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[Abstract]

In a cluster of poems employing images of the sea, rivers, brooks, wells, and, finally, a camel, Emily Dickinson depicts the refreshment books provide and the potentially overwhelming power of literary influence, locating the true source of the creative imagination and its transgressive power in the self. As Alfred Habegger claims, Dickinson used books and reading as a “kind of field work, something experimental” (Habegger 243) to explore personae and develop poetic voices inspired by her favorite books. I analyze several echoes or potential parallels between Dickinson’s poetry and Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837), which serves as a touchstone on reading and books for her generation. Examining the lyrics beginning “My River runs to Thee—” (Fr219, M 107), “Have you got a Brook in your little heart” (Fr 94, M 61), and “The Well opon the Brook” (Fr 1051, M 473), I consider the poet’s desire to merge with and stand apart from an overwhelming other. Her imagined dialogue casts the speaker as a river who expresses her desire to join the sea (perhaps inspired by George Eliot’s novel, The Mill on the Floss). Using a Shakespearean allusion, Dickinson implies that “brooks” (or books) may sustain the poet, but they also threaten to overflow their banks or dry up. In contrast, the “well,” insular and self-contained, connotes the “failless” reliance on the self and poetic imagination. Far from inundating her, as the lyric “Strong Draughts of Their Refreshing Minds” (Fr770, M 358) implies, books enable Dickinson to have an “elastic” mind and attain the “Camel’s trait”— to subsist on inner resources for long periods. I plan to attend throughout my discussion to the way the speakers move from local and global, from familiar to exotic, in these readings and others that give insight into her reading process.

The focus will also be on Emily Dickinson’s use of allusion, echo, and habits of reading, considering how Shakespeare, Keats, George Eliot, and the Victorians were absorbed into her work as well as her explicit statements about literary influence and reading. The topics will be Dickinson as a reader, and how her poems are revisions of or responses to precursor texts. Using the theories of John Hollander and recent theoretical interpretations of the book, I plan to explore how she navigates the idea of literary influence and how the lyric voice of her poetry might be influenced by the voice or text of another poet.