Beyond the Master Letters: A Computerized Word Content Analysis of Emily Dickinson Correspondence with Samuel Bowles and Susan Gilbert

Abstract

Much of the personal life of one of America's greatest poets, Emily Dick inson, remains shrouded in mystery. She was relatively unknown during her lifetime, spending most of her adult years voluntarily confined to her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Following her death, almost 1,800 poems, as well as drafts of correspondence she had maintained with friends and relatives, were discovered in her room. They are the principal source materials for her biographers. Among these letters were three drafts addressed between 1858 and 1863 to an unknown recipient, with the salutation Dear Master. Dickinson biographers have generally agreed that these so-called Master Letters were part of a larger correspondence describing different stages of an intense emo tional experience: the story of a deeply frustrating love relationship, full of passion and anguish over separation and lack of response from the other person.1 The importance of these letters, scholars agree, lies in their unique emotional style, signaling the beginning of Dickinson's most creative peri od as a poet, perhaps even first igniting her poetic imagination and enor mous creative powers. Indeed, biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes that when Dickinson tries to give form to her feelings in the three Master Let ters, the language of poetry floods into the prose and overtakes ordinary epistolary style (406—412). Because of this connection with the emergence of her creativity, the identity of Master has been a matter of much speculation and sharp dis agreement among Dickinson scholars. Several important figures in her life