON
U
NDONE

1
. T. W. Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor”; “Emily Dickinson's Letters,” 444.

2
. “No such experience as this in the case of an unknown poet has been reported in New York City, at least in the present generation.” This clipping is unmarked in Mabel Loomis Todd's scrapbook, Mabel Loomis Todd Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

3
. The precedence of print to handwriting in the nineteenth-century United States—or at least in New England—is a longer story than I can tell here. For suggestive beginnings on the subject, see Meredith McGill, “The Duplicity of the Pen,” and her
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting,
as well as Patricia Crain,
The Story of A.

4
. Jerome McGann,
The Textual Condition,
87. For commentary on McGann's view, see Margaret Dickie, “Dickinson in Context,” 325.

5
. Michael Warner,
Publics and Counterpublics,
81. Warner's apt phrase for one of the aspects of the phenomenology of lyric reading I describe is actually a way of summarizing his citation of my argument about the lyric, though the idea behind the phrase represents the way in which he has advanced my original ideas on the subject.

6
. The lines were printed for the first time in
Bolts of Melody
in a section entitled “Poems Incomplete or Unfinished,” given a number in the volume (618), and arranged as two quatrains without variants and missing one line:

Bingham does not explain why she both arranges the lines as a poem and does not print them as such, except to say that “the above fragment was written after ‘A pang,' but both are in the writing of the eighties” (BM, 308). Bingham's mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, first editor of the manuscripts, was given co-editorial credit
though long since dead, and we do not know whether the decision to classify one manuscript as a poem and the other as an unfinished poem was Todd's or her daughter's. In any case, both Johnson and Franklin have followed the precedent.

7
. “Like every previous appearance of Dickinson's poems, beginning with ‘Sic transit gloria mundi' (2) in 1852, this edition is based on the assumption that a literary work is separable from its artifact, as Dickinson herself demonstrated as she moved her poems from one piece of paper to another” (F p. 27); “The distinction between genres was Dickinson's own. She maintained a workshop for the production, distribution, and recording of poetry, but separated letters from it” (F p. 34). G. Thomas Tanselle has eloquently defended Franklin's editorial distinctions between letters and poems, text and artifact in “Emily Dickinson as an Editorial Problem”: “The judgment of editors mediates our approach to all authors,” according to Tanselle, “and if we wish to think of degrees of mediation, I would say that less of it has been practiced on Dickinson than on many other writers” (79).

8
. Hollander, “Breaking into Song,” 74, and Herrnstein Smith,
Poetic Closure,
63.

9
. My questions about lyric recognition echo the title of Stanley Fish's essay, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.” In that essay, Fish offers the example of a list of proper names (of authors of linguistic texts) that he wrote on the blackboard for one class before the entrance of another. The second class, on seventeenth-century religious poetry, then proceeded to read the list of names as if they were a seventeenth-century religious poem. Fish's conclusion from this accidental experiment is that “all interpretation is not the art of construing but of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them” (327). While I agree with Fish that interpretation is the art of constructing, I would point out that the difference between his example and the construction of Dickinson's lyrics through interpretation is that his “interpretive community” had been instructed in the protocol for reading a historically defined (and not accidentally, pre-eighteenth-century) genre, whereas Dickinson's readers have defined the genre of her work according to much more flexible (though no less constructed) protocols of interpretation, which have often been not only replicated in but generated by the modern university classroom.

10
. G. W. Hegel,
Aesthetics,
2:971.

11
. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,”
The Rhetoric of Romanticism,
254. As I have suggested in the introduction, I take the phrase “lyric reading” from de Man, and, as my reader will notice, the pages that follow carry on a debate with de Man over the implications of the phrase I borrow from him, a debate often hidden between the lines, and not always possible to note explicitly. On de Man's contradictory notion of “lyrical reading,” see Jonathan Culler, “Reading Lyric,” and Yopie Prins,
Victorian Sappho.

12
. The classic study of Dickinson's relation to British poetic romanticism is Joanne Feit Diehl's
Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination.
Diehl's work still calls out for elaboration, especially given more recent work on the circulation of British romanticism in the United States. Gary Lee Stonum has done some of that elaboration in
The Dickinson Sublime
and Mary Loeffelholz has done suggestive work in this vein in
Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory.

13
. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “
In Re
Emily Dickinson” (1892), 143. The 1903 revision in included in Aldrich's collected works of that year, and is quoted in Karl Lubbers,
Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution,
94.

14
. Virginia Rinaldy Terris's 1973 dissertation “Emily Dickinson and the Genteel Critics” gives a good account of the critical deliberation in the 1890s over Dickinson's verse in relation to emerging mass culture; on the emergence of a distinction between literary and mass culture in the 1890s, see Andreas Huyssen,
After the Great Divide.

15
. Stoddard, “Technique in Emily Dickinson's Poems,”
The Critic
20 (January 9, 1892): 24. As I have noted earlier, in “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Mary Poovey suggests that twentieth-century literary criticism relies upon the “organic form” of the romantic lyric as a paradigm for interpretation, but as these glimpses at the history of the interpretation of the lyric in U. S. critical culture indicate, the story of the transmission of the lyric
as
model has many chapters that remove it from Coleridge and Wordsworth. Francis Stoddard, for example, calls Emily Dickinson's form “subtle and medieval” rather than romantic (“Technique in Emily Dickinson's Poems,” 24). For the history of the rise of English departments at the end of the nineteenth century and some of the issues in critical culture that arose with them, see Gerald Graff and Michael Warner,
Professing Literature,
and Michael Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature.”