Introducing Emily Dickinson, part 1 [by David Lehman]

Emily Dickinson is one of the chief glories of American poetry because, in her poems, she weds originality of vision with an idiosyncratic style raised to a rhetorical ideal. Her characteristic utterance is the brief lyric, often in quatrains, evincing the power of compression, the resolve to “tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” a staccato rhythm, elliptical leaps, and a unique system of punctuation, with the humble dash working to juxtapose, or separate, parts of thought. The twentieth-century editors who regularized her punctuation, removing dashes, and lower-casing her capital letters, did her a great disservice. Today the power of her dash is acknowledged as an element of style in any university course in which her work is taught.

Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, nearly all of which were unread by anyone in her lifetime. She kept the poems tied up in a drawer. She averaged one a day in her most fruitful period, which coincided with the Civil War. Though she very seldom addressed the conflict, it didn’t go entirely unnoticed. “It feels a shame to be Alive -- / When Men so brave—are dead,” she wrote in 1863. But this is an exception. The external world did not much impinge on her. “Escape is such a thankful word,” she wrote, as if a concentration on ultimate things, the truths of the soul, required her to ignore temporal actualities.[1] Fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime. The one time she sent out her work, The Atlantic rejected it. She resisted the urge to repeat the effort not only because “Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man,” but also because editors were bound to bungle things, and did. When, without her consent, a poem of hers was printed in The Springfield Republican, it vexed her that the editor inserted a conventional comma that she had deliberately omitted.[2]

The “belle of Amherst,” also known as the “mystic of New England,” gradually absented herself from society after a year attending the seminary that would become Mount Holyoke College. Her reclusive solitude is the fact at the base of legend and myth. Choosing to remain housebound, refusing visitors, she dressed in virginal white. In an introduction to a selection of her poems, John Malcolm Brinnin pictured a nun costumed as a perpetual bride in her father’s Amherst house: “When Emily Dickinson became the nun in the cloisters of her father’s house, enacting in her poems the bittersweet resignation of thwarted love and accepting marriage to nothing but the universe, she had unconsciously made a place for herself among the tragic heroines of drama and fiction.”[3] With a poet as secretive and private as Dickinson, the conjecture can quickly go from cloister to prison or dungeon. Summarizing Rebecca Patterson’s speculative biography The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (1951), the poet Anthony Hecht makes shrewd use of an often misused adverb: in Dickinson’s life, Patterson “diligently discovers parental inadequacy, repressed homosexuality, and frustrated love.”[4]

Ever the provocateur, Camille Paglia contends that Dickinson’s poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated sadomasochist. Dickinson is nothing less than “Amherst's Madame de Sade.” In Sexual Personae (1990), Paglia likens the poet to “the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”[5] Was Dickinson an inmate in a prison, a nunnery, or a Victorian house with an attic for an eccentric and slightly deranged maiden aunt? Maybe none of these things. What she was, by any standard, was an eccentric, a visionary, and a great American poet

Dickinson wrote poems that pose soluble riddles. The “it” in “I like to see it lap the Miles” is a train. She has poems that offer aphorisms (“Much madness is divinest Sense”) or metaphors that widen into allegories (“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”). There are also capricious poems (“Bee! I’m expecting you!”) and tantalizing fragments.  “A Letter is a joy of Earth — / It is denied the Gods — ” is the whole of #1639.  Best of all are the poems that are finally inscrutable but infinitely suggestive, including otherworldly dramas of life beyond the grave: “I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died”; “I died for beauty”; “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”; “It was not Death, for I stood up”; “Death is the supple suitor.” She writes so often and so knowingly about death that the reader may wonder whether she has discovered the country “from whose bourn / No traveler returns” and has written her poems from the other side.

The poems have numbers, not titles, and the ones to which I keep returning have hearts of irreducible mystery. She can follow an opening line in a way that no one would have anticipated (see #640) or end a poem with the last word you’d expect (#510). Before an audience or a class, recite the first line of the former (“I cannot live with You”), ask people to nominate second lines, then astonish them with what Dickinson does, which I shan’t reveal here for fear of spoiling the fun.

 Anthony Hecht sees the riddling impulse as central to our understanding of her poetry, and I agree, but while there are riddling poems that are easy enough to solve, she specialized in enigmas and puzzles that tease the mind but keep their meaning hidden. This is less a strategy or a reflection of her disposition than it is an esthetic decision that follows from her respect for complexity and her distrust of easy answers. “The Riddle that we guess / We speedily despise,” Dickinson wrote.  Mystery is the link between art and religion, according to Stephane Mallarmé, and these sentences of his apply to Dickinson’s writing: “Every sacred thing that wishes to remain sacred envelops itself in mystery. Religions take refuge in arcana that are revealed only to the predestinate: art has its arcana, too."

Ed. note: For part two of this essay, please click here.

[1] “Escape -- it is the Basket / In which the Heart is caught / When down some awful Battlement / The rest of Life is dropt -- ”

[2] The poem: “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” (#986), a riddle poem, the solution to which is a snake. The newspaper inserted the comma that Dickinson specified she did not want between lines three and four (“You may have met Him – did you not / His notice sudden is -- ”).

[3] “From the introduction to Emily Dickinson in the Laurel Poetry Series (1960).

[4] Anthony Hecht, Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (Atheneum, 1986), p. 85 Hecht’s essay is entitled “The Riddles of Emily Dickinson,” aiming his attention on her poems rather than her person.

[5] See the fascinating final chapter of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990).

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

Comments

[Terence Winch]

Excellent piece. And let's not forget that most of her poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

[Dave Read]

Let us consult Ms. Dickinson's neighbor Mr. MacLeish, who says this, with not only the same elan as Emily, but with her dash, too:
"...
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be."

[Tony Paris]

Hi Dave. That must be MacLeish's best poem. But to what does "this" refer in "who says this"? Aren't you reducing Dickinson to one meaning, when the pleasures of poetry go far beyond meaning? MacLeish's "dash" in quite a different sense from the grammatical term, yes?

[Dave Read]

Hi Tony,
My point in excerpting the verse, is to align with what I take to be his judgment that poetry is beyond scholarship. My judgment is that every poem is individual to the one reading it, and that a poem cannot be reduced to meet anyone else's thesis. I mean, it can be, and is done - way too much. The pleasure of a poem goes beyond meaning all the way the poem goes - if that's not a tautology? Once a term is added to the book of forms and grammar, it becomes as a leaf in a poem about October in New England.

[Tony Paris]

"Once a term is added to the book of forms and grammar, it becomes as a leaf in a poem about October in New England." That's a great sentence.

[Dave Read]

That's a great compliment, Tony. I'm always alert to opportunities to imagine anytime but the present - it's a defense mechanism, always keep one foot on firm imaginary ground!

[Dave Read]

I see you have excised the original concluding sentence, David. I already feel like a party crasher here, so, if you could recommend another website open to the discussion of poetry, please do. Thank you.

[David Lehman]

Dave Read: Thanks for commenting. Not sure I remember what my original concluding sentence was. Far from a party crasher, you are most welcome here. -- DL

[Dave Read]

“Today the power of her dash is acknowledged as an element of style in any university course in which her work is taught.” The deletion of it vitiated my comment: "... with not only the same elan as Emily, but with her dash, too." I was showing off, then you pulled the rug...! It's your poetry party, your rug...

Speaking of Ms. Dickinson, I've just read my old teacher's entry about repurposing material from her letters in your "Ecstatic Occasions Expedient Forms." His rationale reminds me of the "sampling" kerfuffle at the birth of hip-hop.

Thank you, David, for making room for a cranky anti-academician.

[David Lehman]

“Today the power of her dash is acknowledged as an element of style in any university course in which her work is taught." Isn't that in the piece? It should be. I am pretty sure the sentence was lifted from the head note I had written for Dickinson in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

[Dave Read]

Lifted by whom, David?
And what do they know at Oxford about poetry in America - or does Oxford refer to the locale of Ole Miss?

[David Lehman]

Dave Read: That's my sentence; I wrote the head notes for the Oxford Book (which I edited), and I listed it for my piece on Dickinson -- or thought I did. When I studied in England, admittedly many years ago, the "American" writers most esteemed were Henry James, TS Eliot, early Auden, and Larkin.

[Dave Read]

I know where/how to discover stuff about the British, David. However, I'm here because I'm passionate about the woeful state of poetry in the USA. Before going to study in England, had you read Spring and All, the book?

[Dave Read]

We're both first wave baby boomers, David; was the Academy your refuge from the draft? If you opposed the Vietnam war, how did you not see the Academy as being more responsible for it that any other institution? Is it OK to pretend truth is a social construct, rather than an absolute and essential component of reason?

[David Lehman]

Dave Read: I wrote a book -- much acclaimed, but it also earned me lifetime enemies from entrenched academics -- excoriating the idea that "truth is a social construct" or a "narrative." The book is "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man," published in 1991, with a new afterword in the 1992 paperback. Have you read it? It gives me very little pleasure to see how prescient that book was.

[Dave Read]

I await the truth, David, of how the sentence disappeared from the above essay, after I based my comment on it?

At any rate, I would turn to the philosophers for a disquisition on truth. It's absence from contemporary poetry is why I'm so outraged.

Why did you dodge my question about Vietnam? It is the crucible of our generation. It looks like you made a separate peace that allowed you to take cover in the Academy? If so, what have you done to liberate the Academy from its dependence on the Pentagon?

What do you say to the mother of the poor boy who was drafted instead of you? Was he killed? Did he kill?

[David Lehman]

Dave Read: The final sentence of my first paragraph is "Today the power of her dash is acknowledged as an element of style in any university course in which her work is taught." It has always been there.
Much as I like vigorous give-and-take in comments, you are behaving a bit like a bully. I am
under no obligation to answer questions, especially not those hurled at me in so hectoring a manner. For the record, the best thing I did in my professional career was to quit academe and set myself up as a free-lance writer. I was 32, with a PhD in hand and six years of fulltime teaching, and I wanted out.
If you are sincerely interested, may I recommend that you take a look at my "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir."

[Dave Read]

I am sorry, David, I made a mistake, please accept my unconditional apology.

[Dave Read]

Just ordered "Sings of the Times...," David - thanks in advance for writing it. I'll cop to being a boor from time to time, but I'm not a bully. Thanks again for letting me sound off here.

[Dave Read]

In case you're wondering, Dr. Lehman, here is an example of a poet tending to the poetry canon; scholars disqualify themselves from the task when they remain in class after the bell, instead of go out to play as poets do: https://readspoems.com/frosted-gloss/

[Warren King]

The effect -- of the dash --
stops the runner -- in his track
as if the wish -- for a wash
would take you back to the wreck

of the morrow -- as even you know
who knows neither nonsense nor sorrow.