Though little anthologized, here's my favorite Dickinson, which I've read at more wakes and funerals than I care to contemplate:

The bustle in the house
the morning after death
is solemnest of industries
enacted upon earth.

The sweeping up the heart
and putting love away
we shall not want to use again
until Eternity.

Highlander,

Cunningham wrote for the world,not just for
university types with tin ears (Tim Steele,
his good friend, thinks Cunningham is the best
epigrammatist in English in the twentieth
century. Does Steele have a tin ear?)Cunningham
also admired Dickinson--whose meter
is basically hymn meter (and so quite regular).
Where any poet cannot convince us of his
bona fides with meter, we are justified in
wondering if that person knows what he is doing.

Changing the dashes to normal punctuation would
simply make it easier for her to communicate with
us, and I can't see how that would be a sin.

Cheers!

I sometimes think--those dashes--add--a texture never taught, chart a very deliberate mind approaching highly potent issues and pausing longer than commas, semis, and periods allow.

------------------
Ralph

Punctuation in the 19th century was often left to the publisher -- there was no Chicago manual of Style, nor were there Freshman Comp classes. Had Dickenson been widely published in her lifetime, she, like Wordsworth before her, would likely have expected her punctuation to be changed.

I have more favorite Dickinson poems than I can remember, and I tend to find new ones at each reading. I posted those two poems because they find the author in a particularly philosophical frame of mind. I think her punctuation works well for conveying the hesitations, qualifications, reversals, and paradoxes of a "deliberate mind," to borrow RCL's excellent phrase. At the risk of sounding facetious, I would add that she might even have deliberated over her recipes, so deeply ingrained was her habit of reflection. I find Highlander's comment about outpourings of the heart to be jejeune. Miss D. was a philosopher.

Alan Sullivan

I love that little lyric that Tim copied out.
Here are two other short ones that are among
my favorites.

Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.

No ordinance is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.

Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.

Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference
Enhances nature now.

----and this one.

I shall know why, when time is over,
And I have ceased to wonder why;
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom of the sky.

He will tell me what Peter promised,
And I, for wonder at his woe,
I shall forget the drop of anguish
That scalds me now, that scalds me now.


I agree, it's maddening to read Johnson's
edition with all the dashes. It strains
credulity to think that she wouldn't have
punctuated them for publication. And I think
Joel is right to question her work. It must
be admitted that of the 1,775 poems we have,
many are very bad, and many more simply eccentric
or impenetrable. And technically she is very
limited. But she can be brilliant within those
limits, and she did write 20 or 30 poems as
beautiful as anything in the language, and like
nothing else in any language---enough to establish
her as one of the great poets. And a hundred or
so others that repay reading and contain wonderful
things.
And JV Cunningham was an excellent poet, and---Tim
Steele is right---the best epigrammatist of the century.
Of most centuries, for that matter. He also wrote
three essays about Dickinson that to my mind are the
best criticism of her poetry (though never cited in the
endless flow of books from the academic Dickinson
industry).

Highlander-- that's a little unfair. I'd rather read any of those guys than E.D. I'd rather read Cunningham than E.D.

I had no sympathy at all with E.D. until one day a small poem I was fiddling with ended up being rather like one of her's. Complete with the slant rhymes, the ballad stanza and the faint, slightly off, octosyllabic/tetrameter...and the abstract and self-preoccupied topic. Add the arbitrary caps and dashes, I could have passed as a new discovery.
She's an easy poet to imitate-- every reading has some adolescent girl going through her E.D. phase. Because said girl is basically healthy she'll move on... E.D. stayed in her phase for a lifetime, and across 1300 plus pieces.

I heard a guy at an AA meeting say that when he was drinking, he thought he was the only human being in the world...everyone else was an ash-tray. E.D. suffers this kind of solipsism-- there's HERSELF, God, external objects (not really nature), and her Demon-Lover...and the later three are just unconvincing reference points for her self-examination.

But there was something kind of inevitable about E.D. A contemporary historian, John Lukacs, said Marxism was inevitable. If Marx had say died of cholera at age 18, someone else would have slapped together a similar system-- and it would have played a similar role in recent times. There HAD to be a poet like E.D. Thank God she mined her little corner of the poetry world so thoroughly, she left little else for anyone to be tempted to do.

Shakespeare wasn't original because he was the first...Shakespeare remains original.

[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited February 15, 2001).]

MacArthur, the last line of your post really struck a chord with me. How many mediocre poets are we stuck with simply because they pioneered a new style? (That others surpassed them in the execution of the style doesn't seem to matter.) Stephen Crane, Eliot, Williams, and others I'm forgetting (some would put Whitman in that cateogory, though I'm up in the air about that). And if I went back into history, I could find just as many lousy traditional poets who keep getting anthologized because they were the breakthrough poet of some style that is now old hat.

Yeah...originality, as we understand it, is a uniquely Modernist concern. You can't really detect it as a critical category prior to the 1920's. Before that, no poet was ever criticised for adopting a model, and certainly not for surpassing a model, but only for failing a model. Barring out-right plagirism, works of poetry were simply judged as being successful, or not.

Like most American poets, I am provoked to a confession. I don't like Dickinson. I don't like Whitman. I don't like Hart Crane. I'm not even (horrors!) enthused about E.A. Robinson. You really have to get to Frost, Millay and Parker before I get excited about American poetry. I consider myself very parochially American thematically, but for style give me Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Swift, Byron, Auden and Larkin. OK, so shoot me now.
Specifically with regard to Dickinson, I see occasional charm in the well-turned off-kilter line or even stanza, but
I see very few of these poems standing on their own as interesting works of art despite their brevity. Being brief, cryptic and mysterious about autobiography has created a largely empty vessel in which contemporary critics see their own reflections, which only augurs for six more weeks of winter.

Just one person's opinion,
Mike