A Lady from America's Troubled Past
To Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Dear Emily,
Posthumously your manuscripts found their way into print. Since then your readership has been growing steadily.
Today you are widely recognized as a great American poet. You can't care less, of course. After all, you are no longer around.
When you were around, you must be contending with a mundane life. But you had never surrendered to mundanity. Instead, mundanity had surrendered to you.
To me, your genius was most explicit in the implicit way you challenged the prosaic mind.
Yes, you might not rhyme perfectly, but your rhymes were perfectly above the din of lonely crowds in your time (and mine).
In your time the Civil War frontlines were nowhere near you. Still you couldn't help feeling that the Civil War was breathing down your neck. War was such a monster.
Putting pen to paper, you told yourself that you hated war. However, you also knew too well that you couldn't live in peace with the slave states---their racism was a human stain that's hard to scrub off even with Lincoln's blood and your tears.
Your noble soul is your poetry. Because of you, many readers may now be finding themselves on the road to Damascus.
Emily, you rock.
Sincerely yours,
renqiulan
