From: LouisFors <LouisFors@aol.com>
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Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 23:29:55 EST
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In a message dated 98-03-17 21:07:51 EST, Nancy wrote:

<snip> 
>  I used to see ED as somewnat "maladjusted" but no longer.  My respect for
>  her complexity and artistic talent grows daily.  If anything, I envy her
>  ability to select the few with whom she visited.  I have to work; often
>  that requires me to come into contact with many kinds of behavior that I'd
>  define as "crazy" (I think others would call this behavior "politics").  I
>  value peace and serenity. I'd love to stay home and simply think and write
>  poetry, choosing to see only those who, as my mother would say, "don't have
>  an ax to grind"!  Back to "Much Madness..."
<snip>
Adding a couple of thoughts to those posted by Nancy and Fred, I don't think
we have stressed enough that Dickinson didn't just toss her poems off.  They
were carefully, thoughtfully wrought.  The sort of careful crafstmanship that
she employed required concentration, and that required retreating from social
circles that she could have participated in in Amherst in her time and place.
With whom could she talk about her poetry--the most important thing in her
life--in those social rounds?  It is clear from correspondence that even
Higginson, a respected critic, couldn't respond in challenging ways to her
work. (ED seems to toy with him her letters, nicely, of course, but toy
nevertheless.)  It is clear that ED and Susan worked closely together, by
correspondence, in what Martha Nell Smith calls a "poetry workshop." And Susan
was her primary audience, if one accepts Smith's analysis, as I do.
I don't think ED was in the least crippled, emotionally, by the life she
chose.  She had a face-to-face social world in the house, she had her
extensive correspondence, and she developed her great talent in the only way
she could.  I cannot believe that she didn't receive great satisfaction from
the radical poetic forms she was developing, and in her correspondence
publishing ventures.  Some repression, doubtless.  But artists have to make
choices, and she was a she in a time when she wasn't supposed to create what
she did--with those spectacularly sharp images, those amazing multi-layered
meanings.  So she created a world that permitted her to accomplish what she
needed to do.  And I suspect that she lived fully in that world.

Louis Forsdale