2. The problem of voices in Emily Dickinson’s poetry

When first reading an Emily Dickinson poem, certainly as a non-native English speaker, it can be very hard to comprehend it even a bit. Emily Dickinson made her own world in her poems, using her own kind of language to communicate. Her poems are beautiful and open to a lot of interpretations and therefore she is, of course, a source of research for scholars and of inspiration for her readers and composers. Interpretations of her poems never end and so also new literature about and songs on her poems is written every day. The settings of her poems provide singers with many colours to explore in performance, that sometimes this can be dazzling: who is the personality, the character in the poem and who is he or she talking to? In other words: what are the voices of the poem? A good example of that dazzle is the first time I had to analyse a Dickinson poem some years ago:

The poem was ‘The World -- feels Dusty’, the setting from Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson. This is the text Copland set next to the version of Johnson:

I could not get what it meant at all. On Google there was a blog about Emily Dickinson poems: The prowling Bee, Blogging all the Poems of Emily Dickinson written by Susan Kornfield.  According to her, this poem from around 1862 is about the American Civil War (1861-1865), about the soldiers that die in the dust, where the honours of the war taste dry and the Flags of the involved parties are vexing. Only love and friendship can give some refreshment.[1] 

Being a historian, this analysis appealed a lot to me and so I decided to use it for my interpretation classes. So, now fully prepared I went to the stage and sang the Copland song. After singing my teacher asked: “And so what does the poem mean to you?” So I told them the interpretation of my choice. “Ok, nice”, my teacher said, “but who are you and who are you talking too?”. I said that for me I felt that it was Emily Dickinson herself, enraged about the war and wanting to comfort the soldiers that died. “But which soldiers, who is the ‘thy’? Did someone close to her die on the battlefield? And why are you Emily Dickinson?” It was hard to answer these questions. And yet it is essential to answer them to create a stage personality and to communicate the poem.

      In this poem, the first stanza is like a general statement, while the second stanza becomes very personal. Still, have no idea about which voices are involved. And as Emily Dickinson was never asked, we can never be sure what she meant with the poem. Then there is also the interpretation of the composer that you have to take into account. In this case, he even changed the words of the poem, complicating it even further. 

This is not a problem of this specific poem. Books and articles have been written about Emily Dickinson’s ‘voices’. In order to find my own interpretation of the poem in this research, I will first look at some sources about who are the voices in Dickinson’s writing. Later I will also find out how composers made their own interpretation of the poems. With this, I hope to find out what are the valid interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry and if there are even interpretations more valid than others. This information will lead to ways to make my own interpretations. Then I will use the analysis to make a dramatic analysis of the poem ‘I’m Nobody’ and in turn, use that analysis to figure out the voices that fit with the three settings.

Theories on Voices and Audience: The Poem is the poet

There are a lot of theories about the voices of Emily Dickinson because she didn’t provide any clear information herself. Of course, scholars love it when they have to find out something without being able to ever know for sure. Therefore there are a lot of theories on who is speaking in Emily Dickinson’s poems. Below I will explore a few of them.

One of the first questions in reading Emily Dickinson is whether the poems are a representation of the poet. Singing Emily Dickinson songs, I always felt that the role belonging to the song was the poet herself. But as it was never stated by Emily Dickinson that she herself is talking in her poems, can this be the right thought and is it always the case? Many of Dickinson’s poems are written in the first person and so it is not completely arbitrary to assume that the ‘I’ is Emily. In her book The Voice of the Poet, Brita Lindberg-Seyersted states this:

“To attempt an identification of the ‘voice’ of a poem with its author is a precarious thing. Emily Dickinson was explicit on this point of speaker as opposed to author when, in her fourth letter to the Colonel she warned: ‘When I state myself as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me - but a supposed person.”[2]

Lindberg-Seyersted gives something like a warning, that you cannot see Dickinson’s poetry just as all the inner and true thoughts of the poet, as Dickinson herself stated that this wasn’t the case. She continues that it was common to write personal and confessional poetry in the nineteenth century. Dickinson could express her thoughts more freely in her poems than in her letters and in a way that makes the poems connected to her person. But it doesn’t mean that everything in there is a direct conversion of her thoughts and opinions into writings on paper. On the contrary, poetry is a form of art, and in art it is not only about pure communication, but it is also about the form that’s created. So Lindberg-Seyersted sees Emily Dickinson represented in her poems, but she also poses other identities in them.[3]

The Character of the Compositions

In her thesis “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”: Musical (Re)presentations of Emily Dickinson Abigail Martin enumerates a  few composers like Arthur Farewell and Ernst Bacon that all treat Dickinson’s poems as the poet herself. Through her poems, they feel very connected to Emily Dickinson and in setting her poems they feel they come closer to her soul. Also in Lowenberg’s book, there are a few composers that write about their identification with Dickinson. For example, Gloria Coates writes in a letter to Lowenberg:

“I have always felt a close link between my thoughts and those of Emily Dickinson. (…) There is a universality in her ideas which transcends time and place, yet an intimacy of expression so that one feels he knows the ‘little wren’ quite well and can marvel and delight in her company.”[4]

David Irving also sees that Dickinson’s personality and poetry are the same, but when he composes he wants to give his own perspective of Emily Dickinson and her poetry. Martin thinks this is a more valid description of how composers set Emily Dickinson. For her, every composer makes their own Emily Dickinson according to their own interpretations and values. And to say their compositions represent her personality can be wrong. Later in the research, she takes a closer look at composers Aaron Copland, Ernst Bacon, Lori Laitman and Libby Larsen. She finds that all four composers see their own identity reflected in the poems of Dickinson. And with their compositions, they pose their own identity on Dickinson’s in, making a lot of different and probably inaccurate Dickinson’s in the meanwhile. Dickinson’s intention was to stay vague and remain open to multiple interpretations. [5] 

Controlling her voices: a gender perspective

An important thing multiple people notice is that Dickinson herself could write in different voices to different people. She herself decided how she would write her poems and her letters for or to a certain person, like her brother or Sue. This becomes also clear when you look at the problem from a gender perspective.

One of the most striking things of Emily Dickinson is that she was female. It is not a trivial matter, because, in the time she lived, there were very distinct expectations for men and women and the business of writing poetry was considered a male domain.

      Messmer writes about this in A vice for Voices. She has two chapters: ‘The “Female” World of Love an Duty’ and ‘The “Male” World of Power and Poetry’. She sees that Dickinson assumes a female gender when writing letters to her female friends about the then proper female topics, like nature, flowers, family and household. [6] While to her male correspondents she profiles herself as an independent person, expressing her superiority. In the letters to her brother, for example, she wants to show that she is an elder sister or equal to men. She always wants to outwit him. In her correspondence to Higginson she doesn’t sign the letters with her female first name, nor does she want a picture. Messmer sees this as a sign that she didn’t want to emphasise her gender to him, to be treated as an equal. She thinks that Emily Dickinson wanted to show to the society around her that she was a woman that knew what was her role, but that as an author and poet she didn’t want her writings to be biased by her gender.[7] 

      Whether Messmer’s observations be true or not, it shows that Emily Dickinson created different images for different readers. She could change her role to manipulate her readers to see her as she wanted and to see her as they wanted themselves.

According to Lindberg-Seyersted in almost all of Dickinson’s poems, the assumed personality is feminine. There are poems in which this is clearly stated, for example, the poem  ‘I’m “wife” – I’ve finished that –’ (J199). In a lot of poems it is not visible at once: “but it seems to me natural to do so.”[8]

Gender and Power

Ursula Caci has a different view on the gender of personae in Dickinson’s poems. She always talks about the ‘speaker’ of the poems, so she doesn’t necessarily see Dickinson as the impersonation of her own work. It opens up the possibility for male speakers and when it is not explicitly stated, she doesn’t specify the gender. She says that Dickinson uses gender as a means to set power relations between the speaker of the poem and the one spoken to. Gender gave Dickinson a way to play with power expectations:

“In Dickinson’s power-negotiating poetry, social interaction requires at least two participants, and at least one of them perceives power as something social that is negotiated in the relative terms of that relationship.”[9]

As most real relationships (romantic or not) have flexible power games, so have the relationships in Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson uses gender to play this power game, as of course gender roles were very strict in her surroundings. In her poetry she can work around these restrictions from society, she can make her own rules. It isn’t always the strong male against the weak woman. Dickinson often even turns this around: maybe it starts with a strong male character opposite a weak female character, but later the man becomes subordinate to the woman. In this way, Caci says, she kicks against the boundaries that society made for her. The speakers in her poems play the power game actively.[10]

In theatre, power relations are very important to define the relationship between two characters: who has the highest status and who the lowest. Caci’s article offers good insights in how Dickinson’s poetry can be a very short theatre show using the status of the speaker of the poem and the status of the one spoken to. This will help me in defining clear characters for the various settings.

Emily or not?

Before researching the topic about the voices in Emily Dickinson, I didn’t expect to know afterwards who the voice was or voices were in Dickinson’s poetry. Actually, I thought the literature would be even more diverse. Most texts about who is speaking (of scholars or composers) assume Dickinson is the speaker herself, this becomes clear in Martin’s article, or see her strongly represented in her poems, as Lindberg-Seyersted does. Composers identify themselves with the way Dickinson writes. And earlier I was convinced that Dickinson should speak herself when singing her poems. Why then choose another approach and make completely fictional characters that are not connected to Dickinson’s person?

As I have described above, there is evidence in literature that Emily Dickinson herself changed her tone and character according to the person she had a conversation with. For example, both Caci and Messmer see that Dickinson’s representations of gender in her letters and in her poetry were flexible. And Martin constantly speaks about the many ‘Dickinson’s’ that scholars and composers make up. I like the idea of an ambiguous Emily Dickinson, one that hides double meanings everywhere and lets the reader guess the underlying identity of the speaker. Emily Dickinson was witty enough to make people read in her text what they wanted to read. As Martin shows: this is what scholars and composers have been doing.[11]

In the end, the singer is representing a composer’s representation of a representational poem of the character of Emily Dickinson. Then the audience interprets that representation. If it is impossible to represent the voice of Emily Dickinson correctly on stage, it is unnecessary to stay with her as the voice of every poem in the songs. Therefore I decided to look for other possible voices that are fitting for the poem ‘I’m Nobody’.

In the next part I discuss interpretations of ‘I’m Nobody’, it will show multiple ways in which the poem can be understood. This only makes my life as a performer more interesting because I can take contrasting personalities with each different setting to emphasise the theatrical aspect of singing art-songs.