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.