Petrőczi Éva: Holt költők társaságában. A Puritanizmuskutató Intézet és a Medgyesi Pál Puritán Kiskönyvtár emlékére - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 9. (Sárospatak, 2014)

Emily Dickinson, the Poetess-Queen of the Webster Dictionary To Tamás Magay, the eternal lexicographer-theologian

due to one of her teachers, Mrs Almira H. Lincoln, authoress of a “botani- co-grammatical” book, entitled Symbolical Language of Flowers. The fact that from among the 400 specimens she labelled sixty-five with the genus and species according to the Linnean system of classification proves that besides her artistic merits she had very evident scholarly ones as well.313 That’s how the unusual nature of her Herbarium brings as closer to her mostly beloved Webster dictionary, the cultural icon of New England. Let me quote the words of Joshua Kendall’s article: “A century earlier, another Bay State Bard - Emily Dickinson - had also fallen for a lexicographer. In 1844, when the poet was a teenager, her father, Edward Dickinson, bought a copy of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language published by J. S. and C. Adams of Amherst. Webster, who had lived in Amherst two decades earlier, was well known by the Dickinson family. His granddaughter, Emily Fowler, grew up in Amherst and was attending the Amherst Academy with Emily Dickinson. This was the last edition of the dictionary which the great lexicographer worked on before his death in 1843. This two-volume book would be, as Emily Dickinson later wrote to her brother Austin, her »sole companion« one which she repeatedly mined as she found her artistic voice. The great poet, her niece, Martha Bianchi Dickinson once declared, read this dictionary as »a priest his breviary« or a book of daily devotions. I recently examined the Dickinson’s family copy of Webster’s 1844 dictionary, which is now held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. And one can see that Emily Dickinson literally inhabited the book. While there are no marginalia, there is evidence of her love. The green dye, which initially covered the outside of all the pages, is no longer visible not he for edge. The likely culprit? The wear and tear caused by Dickinson’s busy thumbs

.”314

Dickinson herself was quite laconic and taciturn when mentioning the Book of Books of her life to her tutor and - though unintentionally - misleading guardian angel in the fields of poetry, Colonel Th. Wentworth Hig- ginson. E. D. wrote her self-introductory letter to him on April 16, 1862. In her second, and more detailed letter dedicated to Higginson appears the

313 Judith Farr’s Victorian Treasure: Emily Dickinsons Herbarium http://www.poets.org/ viewmedia.php/prmMID/21410 (07.07.2012)

314 Joshua Kendall, Poets and their Passion for Lexicographers: Plath and Roger; Dickinson and Webster Psychology Today, Oct. 26,2010, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/adventu- res-in-biography (01.02.2012)

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