Czy Emily Dickinson pisała wiersze?

Abstract

The author proposes a reflection on discovering the poet with regard to his creation or construction. This issue is discussed on the example of Emily Dickinson’s works which were published only after her death and were not prepared for print by the author herself. In the light of the latest research on the material dimension of her legacy (starting from Virginia Jackson’s study Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading from 2005 to the recently published collection The Gorgeous Nothings. Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems), it appears that many of Dickinson’s works were not written in a form that could be recognized as poetic at first glance. A large part was preserved only in notebooks, loose sheets covered with handwriting written in continuo or at odd angles, in a manner adapted to the format of a given scrap of paper, usually a free fragment of a recycled envelope or a torn-off corner of a piece of paper used previously for a different purpose. These texts had to be recognized then by discoverers as poems, and then copied and edited in a way consistent with what was considered lyric poetry in the era. Some of them were then rejected as not falling into the category of poetry and included in the opus of the American only by later researchers. Others, in the first editions treated as poems with time were excluded by historians of literature from this collection. Contrary to the provocative title, the aim of the article is not to answer the question about the status of the texts left by Dickinson. Instead, the author reflects on the poetic criteria ascribed to her works by the first and subsequent readers.