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IN OCTOBER 1891, Thomas Wentworth Higginson published an article that may be read as a miniature portrait of Emily Dickinson's reception as a lyric poet. The article, not ostensibly on the poetry but on "Emily Dickinson's Letters," responded to what Higginson called "a suddenness of success almost without a parallel in American literature" (that is, the commercial success of his own first edition of Dickinson's Poems the year before), by making public the poet's private letters to her future literary editor. After printing the first letter, from April 1862, which (now) famously begins, "MR. HIGGINSON-Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?" Higginson remarked in the Atlantic article, "The letter was post-marked 'Amherst' and it was in a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town." Higginson's image of fossilized bird-tracks contains a rather beautiful notion of the lyric as the form informing Dickinson's scriptive character-a very late-nineteenth-century image of lyric reading. Although Higginson's article was itself the effect of Dickinson's success in print, his version of Dickinson as a writer who did not intend to be read in print took wing in his fantasy that Dickinson's manuscript was a material (and institutionally framed) trace of Romantic poetic birdsong. Thus Higginson inaugurated not only Dickinson's book publication, but the reading of Dickinson as an exemplary lyric poet, a poet so lyrical that even her letters look like poems.
Editors have certainly come a long way since Higginson, and the lyrics they decipher in Dickinson's manuscripts have changed character. But there is and has always been agreement that Emily Dickinson wrote lyric poems. While versions of Dickinson's lyricism have shifted as interpretive communities have shifted, everyone since Higginson has discovered some version of the genre that Higginson assumed Dickinson wanted her writing to become. In the new twenty-first-centuiy debates over how to frame Dickinson s writing, the media of transmission (a fancy variorum edition, dazzling digital technologies) have raised almost every question about what it was that Dickinson wrote except the question of genre. Like Higginson in 1891, most readers have found it impossible to read Dickinson's manuscripts as if they...