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The several biographers and editors of Emily Dickinson have usually been content to ignore the poet's masculine claims, although these claims bulk large. Again and again, the poet describes herself as a boy—a boy possessed, moreover, by an unappeasable desire to return to the mother, symbolized in such objects as houses and rooms, food, nectar, and the like; but neither this symbolism nor the boy-identity has attracted much critical notice. Theodora Ward's The Capsule of the Mind, with its gingerly excursion into the poet's masculine alter ego, forms a partial but interesting exception. The approach is Jungian, and Mrs. Ward specifically mentions Jung as her authority for the assertion that such mental power as a woman possesses belongs to her masculine side, whereas the feminine element in a man is “soul.” She finds this idea borne out in the more “philosophical” poems (many of them in the form of “definitions” and employing the “phraseology of the text books”) written in the years 1863-1865, after the poet had suffered a tragic love affair and had extracted from the now vanished lover “the masculine element that set her mind free.”1
This masculine power of text book and definition appears to be also the more distinctively lyrical power of the years 1860-1862. Speaking of the poet's double, the boy Tim, in an 1860 poem beginning “We dont cry—Tim and I”(196),2