214 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865never married. She did, however, cultivate intense intellectual companionships
with several men in succession, whom she called her tutors. The first was Benjamin
F. Newton, a law student in her father’s office, who encouraged both her reading
and her pursuit of poetry. Religious doubts prompted by his death led her to turn
for guidance to the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she called her “dearest
earthly friend” – and whom, for the purposes of her poetry, she transformed into
the image of a “lover” she was never, in fact, to know. After Wadsworth left for San
Francisco, Dickinson devoted herself fiercely to her poetry; and she initiated a
correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whom she knew of only
through his contributions to Atlantic Monthly. “Mr. Higginson,” she wrote to him
in 1862, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” And Higginson,
although he was too ground in the mill of the conventional to appreciate fully what
Dickinson was doing, did encourage her to continue to write. So did other friends
and correspondents, including Helen Hunt Jackson. Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800
poems, but publication was another matter. “Publication – is the Auction / Of the
Mind of Man,” she wrote in one piece (no. 709); and only seven of her poems were
published during her lifetime, six of them without her consent. Ironically, perhaps,
the one that was published with her reluctant permission was one that begins,
“Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed” (no. 67) and explores a
characteristic theme: the possibilities of absence, omission – how an experience
denied and imagined may be more intense, more fiercely sweet than the real thing.
The real thing in terms of writing for Dickinson was to collect her poems in
packets of about twenty each. When she died, 814 poems bound into forty packets
were found in a box in the bottom drawer of her bedroom bureau, together with
333 poems ready for binding and numerous worksheet drafts. Selections from these
were published, edited by Higginson and Mabel L. Todd, an Amherst friend of
Dickinson’s, in 1890 and 1891. Evidently uneasy about what they regarded as the
aberrant, eccentric nature of Dickinson’s art, however, and possibly nervous about
the public reaction, Higginson and Todd altered the poems they published to make
them more conventional, more in line with contemporary taste. Further selections,
also marred by interventionist and insensitive editing – by Dickinson’s niece and
others – appeared in 1896, 1914, 1924, 1929, 1930, and 1937. A volume more faithful
to the original texts was published in 1945. But it was not until 1955 that a three-
volume variorum edition was published, containing all 1,775 known poems. Three
volumes of Dickinson’s letters then appeared three years later. These were only a
small fraction of the letters she actually wrote. As for the letters she received, and
which constituted the only way the world wrote to her during her lifetime, she left
strict instructions for her sister Lavinia and a woman who worked in the household
to destroy them when she was dead. She made no mention of her own letters, or her
figurative letters to the world, which it was the luck or fate of Lavinia to discover.
That is the reason they survived and, seventy years after her death, could be finally
published as she had written them.
“Nature is a stranger yet,” Dickinson observes in one of her poems (“What mystery
pervades a well!,” no. 1400):GGray_c02.indd 214ray_c 02 .indd 214 8 8/1/2011 7:54:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 44 AM