Emily Dickinson on Poetry #

A master of epigram, Dickinson, renown for her odd, enigmatic, elliptical poems helped to initiate modern poetry.

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

Faults were found in the unconventional rhyme.

Favorable critics often said, how beautiful this poem describes such and such! but never looked further.

Dickinson’s metres reflect those of English hymns, with their cadences of meaning.

Critics put off by her form were puzzled by the power of her ‘feeling’ and how it crept into and “take an abiding hold of the mind,” but examine no deeper her form to understand what seems to be an incongruity, saying only that:

“it is a sad pity when the substance of true poetry is put at a disadvantage by the writer’s recklessness in respect to form […] It is hard to understand how such a mind as Miss Dickinson’s must have been in its native powers can have exhibited the intellectual – we had almost added moral – defects which the construction of her poems displays.”

Tell all the truth but tell it slant–

Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind–

James Antoniou - Spectrum Oct 26, 2019 claims: Emily is responsible for some of the fiercest, most cognitively-demanding and most deeply-felt poems ever written. Her eccentricity is increasingly being recognised as strategic rather than whimsical: by adopting an “eccentric” (literally, non-central) approach to poetry, she was able to explore concerns far beyond the parameters of her society. She could, crucially, circumvent the pieties and restrictions that published women poets at the time were expected to accept.

Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime. Most of the poems we have were written in just six years, between 1858 and 1864. She bound them into small volumes she called fascicles, and forty of these were found in her room at her death.

After Emily Dickinson died, her sister, Lavinia, contacted two friends of Emily’s when she discovered the forty fascicles in Emily’s rooms: Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. First Todd began to work on the editing; then Higginson joined her, persuaded by Lavinia. Together, they reworked the poems for publication. Over some years, they published three volumes of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

The extensive editing changes they made “regularized” Emily’s odd spellings, word usage, and especially punctuation. Emily Dickinson was, for instance, very fond of dashes. Yet the Todd/Higginson volumes have included few of them. Todd was sole editor of the third volume of poems, but kept to the editing principles they’d worked out together.

It remained until the 1950s, when Thomas Johnson “un-edited” Dickinson’s poetry.

Dickinson explores mental deterioration and psychological anxieties.

Grief

“I measure every grief I meet
With narrow, probing eyes,
I wonder if It weighs like Mine
Or has an easier size.

After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes:

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

Expression of intense pain:

Pain — has an Element of Blank —
It cannot recollect
When it begun — or if there were
A time when it was not —
It has no Future — but itself —
Its Infinite realms contain
Its Past — enlightened to perceive
New Periods — of Pain.*

One Need Not be a Chamber — to be Haunted

One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors surpassing
Material Place—

Far safer, of a Midnight—meeting External Ghost—
Than an Interior—confronting—
That cooler—Host—

Far safer, through an Abbey—gallop—
The Stones a’chase—
Than moonless—One’s A’self encounter—
In lonesome place—

Ourself—behind Ourself—Concealed—
Should startle—most—
Assassin—hid in Our Apartment—
Be Horror’s least—

The Prudent—carries a Revolver—
He bolts the Door,
O’erlooking a Superior Spectre
More near—

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll …

She became reclusive after she turned 30, by trying to exclude herself from society, becoming quite eccentric.

I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs— The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading—too—

Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace—
Unto supremest name—
Called to my Full—The Crescent dropped—
Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.

My second Rank—too small the first—
Crowned—Crowing—on my Father’s breast—
A half unconscious Queen—
But this time—Adequate—Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown—

John Donne a few centuries before her, used unusual and disjunctive language in order to convey disparate themes.

Withdrawn Into Writing

Emily Dickinson returned home to Amherst. She traveled a few times after that – once, notably, to Washington, DC, with her father during a term he served in the U.S. Congress. But gradually, she withdrew into her writing and her home, and became reclusive. She began to wear dresses exclusively in white. In her later years, she did not leave her home’s property, living in her home and garden.

Pain — has an Element of Blank — It cannot recollect When it begun — or if there were A time when it was not — It has no Future — but itself — Its Infinite realms contain Its Past — enlightened to perceive New Periods — of Pain.

These lapidary offerings are often her most powerful, capturing trauma and grief in unique and imaginative ways. The reader is enveloped by a great truth which then flits away, and our longing for more — for the poet — grows. For anyone who has ever lost or longed for something beautiful, the effect can be staggering.

In 1955, Thomas Johnson “un-edited” Dickinson’s poetry, for the general public to experience her poems more as she’d written them, and as her correspondents had received them.

Today, scholars still discuss and argue over the paradoxes and ambiguities of Dickinson’s life and work.

Emily is responsible for some of the fiercest, most cognitively-demanding and most deeply-felt poems ever written. Her eccentricity is increasingly being recognised as strategic rather than whimsical: by adopting an “eccentric” (literally, non-central) approach to poetry, she was able to explore concerns far beyond the parameters of her society. She could, crucially, circumvent the pieties and restrictions that published women poets at the time were expected to accept.

That inclination to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant –”, as she put it, resulted in some of the most deeply strange poems in the English language:

While many of her lyrics are exultant or playful, others express intense pain:

Nevertheless, sinking into individual Dickinson poems can be about as rich and rewarding as literary explication gets, and her poem beginning “This World is not Conclusion. / A Species stands beyond –” is a singular example. An initial gloss of that opening line might read “There is an afterlife”; it appears to be an expression of faith. But as the poem progresses, the speaker’s piety teeters, ending with the lines “Narcotics cannot still the Tooth [meaning doubt] / That nibbles at the soul –”.

Suddenly the first line has transformed before the reader’s eyes. Those five simple words — “This World is not Conclusion” — now appear to mean that our world offers no conclusions about the spiritual plane; what started out as a religious line has become deeply agnostic.

In this sense her poems can seem like riddles, forever glimmering with different meanings, always one step ahead of the reader in the journey of “circumference”.

The poems of a woman who had one of the subtlest and most original minds in literature, who described the sky as “Molten blue” and shadows during depression as “holding their breath”, and who casts a titanic shadow over 20th and 21st-century poetry.

So the pathos has persisted even though Dickinson’s words reveal a woman who was fun: a lover who joked; a mystic who mocked heaven. This woman was not like us: to know her is to encounter aspects of a nature more developed than our own. Her ­poems turn on the communicative power of the unstated between two people attuned to it. - James Antoniou - Spectrum Oct 26, 2019