“And row my blossoms o’er!” Gift-Giving and Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Vocation

Abstract

Emily Dickinson loved gifts. Many of her early poems were gifts themselves, accompanied gifts, or spoke in the voice of gifts. Finding the voice of the gift was an essential dimension of her development as a poet, and many of her early lyrics show her transforming material gifts into more immediately apprehensible imaginative inventions. She came of age as a poet at a time when the nature of gifts was being widely discussed, and when giving a gift of poetry was, for a brief time, a veritable fad. Her gift poems can be seen as a contribution to the public discourses about what was important in a gift, and what kind of human contact a gift offering might promise. In this current of popular gift discourse, from gift books and flower lexicons, to revivalist discussions of the Atonement, Dickinson forged her poetry and her understanding of the communicative power of the poem. Rising to her imaginative invitation promised a more intense intimacy than any commodity gift could convey. Through her poetic gifts, she debated what kind of human relation was defined by the giving of a gift and what kind of circuit of understanding a poetic gift could create.