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
|