From Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Hummingbirds, pp. 249-50

... the considerable job of sorting through Dickinson's manuscripts, in preparation for the landmark edition of her poems published in 1955, went to Jay Leyda. It was Leyda, a scholar and artist of remarkable range, who painstakingly unpacked the contents of Dickinson's desk, discovering along the way her own hoarding practices and constructed manuscripts. Leyda found a poem written on the back of a faded yellow Chocolat Meunier candy wrapper. He found a manuscript about a bird formed of two parts of an envelope pinned together to resemble a bird. He found a poem about a house written beneath the rooflike arc of another envelope. And, of course, he found the Mauprat collage... Leyda, by temperament, training, and travel, was attuned to the visual and tactile allure of these manuscripts... he knew who among American artists would be most interested in Dickinson's own radical experiments... Leyda recognized an affinity between Emily Dickinson and Joseph Cornell - the "small, rickety infinitudes" of her poems and his boxes. It was an affinity that Cornell himself had already begun to sense when he and Leyda began their exchange regarding Dickinson's radical manuscripts.

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I shouldn't have been surprised - but was - to read that E.D. created time & genre-busting art objects: hybrid letter-poem-collages. Beyond "merely" writing incorporeal poems, beyond penning intimate letters, beyond arranging dried flowers on album herbarium pages, beyond tucking a poem or posy within the fold of a letter - in one iteration she precisely affixed snippets of text clipped from a Harper's beneath an uncanceled postage stamp on the center of a page, and wrote a poem (with variants) around the miniscule collage. I had no idea. I wish I could find an image of the "Mauprat collage" on line to show you - it's very cool. Here's an image of the 1869 three-cent stamp she used.

I have oriented the stamp here as Dickinson did on her manuscript page. Benfey writes,

Dickinson placed the stamp so that the train is traveling upward like a rocket, the smoke cascading down. One has to remember how unfamiliar trains were in the 1870s, and how fast, marking time with their "horrid-hooting stanza," as Dickinson wrote. The blue stamp in the middle of the page resembles a window, and through her own bedroom window Dickinson could actually see the locomotive - named for her father - arriving in Amherst...

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[Ed.: Actually, that confuses me a bit. "The" locomotive depicted on the stamp was named after her father? Or was "a" locomotive (in service to Amherst) named for him?]

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The typescript clipped from Harper's - the upper scrap, slanting upward to the left, reads George Sand, the one below it, slanting down (but at less radical an angle - though perhaps time has taken a toll on precise degrees) is of the title of her novel that had recently been published in Boston (though it's unlikely that E.D. had yet read it) - Mauprat. As Benfey writes, "The words 'of bandits a' are legible beneath Mauprat, part of a sentence [in Harper's] describing the plot of the novel: "Mauprat is brought up among a company of bandits and robbers, relics of the feudal past."

And I'm saying nothing of the poem E.D. penned around it, including a list of alternate words, possibilities, co-existent variants. One of the lines reads, We were all inmates of one place... I consult my Complete Poems of E.D. It's #1167. I'll copy it below, along with the variants (in italics) from her handwritten manuscript...

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Benfey writes,

George Sand was herself a famous writer of letters, one voice in perhaps the best-known exchange of love letters in nineteenth-century Europe. Her correspondence with the poet Alfred de Musset entranced readers, and demonstrated for a whole generation how a love affair could become a work of art. It was a fantasy that Emily Dickinson herself had indulged in throughout her mature life. Her "[M]aster letters" seem, in retrospect, experiments in enacting a grand passion on the page, and so do her late letters to Judge Otis Lord, with her careful insistence that the real life of the affair was verbal, not "corporeal."

That last line - with Miss Dickinson ensconced, on this point, in her century, and I in mine, it's here where she & I ("New Woman" 2.0 and then some) part company - I most assuredly like my cake and eat it too, in my corporeal quest to resolve not the hopelessly structurally divided brain (& who'd want to - source of all kinds of creative tension!) but the unrelated, false, unnatural and unnecessary mind/body split...

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1167

Alone and in a Circumstance
Reluctant to be told
A spider on my reticence
Assiduously crawled

deliberately
determinately
impertinently

And so much more at Home than I
Immediately grew
I felt myself a visitor
And hurriedly withdrew

Revisiting my late abode
With articles of claim
I found it quietly assumed
As a Gymnasium
Where Tax asleep and Title off
The inmates of the Air
Perpetual presumption took
As each were special Heir -
If any strike me on the street
I can return the Blow -
If any take my property
According to the Law
The Statute is my Learned friend
But what redress can be
For an offense nor here nor there
So not in Equity -
That Larceny of time and mind
The marrow of the Day
By spider, or forbid it Lord
That I should specify.