‘The Bird / Who Sings the Same, Unheard, / As Unto Crowd —’: Dickinson, Birdsong, and the Business of Improvisation

Abstract

One sob in the throat, one flutter of bosom -"My business is to sing" -and away she rose! (L269)Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that -My Business is Circumference -. (L268) " . . . a word of extensive use and indefinite signification . . . ." Noah Webster, "Business," American Dictionary of the English Language (italics in original)Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. The poem that lends several lines to this essay's title, "To hear an Oriole sing" (Fr402), is one of 222, about one in eight of the extant poems, in which Dickinson mentions birds or their songs (Schuman and Hodgman xvi). She named 26 distinct species (xiii). Scholars of the period have long associated birdsong with Romantic and sentimentalist themes, and Dickinson scholarship is no exception. Cheryl Walker points out the ways that the myth of Philomela, turned into a nightingale by Tere3us, agonizingly sorrowful but unable to sing because tongueless, inflected American women's poetry and women poets' sense of their own projects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are no nightingales in the Americas, but associations between the species and improvisation traveled from Europe, because of its remarkable ability to spontaneously combine fragments of song in seemingly infinite varieties. Walker and other feminist critics radically recontextualized the canonical Dickinson by reading her alongside then-dismissed poets such as Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Lydia Huntley Sigourney. Walker contrasts Dickinson with her friend Helen Hunt Jackson, characterizing Jackson as a careerist, where Dickinson is presented as more characteristic of the sentimental poetess, her work reflecting "the vulnerability or ambivalence toward freedom characteristic of women's bird poems" (49). Contrasting Dickinson with the still too-little studied Jackson and others had a profound effect on nineteenth-century Americanist scholarship, prompting the rediscovery, reprinting, and CONTACT Gerard Holmes