Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Rainbow
Try listening to an audiobook edition of her poetry. I doubt you will care whether the recording is based on a text using this punctuation arrangement or that one, as long as what really matters - the poetry- comes through strongly and clearly.
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Yes, after which I'll listen to an audiobook of Apollinaire's caligrams, safe in the knowledge that I have missed nothing.
I'm going to have to side with the majority here, a critic once stated that how we view Dickinson depends on the age, from the editing (and yes, actually, the editing went further than punctuation, to actual word choice, and yes, actually, since punctuation dictates how a poem is to be read out loud, the changing of said punctuation would change the audible attributes of that poem) and dumbing-down of her brilliant modernist talents in the nineteenth to early twentieth century, to the great focus on visual experimentation lead by Sarah Howe and others in the late twentieth and twenty-first. Here, oddly, I am happy to be of my age, and would rather think much of an artist than try to denigrate her "tics" and "quirks" as accidental. In fact, they are far from that. That is why I think your choice of this poem is poor for Dickinson "at her finest", most half-decent nineteenth-century poets could manage a verse almost as good; she's at her finest with her half-rhymes, with her brilliantly strange inventiveness, as in the poems I posted above, she is greater, I think, even than Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his "tics and quirks", let alone Whitman. In fact, I find much of Whitman boringly positive, Dickinson is the opposite. She is boisterous, but boisterously negative, obsessed with death and decay. For me, she is even greater than Keats in that regard, for she is the much more restlessly experimental of the great poets. I might, on an ambitious day, compare her to Shakespeare; Bloom did it. So no, I'm not sure this is her "at her finest", though it is her at her "very good".