The Soul unto itself

Emily Dickinson first sent Poem 683 as a letter to a friend in Springfield. That context surrounds the poem with mystery. With the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe, no writer in the American literary canon has provoked as much speculation about their private life and its impact on their work as Emily Dickinson. Although she pioneered the genre of the confessional poem, with its assumption that the emotional lacerations and giddy joys of the poet make for poetry, Dickinson left no diary, nothing to clarify what has remained otherwise a tantalizingly mysterious private life. Few of her poems were ever sent out for publication—early on, her eccentric poems found little interest. Dickinson sent Poem 683 to Samuel Bowles (1826-1878), a prominent newspaper editor and influential journalist living in Springfield (about 20 miles west of Amherst. Bowles would ultimately receive more than 40 of her poems, some submitted for publication, others in letters. That correspondence invites speculation about the nature of the relationship and what Dickinson may have been saying to him in these gnomic poems).

Bowles, a frequent visitor to Amherst, was a close friend of the Dickinson family. Gregarious and opinionated (he was among the most prominent abolitionists in Massachusetts), Bowles was known as an engaging conversationalist. The exact relationship between Bowles and Dickinson might be—might not be—suggested by Poem 683. Is this man the unrequited love of the poem? The speaker explores the tension between what the heart wants and what the soul allows. It may be an anatomy of a love that Dickinson opted not to pursue, to live without. Or it might be a kind of philosophical conundrum Dickinson posed to a man whose intellect she admired and whose opinion she respected.