Emily Dickinson’s Eloquent Lies

Abstract

This chapter explains that, like Clare, Emily Dickinson makes her fair share of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other kinds of mistakes, but her style sometimes masquerades as error too. Mostly unpublished during her lifetime, her poems were first made public after her death and under the influence of a strong editorial hand. In their original form on scraps of paper, in letters, and in hand-sewn “fascicles,” they seem to exhibit mistake at every turn. But because they constitute instances of private expression, these improprieties can seem to belong to a set of personal norms not quite subject to the standards of the day. However, Dickinson herself was cognizant of her breaches, often confessing them in letters and sometimes even within the poems themselves. The chapter then determines how Dickinson's own admissions of “wrongness” complicate one's readings of her poetry's mistakes. Does the poet's complicity undo her solecisms, or can awareness coexist with error? The chapter suggests the possibility of reading much of her wrongdoing nevertheless as mistake; the difference between knowing better and doing better may, for Dickinson, be a difference in degree rather than in kind.