Coincidental Implants

My mind was blown yesterday by a supernova of Baader Meinhof moments, a union of coincidental connections betwixt assorted details from several of my recent posts (LOL – I seldom get the opportunity to say “betwixt” so I thought I’d jump on the chance today).  Let me see if I can recount all of the details that led up to this cataclysmic convergence of correlations clearly and concisely:

* Toward the end of last month (5/20 – 5/28), my daily posts dealt with the engagement of Austin Dickinson and Susan Gilbert, on recent research that suggests a romantic, even erotic, love between Emily Dickinson and Susan, and on Mabel Loomis Todd’s (and Austin Dickinson’s?) later attempts to erase “Sue” from Dickinson’s work and reputation.

​* On May 27th, I changed course altogether and covered some of Dickinson’s poems that make mention of the month of May, and on May 28th I explored “One Sister have I in our house,” a laudatory poem about Susan Gilbert Dickinson that mentions the month of May and that also related to the earlier posts mentioned above, HERE. ​

* On May 29th I moved on and took a look at Dickinson’s works that use the word “house” – inspired by “One sister have I in our HOUSE” – and I landed on “I dwell in possibility” (“A fairer HOUSE than prose”). 

​* For that post, I stumbled upon a blog post of “a Carpenter and Poet living ‘up in Vermont,’” and in that piece he examined Helen Vendler’s take on “I dwell in possibility." (HERE).  At that time, I was unfamiliar with the name “Helen Vendler.”

* Yesterday, after a bit of word association, I moved on to Dickinson’s poetry which uses the word “door,” and I took a look at “One need not be a chamber – to be haunted.”

* The opening line of that poem made me wonder if Dickinson had ever read “The Raven” and/or anything else by Poe, and various online clues led me to Jack Capps’ book Emily Dickinson’s Reading on Archive.org.

Okay, so here I was yesterday with a “borrow unavailable” book on my screen, and I spied the magnifying glass icon for the “Search Inside” feature of the archive.  I wondered, “Hmm…would this feature perform a word search inside a book that is unavailable?”  I tried it and lo and behold, it worked!  I searched “Poe” and got this information: 

 “Poe is a bit different; of him, she (i.e. Dickinson) wrote, ‘I know too little to think.’  She may have read one volume of Poe in the 1850's, for in August of that year she wrote to Henry Vaughn Emmons to thank him for the gift of an unidentified book, and her note reads in part: ‘I find it Friend - I read it ... I thank you for them all — the pearl, and then the onyx, and then the emerald stone.’ Mrs. Aurelia Scott suspects a cryptic message in the first letters of the three gems: they spell ‘Poe.’  This is the nearest one comes to concrete evidence that Emily Dickinson read Edgar Allan Poe.”

I explored this “cryptic message” a bit further, and I came across an article entitled “An Acrostic Window on Emily Dickinson’s ‘I dwell in Possibility’” – and this intriguing treatise is when/where the “supernova of Baader Meinhof moments” I mentioned at the start of this post occurred, for this essay included references to bits and pieces from several posts from the recent collection of days:  “I dwell in Possibility,” Edgar Allan Poe and the acrostic use of POE, Aurelia Scott, Helen Vendler (in footnotes),  and the idea a “house-building poet.”  TBH, the article even included a separate, unrelated Baader Meinhof instance for me related to the word “quotidian” (maybe I’ll explain that one in a post some day soon).  In addition, the article was putting forth a postulation I’d not heard before – that there is an acrostic hidden in “I dwell in Possibility”:  I AM – YES – SO I.

Take a look, HERE. 

Let me know you think about this.  I’ll fill you in on my thoughts tomorrow.

BTW:  Dickinson’s letter to Emmons is HERE.  Johnson’s notes about the letter to Emmons are HERE.