To my classmates

To my classmates:
THANK YOU for clearing the name of Emily Dickinson.
I had been growing increasingly frustrated as I heard multiple and varying conjectures about Emily's character and stability - based on our cumulative hearsay and what we could gather from the poems. I don't know that Ms Dickinson was not in love with her publisher, or her sister-in-law, or that she was not mentally ill, as many of us would like to suggest, but I am again comfortable in our knowing that this determination is not our place to make. Like an entire generation of people reading her poetry, our perception of Emily Dickinson is tempered with the manipulation of her audience that struggles to label and sort the poor woman so that her distinctiveness was something we could understand. If her poems did not fit into the transcendentalist format such as the environment of her time dictated, it's alright, it can be edited and titled - arguably, the same content, but a completely different flavor. If our brains can't wrap around the idea that some people are maybe in love with no one at all, maybe it is easier just to decide that something scandalous simmers below the surface, like lesbianism or insanity.
We too often take for granted the condition that the works we read in class were published in. It should have made plenty of sense that Arthur Gordon Pym was terribly organized, because Edgar Allan Poe was uncomfortable with the format and because he was terribly concerned with its literary quality, only with the story's marketability. There is a marked contrast between "Benito Cereno" and Herman Melville's selected battle pieces. BC is the interpretation of a true story by a talented individual - it's good because Melville is good at what he does, good enough to make money at it. It may be surprisingly to read the poems and find hey - these are really good - because this is the style and these are the pieces that Melville really cares about. Herman Melville struggled and failed to make a living as a poet, but ultimately considers himself this above all else.
It is very unfair of us to project meaning on published works of the long past, and we are increasingly aware of its inaccuracy. As her fascicles gain common ground, so does a more fair perception of Emily Dickinson. I urge my classmates to let Emily's supposed personal life Lie in Her Alabaster Chamber and to concentrate more on the life that she and our other authors wished to project.