alienating language

Alienating Language: A Poets MasqueMichael C. Cohen

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 23, Number 1, 2014, pp. 75-97(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/edj.2014.0009

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2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press

MicHael c. coHen

Alienating Language: A Poets Masque

Although i cannot prove a connection, i note with interest that emily Dickinson wrote a series of poems on the subject of bad communication at around the time her poem Success (known today as Success is counted sweetest [Fr112]) appeared in A Masque of Poets (1878), the culminating volume in the popular no name series of anonymous books published by Roberts Brothers in the 1870s.1 The story of this poems publicationthe last in Dickinsons lifetimeis well known, especially Helen Hunt Jacksons role as intermediary in the process, and, like most of the other stories about Dickinsons forays into print, this one has usually been told to emphasize her resistance to publishing, which among other consequences has insulated her from what some readers perceive as embarrassing entanglements with nineteenth-century verse culture.2

according to Thomas Johnson, for example, the publishing history of Success reveals the degree to which [Dickinson] had become psychologically incapable of consenting to allow her verses to be printed (xxix).3 needless to say, this is not the story i plan to tell in this essay. instead, i will argue that the details behind A Masque of Poets usefully situate Dickinsons late poetics in an environment riven with ambivalent desires toward the project of communication. Poetry served as a primary medium for the circulation of language in this system, but as Dickinsons work makes clear, poems also necessarily convey contradictory and destabilizing relations to the systems protocols of order. The dizzying media shifts that masked the authorship of Success reveal anxieties about the use of words that are both specific to Dickinson and general to the language hierarchies within which she worked. Mischievous or misbegotten verbal actsholding secrets, spreading opinions, making copies, writing graffitiform a thread that runs through Dickinsons late poems. More importantly, however, this thread loops back into

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the poems conditions of communication, such as the generic means by which language becomes poetry and the pragmatic exchanges through which poems create or fail to create meaning, so that Dickinson and her work cannot help but inscribe and elaborate the systemic aspects of language use. The ways that they play upon and play back the incoherence of writing and reading therefore make them both trenchantly critical and utterly typical of their era.

As fields of power, communication systems have an inversely proportional relationship to the agencies of individuals communicating in them, as Russ castronovo has argued. Distributed networks depend on subordinating all points in the relay to the system as a whole: messages flow most potently and dangerously when the autonomy and identity of particular message-senders are submerged; sovereign authorities, in contrast, seek to delimit the power of decentralized systems by reattaching identities to messages and thereby assigning responsibility or blame to actors, who are often represented subsequently as having hijacked the system for their own interests.4 emphasizing Dickinsons passivity in the printing of her poems might be intended to highlight the singularity of her personal processes of composition and circulation, but such an emphasis also reascribes power to the infrastructures that constituted communication in the nineteenth century. Systems of language power appear as a frequent topic in Dickinsons later poems, but those who read Dickinson for her singularity have had difficulty perceiving how her account of these systems elaborates their anti-individualist, anti-singular potential. The low affective temperature of the verbal actions under investigation here (copying, gossiping, telling secrets) accompanies the waning of agency in and around the poems: a networked Dickinson must be a less singular Dickinson, an author with diminished control over the production, propagation, distribution, and dispersal of her own language, even in cases where that language is neither printed nor published. But, following Sianne ngai and Bruno latour, i believe a networked Dickinson is also a more interesting Dickinson.5 This is the author i want to discuss in this essay, one whose relations to the circulation of her language cut against the uses of that language, including her own uses of it. Poems are social entities, in this view, and the meanings of their sociality necessarily exceed their meanings as contained, autonomous, private, or otherwise lyric expressions.6

as Dickinsons readers now take seriously, poems were often vehicles for her communications in very literal ways. Most of Dickinsons early readers received her poems by way of letters, notes, and other circulating paper formats, and as Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith have demonstrated, these letter-poems can be difficult to separate from the papers in which they were folded, or

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the recipients to whom they were sent (xxv). However, while scholars generally assume that the envelopes and letters contain the poems, the reverse was also true; Dickinson wrote many poems on split-open envelopes, and in other cases enclosed letters inside sheets that had poems on them.7 a benign example is Dickinsons March 1878 letter to Elizabeth Holland (L547), which begins I take Mrs Brownings little Basket to bring the note to you, and which Theodora Ward speculates was enclosed in an advertisement or wrapper for Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Earlier Poems, published in the U.S. that same month (124-25). We learn of you in the Papers and of your new House, of which it is said there will be a Portrait - so i shall see it in just three Days, though i would rather see its vital inhabitants, Dickinson wrote (L547). In this letter, written in ink on paper and enveloped in a printed paper about a publication of poems printed on paper bound into a codex, Dickinson borrowed from Robert Browning (So, i shall see her in three days from in Three Days [198]) to emphasize, in her message to Holland, the imminent arrival at the Dickinson Homestead of an account about the Hollands in the newspaper (a different kind of inked paper), which inadequately compensated for the deferred arrival of the Hollands themselves. Writings on paper, and especially written papers about poems, mediate this exchange by both bringing together and also standing between the vital inhabitants at its ends.

The exchange of writings that constitutes the history of Dickinsons participation in A Masque of Poets is more difficult to parse. Though they likely knew of each other as children, Dickinson and Jacksons adult relationship was grounded in epistolary correspondence, and poems flowed through this paper-based system, though not without generating static. The discourse surrounding Dickinsons letter congratulating Jackson on her marriage, the earliest of the extant correspondence, captures the fraught nexus of poetry, property, and personal relations that would bear on A Masque of Poets as well as on a number of poems written in its wake:

Have i a word but Joy? e. Dickinson. Who fleeing from the Spring

The Spring avenging fling

To Dooms of Balm - (l444)

if Dickinson seems to literalize the idiom for a brief talkto have a wordby making Joy the word that expresses her meaning, the question mark implies otherwise, as does, of course, the ambiguous message that follows (which also


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indicates that she did indeed have more words than just Joy), since fleeing from the Spring and flinging Dooms of Balm hardly sound like congratulatory gestures. In this way, the poem cuts against the letters apparent purpose of communicating best wishes: even if the who referred to e. Dickinson rather than Jackson, the letter would become the Dooms of Balm mentioned in the poem, rather than a note of warm feeling on a happy occasion, as Joy would seem to indicate. The screw turns several more times in the subsequent exchanges over this exchange: Jackson returned the letter to Dickinson for further interpretation, but did so while asserting aggressive claim to title over it: This is mine, remember, she wrote on the bottom of the sheet Dickinson had sent her; You must send it back to me, or else you will be a robber (l444).8 The terms inscribed on and in this letter approximated Dickinsons own attitude towards an earlier publication of her work, except that here her failure to return Jacksons poem (that is, the poem Dickinson had written and sent Jackson) constituted Dickinsons robbery of her own (that is, Dickinsons) writing.9 Jacksons complex desire for a poem she had sent back (when she might just have quoted or copied the lines she wished to understand), seems to conflate the poems mediumhandwriting on paperwith the hand that wrote it; even if Jackson can recall the poems language, she wants the material thing the poem was.

In a later letter (dated March 20, 1876), however, Jackson undermined Dickinsons ownership over her poems by tying Dickinson into a web of talk, handwriting, and print, out of which Dickinson had little hope of stealing.

a very clever manone of the cleverest i ever meta Mr. Dudley of Milwaukee, spent a day with us last week, and we talked about you. So threads cross, even on the outermost edges of a web. . . . i wish very much that you would write to me now and then, when it did not bore you. I have a little manuscript volume

with a few of your verses in itand I read them very oftenYou are a great

poetand it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy. (L444a)

Though the second half of this letter is more famous, I find the first part more fascinating, since, however obliquely Mr. Dudley appears in it, he still constitutes one of the few documented nineteenth-century readers of Dickinson who had no direct connection to her (as far as we know). Jackson pointedly emphasizes the metaphor of network-as-web in her threading of talk about Dickinson (the talk is doubly about Dickinson, in that she is its subject, and it surrounds her), now addressed to Dickinson, which weaves Dickinson into relationships she has not

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chosen. although the anonymous intimacy of print mediationas opposed to the hand-marked intimacy of lettersis sometimes taken as a reason Dickinson seldom published, Jackson makes clear in this account that Dickinson is already public, at least enough to be the subject of strangers talk. in fact, Dickinsons verses appear in a little manuscript volume of Jacksons, which she might have circulated to Mr. Dudleyor anyone else.10 in stark contrast to Dickinsons fascicles (assuming, as i do, that it is not itself a fascicle), the subject of so much painstaking reconstruction under the sign of her authorship, here is a manuscript volume of Dickinsons verse that she did nothing to create, and whose ultimate fate she could not determine.11 By the letters end, stinginess seems beside the point, since Dickinson cannot withdraw herself, or her verses, from the economy of circulation into which Jackson has threaded them. And since these letters also broached the possibility of Dickinson contributing to the no name series, this may have been Jacksons precise point. As Jackson wrote sometime later, You say you find great pleasure in reading my verses. Let somebody somewhere whom you do not know have the same pleasure in reading yours (l476c).

The more explicit negotiations over A Masque of Poets arose in 1878, after Dickinson had spent a lovely hour with the Jacksons in one of their few face-to-face meetings (l573). like Dickinsons exchange with the Hollands, Jacksons subsequent letters attempted to supplement their deferral of presence through the mediation of an image, in this case Gilbert Dickinsons: I send back the little baby face to tell you that i had not averted my faceonly the habit of speaking (l573a). Gilberts image thus apologizes for Jacksons failure to communicate, though her silence does not mean she had averted [her] face (clearly quoting from one of Dickinsons letters, now lost), but simply her habit of speaking, a failure more commonly associated with Dickinson. Gilberts face also smoothed the way for the business at hand:

Would it be of any use to ask you once more for one or two of your poems, to

come out in the volume of no name poetry which is to be published before long by Roberts Bros.? if you will give me permission i will copy themsending them in my own handwritingand promise never to tell any one, not even the publishers, whose the poems are. could you not bear this much of publicity? only you and i would recognize the poems. (l573a)

This letter, with its tipped-in photo and references to earlier discourse, circulates others faces and words to put forward Jacksons own face and talk, in order to perform a complex negotiation among presence, absence, identity, and deferral.


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This interplay characterizes the long buildup to the Masque, in which even Dickinsons resistance to Jacksons overtures works through deferred mediation. I would regret to estrange [Jackson], Dickinson had written to Thomas Higginson; if you would be willing to give me a note saying you disapproved it . . . she would believe you (l476). Thus although Jackson emphasizes the metonymy of the photograph, and by extension the letter, by collapsing them into the little baby face whose presence they in fact displace, it remains unclear if she successfully reconnects identity and communication, since the letters terms of negotiation go so strongly against the impulse towards embodied (if not face-to-face) communication.

If it is true, as Friedrich Kittler has argued, that nineteenth-century inscription systems inculcated a fundamental connection between language and embodiment that animated writing with the dream of presence, then Jacksons promise to break the link between Dickinsons language and her identity is something of a loaded gesture (25-69). Jackson envisions a shared intimacy (only you and i would recognize the poem) that will result from a systemic erasure of identity. She promises Dickinson a complex anonymity. By rewriting the poem in my own handwritingsomething she had apparently been unwilling to do in the case of the letter-poem Who fleeing from the springin addition to leaving off Dickinsons name, Jackson severs language from personhood, splitting words from name and the written text from the writing body.12 Thus, even if Jackson suggested Dickinson contribute Success because it was a poem i know by heart, this heart-knowledge (a different form of intimate relation) served a system in which mediated languagewords recited by heart, written in anothers handwriting, communicated by letter, printed in a book, and so onworked in explicit antagonism to embodied intimacy (l573b).

The contest over Success was among other things a debate over self-possession: does a poem remain itself as it moves among correspondents, formats, and media? And who decides? When A Masque of Poets came into Dickinsons possession, early in 1879, the poem returned to her, now edited, printed, and presented with several dozen other poems that were utterly like it (they too were edited, printed, and lodged among others) and at the same time entirely different. Yet the highly remediated thing that Success had become just reiterated questions that the earlier negotiations had raised. You were entitled to a copy of a Masque of Poets . . . for your valuable contribution which for want of a known sponsor Mr emerson has generally had to father, Thomas niles wrote Dickinson in early 1879, sending her a copy of the anthology (L573d). Attributing Success

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to Emerson might be a fitting end to the tale, or an exasperating one. While it is unclear who revealed Dickinsons identity to niles, the linguistic misdirection that had led the poem into the book succeeded, albeit in a way similar to the poems meditations on successthat is, by spectacularly inverting what success typically means. if we imagine Dickinson opening the volume niles mailed her (there is no evidence either that she read it or that she did not), she would have found the following poem:

SuccessSuccess is counted sweetestBy those who neer succeed.To comprehend a nectarRequires the sorest need.not one of all the Purple HostWho took the flag to-day,

Can tell the definition,

So plain, of Victory,as he defeated, dying,on whose forbidden earThe distant strains of triumphBreak, agonizing clear. (A Masque of Poets 174)

Because Success presents successful action (Victory) as a kind of public violence, successfully evading ownership over ones words potentially becomes an ethical refusal of such terms. Jackson had imagined Dickinsons amusement in seeing to whom the critics, those shrewd guessers would ascribe your verses; whether or not it amused Dickinson, publishing anonymously confused the relational understanding that ties language to identitya confusion witnessed in niless mixed metaphor of sponsorship and fatherhood (l573a). The means by which the poem appeared in A Masque of Poets constitutes the kind of not succeeding that the poem elaborates. Thus, whether or not Success is counted sweetest can be read as an expression of Dickinsons reservations about publication, or about action more generally, Success cannot be read this way, since this is a poem by anonymous, and as such it succeeds very well on its own terms.

But if Success succeeds in this way, then whose work did Dickinson read when (or if) she opened the book niles sent her? one answer would be, the editors, especially since Success was published with emendations nowhere


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present in Dickinsons manuscripts. But this answer, while correct in a certain sense, ignores a more important point about the anthologys networked structurethe overt mediation of the poems in A Masque of Poets was highly apparent to its nineteenth-century readers. indeed, the alienated language of the book was its main purpose. The gambit of the no name series was to generate buzz by ostentatiously withholding authors names (an advertisement in A Masque of Poets promised work written by eminent authors whose identities would remain an inviolable secret [unnumbered front page]). The masque, a costumed dance, signals the books intention toward flamboyant concealment, as its frontispiece rather hilariously indicates (Fig. 1). at the same time, the anthology assumes that authors marks on languagetheir style, for instancealways also marks them. Dickinson enjoyed guessing who wrote anonymous pieces in the Atlantic Monthly, for instance, a game that indicates the more serious ways that language use cancels individual agency. in the case of A Masque, withholding names merely deferred the moment of identification, the point when stylized writing smuggles individual writers back into the system.

Fig 1. Frontispiece illustration. A Masque of Poets. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878.

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in a culture of celebrity authorship, marking writing By anonymous is a publicity stunt. While anonymity protects communicators from the consequences of their communication, at least in theory, when elevated to the level of authorship anonymity also promotes assumptions about privileged access to information, secrets, or salacious gossip.13 anonymous speakers (or authors, or leakers) circulate otherwise inaccessible language by first breaking the code of language use that ties linguistic acts to individual agents. Speculations about who wrote what function as a kind of critical self-reflection within the public sphere, since these guesses are typically based on prior knowledge and familiarity with authors styles.14 a reviewer noted that readers were politely requested to return to the publishers of the Masque [their] guesses about the authorship of the different poems (Recent literature 410). The book has much interest for all literary people, Jackson declared, before stating i confess myself quite unable to conjecture the authorship of most of the poems (L573c). While it would seem that identifying anonymous contributors reinforces liberal concepts of language and property by reestablishing authorial agency within the media environment, the assumption that good authors cannot help being known by their writing ironically drains authorship of its self-determining power.

In that sense, Success succeeded because it could not quite be attributed to emerson, or anyone else. By eluding the name of an author, the poem escaped the fate of its subject; thus if Dickinson read the book, the writing she encountered there was nobodys. networked language is alienating language, and being networked is an experience of self-alienation, or, more specifically, linguistic alienation, in which language is severed from subjectivity, only to return, like a book in the mail, as the animated incarnation of the communication system. Dickinsons late poems produce and are produced by encounters with language in a network, and language as a network, conditions of being that preclude alignments of language and individuation. Her late style is predicated on a set of heterogeneous genresgossip, slander, lies, secrets, rumor, graffitithat rupture the smooth engagement between a communicating subjects sense of autonomy and unity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the social structures that enable communication to become coherent. These genres are forms of bad language because, like noise or dirt, they are out of place, or, more to the point, out of order.15 language that is out of order disrupts the systemic principles that produce meaning (like syntax or word order), as well as the social structures that determine who can speak, and where and when that speech will work (as when someone is ruled out of order for violating the protocols of a courtroom, faculty meeting, or other situation where


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language circulates according to formal codes). language that is out of order has broken down in that it fails to communicate or communicates so effectively that it outstrips the conventions that would regulate it.

libel is one such use of language. it is out of order in a legal sense, since, to be libelous, writing must mediate false claims about someone by transposing rumor, gossip, or lies from the more private and furtive back channels of conversation into the publicity of print or television. as Patricia Meyer Spacks argues, gossip and rumor are eminently networked uses of language because, to maintain their affective charge, they need always to come from somewhere else and be always already in circulation.16 libel, in contrast, must have an author, or at least a party responsible for the production of the language in print. in this sense, the shift from gossip to libel reverses the trajectory of Success, which becomes authorless only as it enters into print, through the handwriting of someone else. libel is a contest over representation, whether words describe someone falsely or truly, and being libeled is an experience of self-loss because discovering yourself in false language is disembodying and de-individuating. To be libeled is to lose self-possession through language, so that libelous words become agents under no ones control. The desire to regulate language through the legalism of libel is therefore also a desire to return power and responsibility to the speakers of language, to delimit words by forcing speakers to own (and own up to) them. Yet doing so requires repeating the offending words again and again, in court or in the press, asserting the language in the effort to discredit it. In this way, libel offers a false promise that institutional systems can silence the alienating echo of bad language. in unfolding the disordering power of words, Dickinsons poem Belshazzar had a Letter - , which Franklin dates to the same period as A Masque of Poets, and which is one of only a few of her poems linked to a specific historical eventin this case, a libel scandalelaborates the fantasy of libel by unfastening the imagined ties that bind language to spaces and speakers.

Belshazzar had a Letter -

He never had but one -Belshazzars correspondentconcluded and begunin that immortal copyThe conscience of us allcan read without its GlassesOn Revelations Wall -

(Fr1487)

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The poems smirking reference to writing that appears by way of a mysterious agencysuch as the hand that, in the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, writes Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin on the wall of Belshazzars palaceseems to relish the kinds of remediation that structured Dickinsons relation to A Masque of Poets, in which authorship was obscured by way of masked handwriting and anonymity. anonymous communications, suddenly authored into a public, personal address, also structured the local scandal on which this poem may have been based, as we shall see. Dickinsons real interest, however, is neither the Biblical story nor the town affair, but is instead the ways authorless writings hollow out communication. The writing on the wall is out of place, similar to graffiti in that it registers as itself only by appearing someplace it should not be. At the same time, the writing to which the poem refers confuses boundaries between publicity, privacy, individuality, and sociality, something that the writing that is the poem, with its own oblique circulation and obscure referentiality, does as well. The various kinds of writinggraffiti, letter, and poemall proffer the allure of presence and identification, only to darken into non-relation. While gossip and graffiti may be spoken or written, neither can be authored, because their alienating effects depend on incorporating inappropriate spaces and interpolating unwilling subjects into the network of communication whose protocols they flout.

Regardless of whether the writing on the wall that appeared during Belshazzars feast can fairly be described as graffiti, Belshazzar had a Letter - remains invested in the social perceptions of proper and improper forms of language and action. Belshazzars bad behavior prompts the writing to appear and signal, to those who can correctly read it, his imminent demise. The inappropriate location and cryptic locution of the language indicate its extraordinary force; had a messenger delivered these four words to the king as an oral report they would be much less impressive. The writing is after the fact but also anticipatory, addressed to Belshazzar yet open to everyone else to see or read. as Johnson and Franklin have noted, however, the poem also may have referred to a scandal in amherst that involved charles D. lothrop, a minister who had been accused of abuse by his daughter.17 Gossip and rumors, replete with harrowing details of lothrops brutal behavior, swirled around town for weeks, until finally a detailed account appeared in the Springfield Republican, which prompted lothrop to sue the newspaper for libel. The case was decided against him in april 1879, roughly when both Johnson and Franklin date the poem. if we map this scandal as a media event, it looks as follows: oral stories about lothrop are exchanged, widely but discreetly; the failure of a private resolution (mediated by austin Dickinson, among others) leads


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to a public rehearsal of the accusation, which prompts a printed version of the story; in its adjudication for libel, the story is retold in court statements, as more gossip in town, and in other newsprint accounts; finally the verdict reaffirms the genre of the storyfact not libelwhich causes lothrops further disgrace.18 opinion is a flitting thing / But Truth, outlasts the Sun - , Dickinson notes wryly in a companion poem; If then we cannot own them both - / Possess the oldest one - (Fr1495).

Whether or not the poem refers to the scandal, Belshazzar had a Letter - condenses a number of the issues involving networked language that the scandal also illustrated. libel, as lothrop tried to claim, is out of order both because it is false and because it appears in the wrong places. This out-of-place-ness makes it alienating: like Belshazzar, lothrop recognizes himself as the subject of language, the circulation of which he cannot control. In each case, the attempt at remedy fails: Daniels interpretation does not save Belshazzars life, nor does lothrops libel suit save his reputation. Both men are ostracized when they become communications content rather than its vessel, a point the poem obscures by making Belshazzar half of an epistolary correspondence, and thus, apparently, part of the network.

In the references to letters and correspondents, though, Dickinson also may have referred to the poems own material life as a letter she sent to her nephew Ned sometime in 1879; this letter, one of three extant manuscript versions of the poem, concludes with a one-line tag: Suggested by our Neighbor - , which figures the subject (Belshazzar manifestly, lothrop latently) as once again the fodder for others talk (L603). The bad behavior of Belshazzar / Lothrop prompts language (oral rumors, handwriting on a wall, letters and poems, printed stories) that produces a critical awareness of the circulation of language. The poems anxieties about systems of language circulation, which link it to the exchanges behind A Masque of Poets, depict language as meaningful only to the extent that it exteriorizes its subjects; facing himself in writing is not a good experience for either Belshazzar or lothrop. Their encounters demand interpretation, but their readings are mistaken. in fact, the poem hinges on misreading: the writing on the wall, addressed to no one, becomes a letter sent only to Belshazzar; stories in the paper that seem libelous turn out not to be.

Thus, even with glasses no one reads the handwriting. Belshazzar can receive the message as a letter sent to him only through a mistake that transforms public address (graffiti on a wall) into private communication (a letter). Dickinson inverts Daniels account, where the writing that was written must clearly be divided from the interpretation of the thing before the apparently meaningless scrawl can reveal its immanent message.19 in her poem, the misreading mistakes the genre and the intention of the writing by assuming that it issues from an agent who

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corresponds from the heart. Instead, Belshazzars Correspondent / Concluded and begun / In that immortal Copythe language is copied, not original even if it is immortal.20 associations between handwriting, embodiment, and authenticity do not work, for while graffiti like the writing on the wall is a hand-writing, it is a copy dependent on a continuous reproduction that separates it from the writing hand (like the copy of Success disguised in Jacksons hand) (Stewart 213-14). But the copied language, written in public and misread as personal correspondence, simply intimates the conclusion that all readers are themselves copies; the reading public (those who view the writing, for instance) share the conscience of us all by reading the same way. The schizophrenic mistake of intention that assumes something addressed to no one is actually, secretly, directed at me, therefore models every act of reading. Graffiti, a form of writing that appears in public, but is not public, and that seems to propagate by means of an unknown agency (the writing that was written, in Daniels phrase) even as it broadcasts its own handwritten-ness (Belshazzar saw the part of the hand that wrote), enables the poem to foreground how language, as a networked system of differences, only communicates by way of alienating both sender and recipient.

Discovering yourself through reading or writing is thus something that will always go awry, at least in Dickinsons later poems, for verbal communication ultimately empties out subjective agency. Secrets is a daily word, a poem Franklin dates shortly after Belshazzar had a Letter - , tests the capacities of language to connect individuals and, simultaneously, produce interioritythat is, its capacities to regulate inter- and intra-subjective relations. language cannot be an agent, at least in this poem, but its mediation through people proves that they cannot be agents either.

Secrets is a daily word Yet does not exist -

Muffled - it remits surmise -

Murmured - it has ceased -Dungeoned in the Human Breast Doubtless secrets lie - But that Grate inviolate -comes nor goes awaynothing with a Tongue or ear -Secrets stapled thereWill emerge but once - and dumb -

To the Sepulchre - (Fr1494)


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If graffiti and libel are writing out of order because they appear in public places where they do not belong, then secrets would seem to be an opposite instance, the privatization of knowledge that links individuals through a restricted economy of circulation (such as the intimacy of knowing who wrote Success that would have bound Dickinson and Jackson). Limited circulation is key; those in the know differ from the rest of us by their shared relation to information that is defined by its non-publicity, yet which still requires an exchange between at least two points in order to exist.21 as a speech genre, a secret exerts an ambivalent power for the holder, who can bind others and burden them with the proscription against further circulation. in that sense, Secrets is a daily word reveals the impossibility of the secrets sociability, and of secret sociability; in linking people secrets extinguish themselves (they become less secret with each new knower) while muffling those who know. Muffled - it remits surmise - / Murmured - it has ceased - : only in the non-telling can the secret be passed on; while muffled speech is unhearable, the onomatopoeic murmur enacts the sound of speech that can be heard but not understood. Secrets are a different kind of alienating language, because their proscription against telling isolates them from the larger communication system (for a secret to remain a secret, it must be out of order to tell it), while the burden of knowledge compels the secret holder towards a revelation that the secret formally resists. a secret is only worth knowing to the extent that i want to tell it to others, or that i want others to want to know, or surmise, what i know but will not tell.

The poems opening scare-quotes indicate its address to ordinary language (a daily word), the commonsense understanding that while secrets need to be told, they cannot survive the telling and remain what they are, secret. in their compulsion towards exchange, secrets create the illusion of interiority, with the Human Breast becoming a dungeon or Grate inviolate that can be locked off from the penetration of others even while remaining permeable: a mouth reimagined as a grate grotesquely makes impossible what mouths usually do, namely speak.22 it is tempting to read the locked-off inviolate space as a metaphor for the secret-holder; according to D.A. Millers classic account of mid-Victorian fiction, The Novel and the Police, subjects assert their impenetrability, their autonomy, and thus their subjectivity by holding and withholding secrets (192-220). This could be one possible implication of Dickinsons definition poem, which is otherwise devoid of persons. But rather than being an enlivening force, the poem presents secrets in terms of immobility and de-animation: muffled, dungeoned, stapled, dumb. Sequestering a secret maintains its limited economy and thereby the shared relation of its holders, but in the poems terms this kills language and agency. Holding secrets means

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immuring communication, so that a secret locked away transforms the Human Breast into a Sepulchre. nothing with a Tongue or ear will survive the encounter with a secret, for secrets, in their simultaneous compulsion towards and proscription against retelling, abrogate agency. in receiving a secret we become vaults or sepulchresentities without tongues or earsby anothers act.

communication evacuates personhood: the promised privacy of the Grate inviolate reveals itself to be mere privation, while the shared burden of private language fails to generate community among the knowers. The poem thus ends with the secrets longed-for extinction into discourse, but even this ending fails at catharsis, for, in the telling, all secrets simply become dumb. The secrets apotheosis to the Sepulchre resembles the livid interview among the dead described in the related poem His voice decrepit was with Joy - (Fr1508). Words do not animate. Instead, Secrets is a daily word emphasizes how certain stretches of language cut back against the conventions (such as social exchange) that make them meaningful. More precisely, and like Belshazzar had a Letter - , the poem stages a zero-sum game between the circulation of language and its meaning, where meaning is a hoard, the value of which is proportioned inversely to its dispersal. The secret is like a misers wealth: if being miserly means refusing to spend money because of a fixation on the idea of value (choosing the abstract possibility of spending rather than the real practice of buying), and if, in economic terms, money can only have value when it circulates, then the misers hoard is worthless and the obsession that generates the hoard devalues the medium of its cathectic investment. Miserliness is a fully ironic condition, and Dickinsons poem suggests that a belief in the subject-making power of language is equally ironic because it is equally self-cancelling. Telling a secret empties it of value and meaning, but hoarding it does too, and the assumption that language can create selfhood, whether by exchange or by withdrawal, is revealed in the final lines to be an emotionally misguided fantasy.

another poem, also dated by Franklin as a poem of 1879, extrapolates this communicative conflict between circulation and meaning, and language and selfhood, to consider the poems fate in a system of alienated language exchange.

A little overflowing word

That any, hearing, had inferredFor ardor or for Tears,Though Generations pass away, Traditions ripen and decay,as eloquent appears - (Fr1501)


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Fig. 2. Emily Dickinson, A little overflowing word. By permission of The Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS am 1118.3 (230) The President and Fellows of Harvard college.

The opening line embeds a paradox that is light enough to be easily missedthe smallness of a little overflowing word belies its excess, the way it breaches the channel that would contain it. This detail is materialized in the manuscripts lineation, where the metrical line flows over the handwritten line right at the word word, leaving it alone on the next line (Fig. 2). Being easy to miss lets a word escape the original intention of its communication, enabling a chance encounter with ears otherwise deaf to it had the word remained in its circuit. The communicative excess of the little word seems to announce languages power, which also manifests paradoxically, since only by overflowing a channel, or deviating from an intentionbeing heard through being overheard, for instancecan the word generate meaning. While this poem is embedded in a letter to Susan Dickinson, the audience meant to hear the word is undefined in the poemany.23 Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the power of this (over)hearing

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is ambiguous: any, hearing the little overflowing word might infer its meaning For Ardor or for Tears, two affective interpretations that, while perhaps not opposed to each other, are at least non-identical. Yet the parataxis means that either inference can be correct. This equation seems to drain out intention, so that the word, its producer, and its recipient have no content, leaving just the formal process of circulation (hearing / overhearing) to matter.

Like Secrets is a daily word, A little overflowing word stages the relation between the network as a form (mapped via circulation) and the message as content (that which circulates), where messages signify only as far as they deviate from the relations laid out for them. like the secret, the force of the overflowing word is measured in de-animating terms: the words timeless eloquence seems to bear no connection to those who happen to hear it, because it will remain unchanged after generations and traditions have disappeared behind it. InterpretationsFor Ardor or for Tearsdo not matter, for any inference will have no effect on the words eloquence. Whatever the word means, it will mean that way forever. eloquence is the words power to stay equal to itself, and the poem clearly distinguishes this formal self-equation from any passing content that might get attributed to it. But the final line also tempts me to think that Dickinson refers to John Stuart Mills famous aphorism, from Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties (first published 1833, but reprinted in the United States in 1874), that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard:

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling

[ardor or Tears, for instance]: but, if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poets utter

unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poets mind. eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to

passion or to action. (97)

The fantasy of de-mediation in Mills definition makes it an important milestone in Virginia Jacksons history of lyric reading, although, as she points out, Mills idealization of poetry as a language of feeling seeking to escape the materiality of language as a system of signs (a state no actual poem can ever reach) quickly stumbles on his awareness of the institutions and media necessary to generate,


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circulate, and consume such utterances: the most trashy productions of the Minerva press, for instance, or poetry printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a booksellers shop (Jackson 129-33; Mill 94, 97). eloquence, on the other hand, is always a mediated communicative act, since it requires both the presence of other minds and the possibility of connections (sympathy, influence, belief, passion) with and between them; it presupposes formal structures that enable feeling [to pour] itself out to other minds. Mill therefore defines poetry by its negative relation to the social systems that produce it materially and discursively. according to Mill, poetry is communicated, but it cannot be communication, since it must disavow the audience that it nevertheless knows and requires to exist.

The rigorous formalism in the essay jives with the logic of A little overflowing word, since both emphasize systemic relations (poetry is As relation to a, eloquence is as relation to B) over the content expressed through those relations. But while the little overflowing word in the poem might be considered a figure of relation without content, it also serves as a figure for the poem, which is variously also a figure of relation, as well as the vehicle for a specific content, and the content itself. Dickinsons poem, twenty-five words total, could indeed be described as little, yet this minority makes it easier to remember, perhaps, or easier to transmit, which, in the poems terms, makes it eloquent. extension through time happens as a result of transmission, the overflowing of channels or circuits that enable new instances of (over)hearing.

as in the other cases i have examined, such acts of speaking and hearing do nothing to constitute subjects, since only the formal process of exchange signifies, while the inferences that anyone (which is to say, no one) makes about the word are contingent and disposable. Dispersal in excess of the system allows the word to outlast generations and traditions, all the while appearing as eloquent aswhat? as eloquent as something else? as if it appeared eloquent? as eloquent as the moment of its first being heard, or overheard? As eloquent as eloquence? If we take seriously the lack of closure in the final line, the absence of both a comparative term (as eloquent as . . . ) and an end-stopthe closing dash is both an ending and the deferral of endingthen the poem both supports and refutes Mills dictum, which is to say that A little overflowing word is neither heard nor overheard. Whether or not it is a poem, it lays down the conditions of exchangeability (For ardor or for Tears) through which language becomes a poem.

in the spirit of the analysis i have tried to perform in this essay, these conditions operate in dynamic opposition to meaning, intention, agency, and authorship. if Dickinson did in fact read and respond to Thoughts on Poetry and

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its Varieties, that engagement would indicate one form of literary networking in the nineteenth century, in that an international system of publication, citation, and circulation facilitated the (so far as we know, imagined) moment when Dickinson read Mill before responding in kind. A little overflowing word could then be read as a meditation on the circumstances of its coming-into-being that collapses the conditions of meaning into the mediated networks of exchange that brought Mill to amherst. The history behind A Masque of Poets and the imagined scene of reading that book tell a slightly different story about poetic communications: the multiple transmissions of Success is counted sweetest set publicity (in a variety of forms) at odds with authorial identity. The print history of Success shows that to be an author or to be in mediato be networked, as Helen Hunt Jackson most eminently wasdiminishes a writers control over the production, dissemination, and intention of her language, even as it enables that language to act critically on its own meaning-making force.

communicating through poetry is never simple. Dickinsons late poems explore the effects of alienating language within systems of exchange, in which alienating is both a modifier and a predicate, referring to something language can do (alienate), as well something that can be done to it (be alienated). These late poems are interesting because of how they reflect and act on forms of exchange in the nineteenth century, in ways that also call into question their own status as material exchanges and communicative actions. My readings, however, may seem to have returned intention and meaning to the poems, even if only to celebrate the ways they mess up the possibility for creating meaning and intention. This is a problem inherent to reading, as Belshazzar had a Letter - makes clear: while reading must always be a networked activity, it requires as a basis of its action that readers forget or suppress the conditions that make their reading possible. Dickinsons authorship, if we want to call it that, has to be kept in suspension: she is an interesting poet, remember, to the extent that she is a networking poet. That is to say, Dickinson does not seek greater leverage over language in these poems, nor is her much-vaunted (and overstated) eccentricity an effort to withdraw from nineteenth-century verse culture. instead, these late poems deploy a slight and glancing style in order to claim that poets are most themselves when their language is least their own.

Notes

1. a word of caution is necessary here, since Ralph Franklins methods of dating the poems are at best provisional, as were Thomas Johnsons before him. Moreover, the manuscripts for the poems i consider in this essay contain no information that allow for precise dating. However, i am not arguing for a direct or indirect causality between


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the publication of A Masque of Poets and the composition of certain other poems. in fact, my argument is not historicist, in that i do not link the content of Dickinsons work to this or that feature of the late nineteenth century. instead, it is historical in a larger sense, because it thinks through the ways that selected poems thematize but also act out the conditions of their making. For this kind of project, precise chronologies or the exact dates of poems are less important than they would be for a more specific investigation into Dickinsons poetic history.

2. Admittedly, it is disconcerting to find a poet of Dickinsons stature turning for sustenance to such second-rate romancers as longfellow and ik Marvel, notes Paula Bennett in a moment of pique at Dickinsons admiration for popular mid-century books like Kavanagh and Reveries of a Bachelor (32). This bias has begun to change, and critics are now much more likely to read positive and productive correspondences between Dickinsons work and that of her contemporaries. For examples, see Benjamin Friedlanders Emily Dickinson and the Battle of Balls Bluff, Mary Loeffelholzs Dickinsons Decoration, and Phoebe Putnams not Quite - content - .

3. Such emphasis on Dickinsons resistance to publication is especially weird in the case of Success is counted sweetest, since this poem was published twice in her lifetime, first in the April 27, 1864 issue of The Brooklyn Daily Union, and later in A Masque of Poets. For a rundown of the poems public history, see R.W. Franklins Variorum Edition (145). lara langer cohen has found a third publication of the poem in a november 1882 issue of the Amateur Journal (see emily Dickinsons Teenage Fanclub in this issue).

4. This view has been developed most fully within the sociology of science, especially in the work of Bruno latour: see, for example, Reassembling the Social. Robert Darnton applies this argument to the circulation of poems in Poetry and the Police, which explores the roles slanderous songs played in the media environment of the ancien rgime. considered as messages, these poems were most subversive when they appeared to come from nowhere; in response, royal authorities built an elaborate surveillance system to assign authorship and responsibility to individuals, who upon being identified were promptly thrown into the Bastille.

5. See latour, Reassembling the Social, as well as ngais account of latour in her chapter on the merely interesting in Our Aesthetic Categories (110-73). For both latour and ngai, the interesting is a networked category of aesthetic judgment and appreciation, valuable because it links heterogeneous agents or agencies together (ngai 114).

6. Anthropologists who study the roles of poems and poetic genres in non-Western cultures regularly emphasize this point. See Flagg Miller, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media; Steven caton, Peaks of Yemen I Summon; and lila abu-lughod, Veiled Sentiments. in Dickinsons Misery, Virginia Jackson critiques the assumption that Dickinson wrote lyric poems, which, as she demonstrates, depends on particular ways of reading the language Dickinson produced, rather than on particular features of that language.

7. For a beautiful display of such enveloping poems, see the facsimiles reproduced in Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner.

8. Jacksons letter of March 20, 1876 thanks Dickinson for not being angry with my impudent request for interpretations, indicating that Jackson had sent the original back for an explanation of its apparently non-celebratory meaning. and Dickinsons response seems not to have entirely satisfied: I do wish I knew just what dooms you meant, though! Jackson wrote (l444a).

9. The idea that poems could be robbed from their owners had appeared a decade earlier in Dickinsons correspondence with Higginson: lest you meet my Snake and suppose i deceive it was robbed of me, she wrote in 1866, referring to the publication of a narrow fellow in the grass in the Springfield Republican (l316).

10. Scholars have guessed at the source of the verses in Jacksons manuscript volume, since the extant letters from Dickinson to Jackson up to that point do not include many poems. Johnson argues that Higginson must have supplied Jackson (Dickinson had

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sent him a copy of Success is counted sweetest in 1862, for instance), since, in his view, Jackson and Dickinsons relationship at this juncture was too formal to imagine that Dickinson herself sent Jackson the poems (xxix). Studies of Dickinsons exchange practices tend to focus on her own agency in the process of circulating her work, which ultimately reemphasizes her power as an author. Few studies examine the secondary circulation of Dickinsons work during her lifetime; for one among these few, see cristanne Millers Reading in Time.

11. I assume that Jacksons little manuscript volume of Dickinsons poems is a very different kind of object from Dickinsons fascicles, because I assume that someone other than Dickinson compiled it. nothing in their correspondence indicates that Dickinson ever sent Jackson one of her fascicles, and, given the intense back-and-forth over the letter-poem Dickinson had sent for Jacksons wedding, it seems to me very likely that Jackson would have mentioned to someone that she had received such a gift. However, because Dickinsons part of this correspondence is lost, my assumption must remain speculative. alexandra Socarides also claims Dickinson never circulated her fascicles, although she notes that some scholars, such as alfred Habegger and Martha nell Smith, have argued otherwise (Dickinson Unbound 30 and 176 n.27). Smith takes seriously the possibility that Jackson might have received a fascicle from Dickinsons hand in Rowing in Eden (73).

12. communication disrupts embodied relations elsewhere in this correspondence, as when Jackson informs Dickinson that Mr. Jackson found a telegram from New York which compelled him to go on without stopping hereand so i came alone to Mr. Warners, which was a disappointment (L573b).

13. Conflicts over anonymity, secrecy, disclosure, and self-interest have a long history: Russ castronovos analysis of eighteenth-century networks focuses on Benjamin Franklins unauthorized leaking of Thomas Hutchinsons letters to the colonial press in 1773, while Robert Darnton makes clear, in his account of the vie prive genre in eighteenth-century France, that anonymity and illicit communication were closely linked. Through their rhetoric of unveiling, these anonymously-published exposs of private lives generated the expectation of access to otherwise hidden secrets about the most prominent people of the eighteenth centuryincluding Franklin, whose Autobiography was first published, in French, as Mmoires de la Vie Prive du Benjamin Franklin (1793), likely by a political enemy still bitter over the Hutchinson scandal. See castronovo, State Secrets, and Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water.

14. More recently this guesswork has become quantified, as in the case of the political roman clef Primary Colors, whose author was proven to be the journalist Joe Klein after New York magazine commissioned Donald Foster to run a computer analysis that broke down syntactic and lexical patterns in the books language and compared them to examples from the attributed writings of several suspects. Despite appearing like a whodunit, this contemporary example operates according to a genetic logic in which style is beyond an authors conscious control but available to the algorithms of a forensic investigator. While these investigations seem interesting only under the assumption that the author is the most important category of literary meaning, they ironically project authorship as an epiphenomenon of networked language use. See Foster, Author Unknown.

15. Mary Douglas defines dirt as matter out of place in Purity and Danger (44-50).16. i lie if i make up a story (if i author it), but i gossip if i simply pass the story along as i

heard it from someone or somewhere else. The more generalized my source, the more credible it will seem, as when I attribute my story to the word on the street. See Michael c. cohen, Peddling authorship in the age of Jackson.

17. For a brief account of the lothrop scandal, see Johnson 1006. Johnson connects Belshazzar had a Letter - to the Lothrop case in his note to the poem (1009), with which Franklin concurs (1300-1). See also Steven Mailloux, Reception Histories (44-8).

18. Following Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Johnson also associates a counterfeit - a Plated Person - (Fr1514) with this scandal (1006). if he were correct, then that poem would


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utilize the logic of unmasking at play in the communication circuits of eighteenth-century France described by Darnton, in which anonymous circulation reveals the true nature of individuals (the nasty vie prive of a pious fraud, as Bianchi calls him) (qtd. in Johnson 1006). This is not the process i see at work in Dickinsons other poems of the period, since in my argument the system of media reveals not the true inner essence of the individual, but instead the absence of any inner essence or individuality.

19. Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TeKel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PeReS; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians (Daniel 5: 24-28).

20. copy can also mean the source text to be used for subsequent transcriptions or copies; while this meaning might clear Belshazzars correspondent of unoriginality, it maintains that the rest of us are reproductions and the relay points for re-transcriptions, and not original authors.

21. Unlike the kind of recessive agency theorized by anne-lise Franois in her account of Dickinson and the open secret, the secret-holder in this poem is evacuated of interiority as a result of non-communication (Open Secrets 136-49, 170-9).

22. Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, / Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips, as Shakespeare describes the pain of exile (Richard II 1.3.166-7).

23. Susan is written on the manuscripts verso, so the poems addressee (if she is that) is separated from its text. A little overflowing word thus maintains the fiction of abstract address more thoroughly than many of Dickinsons other letter-poems.

Works CitedThe following abbreviations are used to refer to the writings of emily Dickinson:

Fr The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. citation by poem number. l The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Eds. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. 3 vols. cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958. Citation by letter number.

abu-lughod, lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: U of california P, 1986.

Bennett, Paula. My Life, a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Bervin, Jen and Marta Werner, eds. Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings. New York: New Directions, 2013.

Browning, Robert. Men and Women. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856.castronovo, Russ. State Secrets: Ben Franklin and WikiLeaks. Critical Inquiry 39.3 (2013):

425-50.caton, Steven. Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe.

Berkeley: U of california P, 1990. cohen, lara langer. emily Dickinsons Teenage Fanclub. Emily Dickinson Journal 23.1

(Spring 2014): 32-45. cohen, Michael c. Peddling authorship in the age of Jackson. ELH 79.2 (2012): 369-88.Darnton, Robert. The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon.

Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010.___. Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. cambridge,

Ma: Harvard UP 2011.

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Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. london: Routledge, 2003.

Foster, Donald. Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.Franklin, R.W., ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP, 1998.Franois, anne-lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford, ca:

Stanford University Press, 2008.Friedlander, Benjamin. Emily Dickinson and the Battle of Balls Bluff. PMLA 124.5 (2009):

1582-99. Hart, ellen louise, and Martha nell Smith, eds. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinsons Intimate

Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998. Jackson, Virginia W. Dickinsons Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, nJ: Princeton

UP, 2005.Johnson, Thomas H., ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP,

1955.Kittler, Friedrich a. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullins.

Stanford, ca: Stanford UP, 1990.latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. oxford:

oxford UP, 2005. Loeffelholz, Mary. Dickinsons Decoration. ELH 72.3 (2005): 663-89.Mailloux, Steven. Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998.A Masque of Poets. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878. Mill, John Stewart. Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties. Dissertations and Discussions:

Political, Philosophical, and Historical. Vol. 1 (1859). New York: Henry Holt, 1874. Miller, cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. amherst: U of

Massachusetts P, 2012.Miller, D. a. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of california P, 1988.Miller, Flagg. The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen.

cambridge: Harvard center for Middle eastern Studies, 2007. ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP,

2012. Putnam, Phoebe. not Quite - content - : emily Dickinson Retouches a Painting Mixed by

John Quincy Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes. PMLA 129.1 (2014): 52-70.Recent literature. Atlantic Monthly Mar. 1879: 410.Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Richard II. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine.

New York: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1996. Smith, Martha nell. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. austin: U of Texas P, 1992.Socarides, alexandra. Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Gossip. New York: Knopf, 1985. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. Durham, nc:

Duke UP, 1994.Ward, Theodora Van Wagenen, ed. Emily Dickinsons Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert

Holland. cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP, 1951.

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