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).]
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