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In the spring of 1992, I was teaching a graduate seminar in Dickinson. As teachers generally do, I took pleasure in reading selected poems aloud. In the middle of "The Malay - took the Pearl" (F451, late 1862), however, I stopped dead, unable to go on. I had read this poem dozens of times before and written on it as well; but this was the first time I saw it not as a Dickinson poem, but as a nineteenth-century text, one of many texts in which the denigration of people of color is treated so casually one barely registers it's there. Certainly, the racism of the lines I had just read -- "The Negro never knew / I - wooed it - too" -- never jumped out at me the way it did then. I remember the pause so well because it went on so long. What appalled me was not the recognition of Dickinson's racial slur but, as I told my students, that it had escaped me heretofore. Why had I been so blind? Or, put another way, what had allowed me to see "The Malay's" racism now when I had not before?
What had changed, I believe, was that for the preceding two years I had increasingly focused on other nineteenth-century women poets, working with a group of writers who, whatever else one says about them, were directly engaged in the great social issues of their day in ways that Dickinson was not -- at least not as I had always read her. In the process, I had developed a much broader grasp of the possibilities of nineteenth-century women's verse, one encouraging me to view Dickinson in a new way -- not just as a unique genius of unequalled metaphoric power but also as one more nineteenth-century poet and a woman of her time and place. This is the Dickinson I will discuss here, not to tear her down -- to me she remains the century's most powerful poet, arguably the strongest writer of short lyrics in the Anglo-American literary tradition -- but to set what I now see as much needed limits on her "greatness" in other respects. It is not simply that Dickinson held, as Betsy Erkkila has forcefully argued, her...