Michael, like you, I thought "A Quiet Passion" seemed too one-sidedly gloomy. It left out the woman who spent so many pleasant hours in her garden, who wrote "Inebriate of air am I / And debauchee of dew" and admiringly described a hummingbird as "A route of evanescence / With a revolving wheel." Dickinson wrote hundreds of happy poems, but I'm afraid Clive James is on to something: we don't easily forgive artists for having an unrelievedly cheery view of the world. If we had only Dickinson's happy poems, we might--wrongly--think of her as a rather minor poet (and though most of her happy poems are astonishing, some are a bit fey). On the other hand, if we had only her poems of misery and grief, we might think of her as a great but limited poet and wish for greater range. Or as James puts it, "Dante's Inferno might be hard to take if we didn't know that he would later write the Paradiso, but the Paradiso would be unbearable without the Inferno."
Dickinson's happy poems can have an extraordinary sense of expansiveness, like this tiny personal Paradiso that might have been sent to a correspondent with a flower:
It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
One line of ironic modesty sets up seven lines of expansion. I love that teasing "be sure you count," as the rest of the poem makes clear that the "sum" could never be told.
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