Emily Dickinson: ni Dios, ni marido, ni editor o “Publication — is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man —”

Abstract

This article seeks to explore some of the possible reasons behind Emily Dickinson’s decision not to publish as she expressed them in some poems and letters. Although Dickinson did not voice proto-feminist ideas as some of her female contemporaries did, her life and work show that she often struggled with patriarchal institutions, including the literary tradition and marketplace. More specifically, this article claims that the author was aware that the “price” of publishing her poetry consisted in subjecting it to processes of normalization, especially in terms of form, according to the editorial standards of the time, which were largely established by a masculine literary elite. In opposition to those standards, Dickinson’s poetry instead responds to what, based on Northrop Frye’s work, is here called lyric precision, a treatment of poetic form that subordinates predetermined patterns to the poem’s own rhythmic, affective, intellectual, and perceptual findings. This article thus examines excerpts from the first three letters sent by the poet to the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862. It also analyzes “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (M128, Fr260), one of the poems edited by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd for Poems, Second Series (1891), and “Publication – is the Auction” (M386, Fr788), a poem that exhibits the principle of lyric precision at work while Dickinson delivers one of her most unequivocal commentaries on the price of publishing.