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
PETRŐCZI ÉVA: HOLT KÖLTŐK TÁRSASÁGÁBAN above described family Webster-volume, not concretely mentioned, but in a highly confessional context: “You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats and Mr and Mrs Browning. For prose, Mr Ruskin, Sir Th. Browne and the Revelations. I went to school; bit in your manner of the phrase I had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after, my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion.”315 Charles R. Anderson, the until now perhaps most understanding monographer of E. D. brilliantly summarizes this episode and finds out Higgin- son’s only possible reaction, namely, that he became evidently sorry for this poor girl, whose dictionary-mania was framed by the loss of two highly honoured and beloved persons. But, unfortunately, Higginson was not sensible and wise enough to feel something else as well: a sort of benevolent envy for this inexperienced girl of Amherst who could find the most precious companion possible: a fountain, a treasury of her art: “For several years, wrote Emily Dickinson, of the period just prior to her first great outburst of poetic creation, »my Lexicon was my only companion«. This ambiguous reply to Higginson’s query about her friends led him to emphasize the wrong half of her meaning. He could only be touched by the pathos of her lonely life. The possibility would not have occurred to him that for the poet, as distinguished from the person, a dictionary could be far more valuable than society. Referring to some crisis, either a loss through death or the denial of love’s feast, she could describe the verbal substitute as a dry wine: »Easing my famine/ At my Lexicon«. But as a poet she knew that words were the only medium of her art, like colours to a painter and notes to the composer. They are the moulds which give form to the thoughts and things of experience. Indeed, experience is without meaning until it finds identity in words. A number of her poems are explicitly concerned with the power and the problems of language.”316 Though Emily Dickinson is primarily the poetess of the Anglo-Saxon world and the majority of analytical works on her were produced by Anglo-Saxon literary historians, two of the best essays on him was written by the world-famous Belgian poet-translator, Robert Goffin. In 1964, not he 315 Dickinson, Emily 1931,273. 316 Anderson, Charles R. 1963,30. 146
