Quote:
Originally Posted by John Riley
I very much don't like the edited versions of her work. I have the Franklin and can read the Johnson but that is it. I hate everything that attempts to smooth out her work. The whole Belle of Amherst BS.
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I have to agree. In fact, Dickinson for me is the poet least in need of an editer, especially many of the male ones that took over her poetry after she died. For me, Dickinson's brilliance always lay in her strangeness, and I thought the more coherent or ordinary nature poems the most boring. This, for me, is middle-grade, better than some, but not as good by far as poems such as:
I tried to think a lonelier Thing
Than any I had seen -
Some Polar Expiation - An Omen in the Bone
Of Death’s tremendous nearness -
I probed Retrieveless things5
My Duplicate - to borrow -
A Haggard comfort springs
From the belief that Somewhere -
Within the Clutch of Thought -
There dwells one other Creature10
Of Heavenly Love - forgot -
I plucked at our Partition -
As One should pry the Walls -
Between Himself - and Horror’s Twin -
Within Opposing Cells -15
I almost strove to clasp his Hand,
Such Luxury - it grew -
That as Myself - could pity Him -
Perhaps he - pitied me -
or, more concretely:
A Clock stopped -
Not the Mantel’s -
Geneva’s farthest skill
Cant put the puppet bowing -
That just now dangled still -5
An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched - with pain -
Then quivered out of Decimals -
Into Degreeless noon -
It will not stir for Doctor’s -10
This Pendulum of snow -
The Shopman importunes it -
While cool - concernless No -
Nods from the Gilded pointers -
Nods from the Seconds slim -15
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life -
And Him -