Dickinson's six-line case that your own life beats any novel
No romance you can buy, Emily Dickinson argues, grips a person like reading his own individual story. Then she flips the usual idea of fiction: a tale is fiction precisely when it is small enough to believe. Real life, by implication, is too large and strange to be credible.
The poem is one sentence split into six lines, with a punchline tucked into the last two. The first four set up a comparison between shop-bought romance, the sort of novel sold to readers, and the private act of perusing one's own life. The verdict is that no invented story could enthral a man so completely. Dickinson's word individual matters: the most gripping plot is the one only you can read from the inside.
The closing lines twist the logic of plausibility. Something counts as fiction, she says, when it is small enough to credit, and whatever is that easily believed is not true. It is an early, compact version of the idea that truth is stranger than invention, delivered with a shrug of dashes and an exclamation mark.
Her own inner life has proved hard for later readers to read. She addressed no fewer than eleven poems to Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, her brother's wife, and some scholars argue that censorship helped hide the nature of their bond, which has been interpreted as romantic. That editing history is part of a larger pattern. When the first selection of her work appeared in 1890, its editors, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, altered the poems considerably so they would match the conventions of the day.
It was only in 1955 that Thomas H. Johnson assembled a complete edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, returning the texts closer to her own intentions, and that collection won wide recognition for its originality. Until then, most readers knew a smoothed version of a poet who had deliberately written against smoothness.
Source: No Romance sold unto
