Our letter to the world..

Emily Dickinson writes in poem ‘441’:

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me

I interpret a ‘letter to the world’ as a means of revealing to everyone your stripped back opinions, morals, regrets and struggles within your life. Freud believed all texts are autobiographical, that everything we write is a result of the anxieties and psychological tensions we have suffered in our life. If this is the case, and I personally believe it is, then every writer’s work is their letter to the world, including Dickinson and Cheever. Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffellholz claim that Dickinson’s poetry was ‘an attempt to communicate with the world, either at large, or a specific audience whom she courted, that had abandoned her’ (A Companion to Emily Dickinson, 2008). I would argue that Dickinson’s work was, even if she didn’t intend it to be, her letter to a world, that she spent her entire life distancing herself from. In my opinion both Dickinson and Cheever’s work portrays many of their life struggles; for example, many of Cheever’s characters are projections of his own flawed character, such as Neddy in ‘The Swimmer’, who’s an alcoholic, just as Cheever was known to be. As writers, we may not necessarily be aware of it, but our unconscious mind is constantly being fed into our writing. I have, in the past, looked back at short stories and poetry I’ve written and been surprised at how alike the voice of a character is to mine, although that was never my intension. Therefore I would argue that a writer’s work is their ‘letter to the word’, even if they never intended it to be.