"Poetry Experienced": Lucy Larcom's Poetic Dwelling in A New England Girlhood

Abstract

preface to her autobiography A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory (1889), Lucy Larcom writes that her autobiography may have been written already her verses: In them, I have found most natural and free of myself. They have seemed to set my life to music for me, life that has always had to be occupied with many things besides (8). Larcom's verses thus operate on dual level. They offer expansive forum which to express her self, and they add element of music, of beauty and artfulness, to life often occupied with quotidian. For most part, Larcom critics have ended their discussions of her poetry and autobiography at this level, rightly acknowledging her as able yet humble versifier of nineteenth century. Yet Larcom's use of poetry her autobiography represents something more interesting than this familiar assessment suggests. If writing her verses she found the most free expression of her self, why should she write autobiograph y? She continues preface, My 'must-have' was poetry. From first, life meant that to me.... [P]oetry is...an atmosphere which every life may expand (10). Thus, Larcom asserts that poetry for her is not only act of writing, but also act of living. I will argue, then, that her autobiography becomes kind of model of poetic dwelling, as Martin Heidegger describes it his essay ...Poetically Dwells.... A New England Girlhood both exemplifies and illuminates Heidegger's thesis that [p]oetry is what really lets us dwell (215), as Larcom illustrates how one comes to poetry this way (for, as she says, she was often occupied with things other than writing) and how it comes to live in one. A New England Girlhood was originally written at request of Larcom's publisher, Houghton Muffin, as contribution to Riverside Library for Young People (Kort 25). it, she was asked to focus specifically on her experience as mill-worker, keeping mind audience of young girls. Her awareness of these stipulations is obvious her preface. She describes her audience as girls of all ages and writes that whatever special interest this little narrative of mine may have is due to social influences under which I was reared, and particularly to prominent place held by both work and religion New England half century ago (8). Most of Larcom's critics explore her autobiography light of these stipulations. Larcom's only recent biographer, Shirley Marchalonis, writes that result of her publisher's suggestion is a controlled nostalgia--not simplistic urging to return to past, but looking back with love on parallel childhoods, her own and that of country (251). Carol H olly explores Larcom's identity terms of affiliation, positing her autobiography with its specific audience of women as an expressly intimate, interactive, and female event (219). However, other recent critics have examined ways Larcom's autobiography perhaps transcends reductiveness of project suggested to her by Houghton Muffin. Rose Norman reads A New England Girlhood as kind of Kunstleromane which Larcom filters all of [her story] through her lens of childhood she sees developing as poet, which conflicted with cultural ideals of womanhood she needed to uphold for her young female audience (108, 109). Amy Kort suggests different, subtle subversion of proposed project text, arguing that Larcom writes out of any generic tradition which her publisher at time or modern critics might attempt to place her. She argues that Larcom presents fragmented and imagistic kind of self within text that equally conceals and reveals it purports to describe, thus, ironically exposing a clearer vision of herself than would be revealed more traditional autobiographical forms (38). Kort divides text into two parts. …