9 - Emily Dickinson in Belles Lettres, Music, and Art

Summary

If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her —

— E. D. to Higginson, 7 June 1866

… legend won't explain the sheer sanity

of vision, the serious mischief

of language, the economy of pain.

— Linda Pastan, “Emily Dickinson” (2000)

EMILY DICKINSON AND HER WORK have served as subject matter for poets and fiction writers, painters, sculptors, and composers going back to the poet's own lifetime. The protagonist in Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876) is said to have been modeled after the poet, a friend since childhood. Artistic works based on the poet have proliferated over the decades, yet have only very recently begun to receive serious critical attention. Bibliographic surveys include those by Klaus Lubbers (1968), who comments briefly on poems, novels, and dramas about the poet's life published or produced through 1957; by Carlton Lowenberg, who in Musicians Wrestle Everywhere: Emily Dickinson and Music (1992) cites hundreds of musical compositions based on Dickinson's poems; and by Jonnie Guerra, whose “Dickinson Adaptations in the Arts and the Theater,” appears in The Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998). Titanic Operas, an online bibliography of more than 150 published poems about Emily Dickinson, is accessible through the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives. In the introduction to her Emily Dickinson: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources, with Selective Annotations, 1890 through 1987, Jeanetta Boswell omitted what she terms “literary tributes to Dickinson” because “they seemed to say more of the person who wrote them than about Emily Dickinson” (she nevertheless cites poems about Dickinson by Hart Crane and Richard Wilbur).