Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

by Virginia Jackson

How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics.


Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry.


Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

Genres: Poetry, Theory, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 5, 2005

Reviews

[Catie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Virginia Jackson is really smart and really boring, this book goes in circles, it's swallowed up in its own hyper-academic language, she makes like 3 points throughout this entire book and then just beats them to death with nice, flowery language. I gave her two stars because she's obviously brilliant (and wants you to know she is brilliant) so one star felt a little harsh. I still hate her and this book though.

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

im split between 4 - 5 stars but here it is

[Kate Humes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jackson methodically unpacks the problems with reading Dickinson's poems as lyrics. She questions Dickinson's early editors' decisions in their (re)arrangement of Dickinson's lines, as well as their assumption that she wrote lyrics. In doing so, we have come to understand Dickinson as a lyric poet, when her manuscripts provide little in the way of proof for such an assumption. Jackson's study meticulously traces the editorial decisions made by Johnson and Franklin and how they disrupt (or corrupt) our reading of Dickinson.

[Tom Pepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Raises some interesting questions, but overall not worth the time. It is a bit appalling that a book like this could get published with a major university press--she seems to have no capacity to understand the other writers she critiques. For instance, even as an undergraduate student many years ago, I would not have been allowed to get away with the shockingly incorrect reading of de Man's essay on lyric that she devotes about ten pages to. One can certainly disagree with de Man, but she completely gets him wrong, and some reader should have objected to this before the publication of the book (this is just one example-misreadings abound). The book pretends to historicize the genre of lyric, but does so only to essentialize the New Critical conception of aesthetics (all the while pretending to keep its distance from New Criticism). Jackson seems, though, to not have understood New Criticism (or the critique of it) any better than she does de Man, so doesn't seem to know that is what she is doing.

The difficulty and tedium other reviewers have pointed to are a problem, I agree. But they seem to result from the author's inability to see that she is simply repeating the same old thing while trying to claim novelty.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m convinced that privacy is really at the heart, so to speak, of this book: Jackson gives us some very useful ways to historicize the fantasy of private utterance and our modernist attachment to its failures. I think there might more to be said about the lyric social imaginary and its relationship to private/public address.

[Joey Gamble · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkably cognizant and thoughtful inquiry into, among other things, the forces that impinge upon a grouping of words to make them into a thing we call a "lyric."

[Virginie · Rating 2 out of 5]

If You breathe English like I breathe air then you will love that book. This book is for people in the academia. If someone talks to me about lyric reading for the next few months, I will go crazy!