218 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –Whatever the conclusion, though, the poem remains in a state of radical indetermi-
nacy. So does the poet, the narrator, and the reader. Ultimate vision is invariably
denied, an adequate vocabulary involving the congruence of word and world is
never attained; the need to understand things remains just that – a need.
“I had no Monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself,” Dickinson wrote once to
Higginson, “and when I try to organise – my little Force explodes – and leaves me bare
and charred – .” In all her best work, Dickinson walks a fine line between the constraints
hinted at here: between rule and chaos, “prose” and “possibility,” speech and silence.
But, as so often, she was being modest to the point of inaccuracy when she suggested
that her poetic experiments with her self ended badly. They were explosive, to be sure,
but what they did and still do is ignite awareness, compel the reader into a recognition
of the magical character of experience. They promote a healthy skepticism, but also
curiosity; they invite doubt, caution, but, along with that, awe and wonder, an acute
sense of mystery. Here and elsewhere in her letters and poems, Dickinson also unveils
a paradox, and one that is not just unique to her. It is a paradox that lies perhaps at the
heart of all American writing and, certainly, at the heart of writing of this period,
circulating around the idea and practice of a tradition of individualism. Dickinson had
“no Monarch,” she told Higginson, nobody to tell her what and how she should write.
As someone was to observe of her much later, she consequently wrote as if no one had
written before. This made the tenor and texture of her work utterly hers: even the
physical look of it on the page tells the reader familiar with it that this is the work of
Dickinson. But it also established her kinship with so many others: “isolatoes” like
Hawthorne and Melville, say, writers concerned with the honor and dignity due to the
self such as Stowe and Stoddard, Douglass and Jacobs, others committed to self-reliance
like Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau, and still others like Poe and Whitman who
attempted to trace the contours of loneliness. Along with Dickinson, these writers and
many others writing between the Revolution and the end of the Civil War, and beyond,
defined an area of concern that subsequent American writers were to explore. They
established parameters within which others, later, were to undertake their chartings of
the country’s ample geography, their own stabs at translating the landscapes of America
into literature. Their example was not a restrictive one, of course. It did not, and does
not, limit American writers to a narrow set of alternatives beyond which they are
forbidden to go. It offers, not a prescriptive grammar, but a transformational one: a
range of options on which each writer might build, structures that are generative,
susceptible to change and development, a series of opportunities rather than roles.
What Dickinson and her contemporaries sustained and transmitted to their successors,
in sum, was a great and continuing tradition founded precisely on the notion that there
was and could be “no Monarch” for the individual: a tradition that has, as at least one
of its unacknowledged aims, the forging of the uncreated conscience of a nation.GGray_c02.indd 218ray_c 02 .indd 218 8 8/1/2011 7:54:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 44 AM