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of community and nation, never seeing anyone, never wearing any color but white, never doing any housework beyond baking batches of cookies for secret delivery to favorite children, and meditating majestically among her flowers.”
    Leyda was already anticipating The Belle of Amherst, years before it was produced. But he believed that Dickinson was no more isolated from the world than most other artists, that “she wrote more in time, that she was much more involved in the conflicts and tensions of her nation and community, than we have thought.” Yet she remained a riddler, like Leyda himself. Perhaps that’s why he was able to penetrate her personality—crawl right under her skin—before any other critic. It’s difficult to uncover where Leyda was born, or who raised him. Leyda’s “omitted center” is as elusive as Dickinson’s. He still believed that hers was recoverable.
    I’m not so sure. Leyda understood the limits of his“rag-picking method . . . most of our biggest questions about her must remain unanswered.” But he still persisted, like some magnificent collagist, still hoped to find the missing keys.
    Suppose the keys weren’t missing at all, but were part of some private, internal structure. And suppose her definition of poetry was different from ours, and she was a very different kind of poet, more like an explorer and discoverer, who meant to subjugate her Lexicon, rather than juggle words. She would share some of her discoveries in her letter-poems, sing a verse or two to a favorite cousin, but she shared her hand-sewn fascicles with no one; these were very private catalogues, complete in themselves, meant for her own consumption; and the variants to a particular word that she wrote in the margins were like magical flowers, not meant to cancel one another, but to create a cluster, or bouquet. That “omitted center” was less a mask than the sign of her modernity. For those critics who swear she was feminizing a male-dominated culture of language constructions, I would say that there’s something strange about the femininity of her attack. Camille Paglia best describes the force and“riddling ellipsis” of Dickinson’s style. “Protestant hymn-measure is warped and deformed by a stupefying energy. Words are rammed into lines with such force that syntax shatters and collapses into itself.” It’s that same Yellow Eye of the blonde Assassin. “The brutality of this belle of Amherst would stop a truck.”
    But more than a century after Higginson first introduced Emily Dickinson to her public, we’re still having a hard time unraveling most of her riddles. We’ve examined her in every sort of context, have peered into her culture and seen how women behaved with other women, and how nineteenth-century courtship rites distanced them from the language of their male suitors. We’ve seen Dickinson’s own sexual ambiguity. Sam Bowles seemed to have a crush on Sue’s former schoolmate Kate Scott, but so did Emily Dickinson, who knita pair of garters for the ravishing young widow, and had the garters sent over to the Evergreens (while Kate was in residence), with the following lines:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  When Katie walks, this simple pair accompany her side
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  When Katie runs unwearied they travel on the road,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  When Katie kneels, their loving hands still clasp her pious knee—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Ah! Katie! Smile at Fortune, with two so knit to thee!
    It’s hard to imagine that Dickinson was unconscious of how erotic these lines were—it’s almost as if she were caressing Kate with her own “loving hands,” but whether she was conscious or not, the garters still leap out at us like a pair of seductive spiders.
    Yet all her puzzles didn’t have such keys, no matter what Leyda said. We may have