Emily Dickinson – stark, spare, lonely and audacious soul – wrote of these twin directions, the implications of literacy, in two fragments, one dated 1882 (fragment 1593), and the other undated (fragment 1696). Here she writes:

… this Bequest of Wings
Was but a Book – what Liberty
A loosened Spirit brings.

Now here the movement outwards, the rush of free flight. Then:

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of Death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself –

Observe the movement within. And the devastating puns: in “polar,” conjuring separation and cold outsider air, and in “admitted,” conjuring a hermetic confessional.

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These twin and yet contrary poles in the word “literacy” are further revealed in the public creation of new languages and new forms. Private minds, those inner sancta, crying out for contact and attachment. Dante’s vulga: the diction of his vast Commedia, the vision of Beatrice in the streets of Florence moving the poet into forging a common language for his lyric, metaphysical architecture. Wordsworth’s common speech becomes an incendiary manifesto for Romanticism. The modernists, especially James Joyce, turn their private labyrinthine work into multilingual artifacts – the novel and the poem become culture bearers. The exemplary postmodernist fictions– Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian – turn self-consciousness into epic constructs and meditations on transcendental ironies.