Abstract
The foundational text in the "New Lyric Studies" was Dickinson's Misery by Virginia Jackson, a work that questions whether the poems Dickinson wrote can be called "lyrics"--and going further, whether there is such a thing as a genre of the "lyric," as it was defined by nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglo-American criticism. One strain of the argument dwells on Dickinson's failure to pursue publication, as well as her extensive use of poetry or of prose that might be poetry, in her letters, to suggest that she did not aim to write autonomous lyrics in the ideal New Critical mode. The book pictures Dickinson, in Jonathan Culler's tart summary, as "a spinster scribbling lines for friends and acquaintances" (85). Christanne Miller has effectively countered this view in her book Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012), demonstrating that Dickinson had high poetic ambitions, took herself seriously as a poet, knew her own powers, and carefully preserved her work for posterity. Dickinson transcribed "over eleven hundred poems in forty bound fascicles and fifteen unbound sets," which she placed in a locked wooden box and which "to our knowledge .. . [she] shared with no friend or family member" (11). In the years of her greatest creativity, 1861-66, she put away the "great majority of her poems" without showing them to anyone, circulating "relatively few [of those] of her poems most frequently anthologized and regarded as among her most important for understanding her thought and art today." (11) As Miller tactfully concludes, "Knowing that she never circulated the majority of her most serious poems suggests that her inclusion of poems in letters may often be more conventional than has been thought" (11). However she treated her poems in the presence of her limited public, Dickinson clearly valued them as autonomous works of art and expected, or at least thought it worthy to hope, that they would be valued by future generations. She saw herself as writing, or attempting to write, poetry with a shelf life beyond her own life, as writing "for the ages," in the old-fashioned phrase.
