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WHAT WERE EMILY DICKINSON’S BOOKS? IN A SENSE WE KNOW SOME OF the most important ones: the King James bible; her father’s (1833) copy of Isaac Watts’s Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs; Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828); Emerson; contemporary newspaper and magazine verse; a handful of writers she especially cherished, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Keats; and then many other famous and not so famous writers who get echoed or quoted in her letters or poems. First well mapped by Jack Capps, her reading list has since been filled out by other scholars.1
But in another perhaps more pertinent sense her key books were the set we now call The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, the little books she made and put away in her desk.2 These were composed by her Soul for the “Nobody” she named in one of her poems (F260, ca. 1861). They’re striking and important exactly because, though a seriously reserved woman, she was anything but an isolata, as her correspondence shows. She shared many of her verses—many hundreds of them—with a close group of relatives and friends, sending them abroad in her arresting, highly poetic letters. But no one in her lifetime saw or read those books, which she began making at a very particular point in time and then, a few years later, (unaccountably) stopped making, though she kept on writing—and sharing—her poetry. For whatever reason—we shall never really know why—she made them for a select Society of One, herself (F409, ca. 1862).
In an 1891 letter to Thomas Higginson about her poetry’s first (posthumous) appearance in print, Samuel Ward offered one of the shrewdest insights into the audience Dickinson was addressing—a judgment that was an explanation of why the Todd and Higginson edition would prove such an outstanding success and make her, what she has since ever been, such an iconic “American” poet.
She is the quintessence we all have who are of Puritan descent pur sang. We came to this country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder. Ascetics of course & this our Thebaid. We conversed with our own souls till we lost the art of communicating with other people.3