My thanks to Kate Benedict for reminding me that I had intended to post a few poems by the divine Miss D. Perhaps some of our members will wish to post other poems. At one time or another many of us have expressed admiration for Dickinson in one discussion or another. Perhaps there will be less controversy on this thread, but I am curious to see what others make of these two poems.

632

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other wil contain
With ease--and You--beside--

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As sponges--Buckets--do--

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound.

640

I cannot live with You--
It would be Life--
And Life is over there--
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to--
Putting up
Our Life--His Porcelain--
Like a cup--

Discarded of the Housewife--
Quaint--or Broke--
A newer Sevres pleases--
Old Ones crack--

I could not die--with You--
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down--
You--could not--

And I--Could I stand by
and see You--freeze--
Without my Right of Frost--
Death's Privilege?

Nor could I rise--with You--
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus'--
That New Grace

Grow plain--and foreign
On my homesick Eye--
Except that You than He
Shone closer by--

They'd judge Us--How--
For You--served Heaven--You know,
or sought to--
I could not--

Because You saturated Sight
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be--
Though my Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame--

And were you--saved--
And I--condemned to be
Where You were not--
That self--were Hell to Me--

So We must meet apart--
You there--I--here--
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are--and Prayer--
And that White Sustinance--
Despair--

The one is a trial of her wings on simple problems for their applicability. The imagery of her usage seems to me anti-gravitational in the manner of Magritte (his castles in the air), and immediately recalls Dalí's painting of himself as a small boy lifting the sea to find a sleeping dog beneath it. It is Shakespearean, of course, not so much as the other, and there is Emily Dickinson the mother of Frost, writing her superb monologue with its distinctive punctuation (from Carlyle and Coleridge?) not seen I think till Neruda's idiosyncratic dots and dashes. The crux is "sordid excellence", and if the student will make a long study of it, he will find that much difficulty has for him become a matter of interest for the sport it provides, merely.

In the midst of haggling over the sale (he had forgotten to up the penciled price, lately), a used bookseller made the flippant remark to me that "Emily wrote some good stuff".
The question remains who but Sappho (if she) wrote better stuff?



[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 12, 2001).]

Alan, when I have more time in a day or two, I will post my favorite Dickinson poems.

Regarding the first poem posted above, I wonder how E.D. failed to correct the repetition of "--side" in the first stanza. She frequently moved off-rhyme quite far, but I believe such repetitions as this are rare. This poem must have been dashed off, put into the bundle, and never studied again.

But I despair of discovering anything more about the methods and motives of Miss Dickinson. When young I once waited alone in her bedroom almost a whole afternoon willing her to appear, however ectoplasmically, and to answer a few questions; but she did not appear, much less speak. So I think she must be dumbly dead, like almost everyone else said to have died, except Napoleon, General Lee and my grandmother.

How fortunate for us that E.D. was not more directly involved in the affair of Mabel and Prof. Loomis with her beloved brother Austin (with whom a letter of hers suggests she slept, probably because there were so few beds in the house, for an undisclosed period of time). Had she been so involved, some of her passion and pent energy might then have been released in ecstatic sin, and we would not have quite so much of her wonderful poetry.

G.



[This message has been edited by Golias (edited February 13, 2001).]

CM, where did you get the idea that Emily D.
is Frost's mother? You can hear her perhaps
in an early poem like "Stars" but Frost is
not much influenced by her, if at all. Her
poems were first published in 1890, when Frost
was well into his teens, and though he loved
her work, that's not where he suckled. There
is much more Longfellow and Emerson in him
than Dickinson, and far more Milton, Horace,
Virgil, etc.
Anyway, here's a Dickinson poem I particularly
admire, which isn't one of the best known:

Of all the souls that stand create
I have elected one.
When sense from spirit files away,
And subterfuge is done;

When that which is and that which was
Apart, intrinsic, stand,
And this brief tragedy of flesh
Is shifted like a sand;

When figures show their royal front
And mists are carved away,---
Behold the atom I preferred
To all the lists of clay!

What a fine choice, Bob

Though I've read the complete poems of ED through, and various smaller collections many times, this one never leapt up at me before. Thanks for pointing it out in this way.

G

Phew! I love both of those posted by Alan, and that by Robert. More later. There's an interesting section on Atlantic's poetry page that has a commentary and several poets reading "I cannot live with you."

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

I hate to interrupt the Dickinson lovefest...

Robert, the poem of ED's that you posted is one of her best. Thanks for posting it. I doubt I've read it elsewhere. I think we all have things to learn about compression, use of pov and imagery from her.

No one, however, has mentioned Dickinson's shortcomings. I, for one, can't read more than a few of her poems at a time. The ballad meter she used for nearly everything distracts and numbs very quickly. And the dashes -- never mind the way inexperienced readers/writers learn dash abuse from her work -- seem random at times. Some will probably tell me to loosen up, but after a few of her poems, how I long for the variety and precision of commas, semicolons, periods, and even (I shudder to even name that other "poetic" cliche punctuation) ellipses.

ED has a great natural lyrical gift. But studying a great poet's flaws are just as instructive as a study of strengths. Though I don't discount that my academic training has perhaps made me too much a critic.

Joel: thought you (and others) might enjoy
a comment I once received from J. V. Cunningham
at Brandeis, oh so many years ago: namely,
that the dashes probably didn't mean diddly-squat
(Cunningham was more elegant) to Dickinson because
when one investigates her recipe box, etc., there
they are--a mere, nervous tic of no importance.

Except, of course, to drive Joel and me to
distraction. The punctuation is MADDENING.

Who was it--Higginson?--who "regularized" her
meter and punctuation and so on? This is commonly
looked on by ED fans as some sort of great sacrilege.
I think he did exactly what a good editor SHOULD do--
he made the poems more intelligible and hence better.
(We'll ignore those places where he chose to substitute
his word for hers--diction should probably stay with
the poet.)

As Cunningham put it, "In the 19th century, editors
were expected to--wonder of wonders--edit."

I think the dashes substitute for other punctuation; she didn't want to bother learning the uses of commas, periods, colons and semi-colons. It's my understanding (though I may be wrong) that she tried to clean up the dashes after receiving some criticism about them (you'll notice that some of her unaltered poems are almost dash-free).

I said that I was going to post my favorite Dickinson poems, but I think the ones I like are the ones everybody likes:

After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Elysium Is as Far
I Died for Beauty — but Was Scarce
I Heard a Fly Buzz — When I Died
I Never Lost as Much but Twice
I Never Saw a Moor
I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close
Success Is Counted Sweetest

I assume everyone's read them, so I won't post them unless there are people who haven't read them.

Strictly speaking, under the law we aren't supposed to post copyrighted poems unless for the purpose of criticism and analysis -- posting them just to share them is a no-no. A lot of people don't realize that all of Dickinson's work is still under copyright; the only poems in the public domain are the altered versions first published in the late 1800's and early 1900's. (I say this, though I really have little respect for the law as it's presently written.)

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited February 14, 2001).]

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

Well, nothing like the start of a nice little flame
war, eh? Why do they call it that, anyway? Wouldn't
a quagmire be a better metaphor?

Did I read Highlander correctly to be insinuating
that Alan is a poor poet?

Now I remember why I sometimes despair of chat boards.

As eloquently as possible, . . . sheeeeesh.

Highlander, you would have cause for complaint if I had misquoted rather than paraphrased you. There was no inaccuracy in the paraphrase. The heart is an organ generally found outpouring in the deepest self, though as Claude Rains observed in Casablanca, "That is my least vulnerable part."

I'm interested by Mike's comments. I agree that Miss D.'s elliptical expressions invite critical over-interpretation. Perhaps excessive regard for such idiosyncratic work sometimes leads poets astray as well. Yet there is more than novelty or oddity to Miss D. Her creepy version of Transcendentalism has always intrigued me. The covert, coded language hints at an enormous rebellion. For good or ill, she anticipates so much of the Twentieth Century, perhaps because many of her finest poems date from the convulsive years of the Civil War.

If you have not read Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae," Mike, I commend the quirky take on Dickinson therein. My thanks to all the others who have posted on this thread. Keep those favorites coming! Or maybe we could start exploring the challenges to conventional Christian imagery in "I cannot live with you."

Alan Sullivan

Mike, I just want to support what you say. Some poets, like Dickinson, are an acquired taste -- and if you don't acquire it, you are not to blame. A lot of the poets I say I like are acquired tastes, yet in my deepest heart of hearts, they aren't for me.

Robinson is one. Tim and Alan went to great lengths to get me to study Hardy and Robinson. Hardy I came to genuinely like (despite his clumsiness), but there is only one poem of Robinson's that I really love (he is just too obscure). Dickinson is also an acquired taste, as is Whitman. As much as I keep talking about Hopkins, the fact is that I don't care for most of his stuff. I find that that's the case with many poets -- there are dozens of poets who have written one, two or three poems that I madly adore, but most of their work leaves me cold.

There is one poet I absolutely cannot stand, and that's Keats. Keats is often held up as the perfect poet, but I find his language to be flowery and pretentious.

The poets that I love in large measure (meaning, large numbers of their poems) are Shakespeare, Frost, Owen, Auden and Millay (though Millay sometimes gets too cute for my taste). I would put Donne in that group if his diction were not so intractably formal. Many of Wilbur's poems I like, but I love only a few.

Mike, who on earth is Parker? I don't know that name. In fact, it sent me scurrying to the Biographical section of my dictionary, and I still don't know who you mean!

It's not often remembered that Fess Parker was a capital poet as well as a great actor. His "Coonskin Coat and other Poems" is now out of print but is to be reissued soon..

"I have a lovely winter coat,
Its collar's made of coon,
I love to clutch it to my throat
And howl at the winter moon."

etc.

G

PS: Fess had a great-aunt named Dorothy Parker, but she only wrote light verse.

I'm guessing Dorothy Parker, our own withering and dispsomaniacal precursor of Wendy Cope?

[This message has been edited by Kate Benedict (edited February 17, 2001).]

Yes, that Dorothy Parker, Kate. Good, but not as
good as Wendy Cope. And she didn't write only light]
verse, though she was best at that. I seem to recall
a couple of her "serious" poems that I thought were
good. But really, Michael, de gustibus non dis-
putandum notwithstanding, how can you put Ms.
Parker next to Mr. Robinson? Hyperion to a satyr.
I grant he can be obscure sometimes (with what Don
Justice calls "benign obscurity"), but anyone should
be able to understand and enjoy masterpieces like
"Eros Turannos" and "Mr Flood's Party" and "Isaac
and Archibald" and "The Wandering Jew" and "Veteran
Sirens" and "The Sheaves" and and and.

There was considerable discussion of Miss D's idiosyncratic punctuation here recently. Yesterday's post brought R.S. Gwynn's long awaited No Word of Farewell. Here's one for the West Chester Gun and Couplet Club members:

Don't Leave Home Without It

My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--
In Corners--till a Day
The BATF came for It.
Join--the NRA!

This thread doesn't make sense anymore, does it? People are apostrophizing someone who isn't here. Should we not begin another thread on the same or a similar topic?

Hear me, O Master of the Board..

G.