Everyday Canvas

Writers' Privacy Matters and Emily Dickinson

Prompt: Do you think we have the right to peek into personal letters of poets and writers after they are dead, even if they have indicated inside those letters that they don't want others to see them? For example, check this letter by Emily Dickinson.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2014/12/i-miss-my-biggest-heart.html

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I always liked lettersofnote.com because the site gives us a rare insight into writers and through them into human condition. This one letter, on the other hand, made me think, and it made to come up with this prompt to alert writers, be it unknown ones who think what they leave behind won't be important because they didn't become famous. Well, some poets and writers did become famous posthumously, like Emily Dickinson.

Obviously Emily Dickinson did not want others to read her letters. "Don't let them see, will you Susie?" I am quite sure, if she had any inkling of her present-day fame, this poet would not have written that letter or she would have asked her friends to burn such letters; but Emily Dickinson wasn't famous in her lifetime. She was a recluse to start with, and this letter she must have written believing in the strictest confidence of its receiver.

I fault neither Dickinson for writing the letter nor her friend Susan Huntington Gilbert for leaving it behind after her death. As precious as such a letter might have been for her, however, she should have burned it, so others wouldn't be reading it, so many decades after their death, but then, she wasn't a seer of future and she didn't know that.

Some say we should only be concerned about privacy, if we have something to hide, and most of us believe that if a person is a celebrity, he is game to all breaks into his or her privacy. But what if a person became a celebrity after death? Shouldn't we, at least, honor the privacy she valued during her lifetime?

My belief is, if a person has hidden something from the public view during his or her lifetime, it should be well respected after death takes that person. Otherwise, we are not any better than grave robbers.


"I dwell in Possibility"
By Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors -
Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye—**
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—



**The underlined two lines refers to the poet's privacy, as she was hiding behind her poetry.
Symbols in this poem:
Possibility= poetry
House and its parts = the persona of the poet
Her Occupation (and the last two lines) Her creating of poetry