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rushthatspeaksNot my favorite poet, but one I find it worthwhile to come back to every so often; she is a poet who is so often mythologized that it is useful bringing myself back to the poetry. A great deal of what I was told about her in school is directly contradicted by the poetry. It is fairly obvious that she had not only a great love in her life somewhere, which did not end well, but, I think, more than one, and my English teachers were forever going on about various religious aspects of various bits of her work (which are there, it is true) and never got around to the portions which congenially and forcefully hate God. (Dickinson loved Charlotte Bronte, but reminds me of Emily Bronte more in that particular direction.)
And the first stanza of the poem listed 88 in her complete works, the one that goes
"Heaven"-- is what I cannot reach!
The Apple on the Tree--
Provided it do hopeless-- hang--
That-- "Heaven" is-- to Me!
has always read to me as something sharing an essential kinship with "Οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾽ ὔσδῳ ἄκρον ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῳ λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπνεσ, οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐδύναντ᾽ ἐπίκεσθαι"; which, I mean, the Dickinson is not nearly as good but anything that reminds me of that particular Sappho fragment for even like thirty seconds wins major, major points in my book. (It's the one about how the best of the apples was left by the gatherers, not intentionally, but because they could not reach it, and it has so many layers of implied metaphor and context and awesomeness and I have never been happy with any of the English translations ever or I'd have quoted one of those.)
But I can never be entirely content with Dickinson. It's that damn meter, the one she uses in the stanza I just quoted, the one she uses almost all the time for everything, so that the poems of hers that don't use it are always startlingly refreshing. I mean it's a good meter, it's useful, and she knows how and when to break it on a poem-by-poem basis, but if you read a lot of Dickinson you start having trouble separating the sense of the words from the sound, the rhythm that carries from poem to poem. After hearing it go for a while it becomes monotonous. And I can't help but think that her way with capital letters is intentionally obfuscatory. She had to know that she was setting, sometimes, a series of puzzles with her capital letters: is this religious, or not, sacred or profane, public-life-of-the-spirit or private-life-of-the-body or those last two with public and private switched or all of the above? I mean, that sort of ambiguity can be very interesting but I get the distinct feeling with Dickinson sometimes that she is using her technical brilliance and this meter and so on in order to hide, to hide from the reader in plain sight, and I cannot help but find that somewhat annoying because you can learn her fairly well but I do not think you can actually know her. It makes some of her work marginally less true than it might be otherwise. I generally find, after some interval, that I had rather be reading A.E. Housman, or someone else who demonstrates that formalist instincts can coexist with a pure deceptive transparency.
Also large chunks of her nature poetry are boring as hell. She has a way with a caught image, but then she'll pile another image onto it, and another on that, and they don't go together and the poem breaks. The difficulty is that the metaphorical weight of, say, the bee comes back in the non-nature poems, and you get rather more out of them for having a built context for the bee, it's just you've had to wade through a great many variants on nearly the same image about bees to build that context.
Ah well. Every so often she says something that is simply the clearest and best way of saying that thing, that falls into mental vocabulary the way that good poetry functions, so that I find myself using her words when I feel that one particular way, and having a poet be able to give an internal voice to a set of emotions for which there would not otherwise be precisely the correct words is pretty much my definition of a great poet, as I (sometimes reluctantly) conclude that Dickinson must be.
But I don't wind up reading her often.
Critics and book designers are weird about her, too. This particular pocket set of selections has the famous ones, of course, and what I suspect is a fair scattershot from the complete works (I have not read the complete works, or I would not have read/reviewed this; I have read a few chunks from it, but I cannot do more than small chunks at long intervals). They've tried to divide them into poems about poetry, poems about death, and poems about love, and this was honestly a terrible idea, because they have shoved the nature poems in any old how and I could argue that up to ninety percent of these poems are in the wrong section entirely. Convincingly argue, I mean. And they haven't used any of the numbering systems that it is reasonable to use when anthologizing Dickinson; they have put them in in, uh, some order, which they have totally failed to explain. (Though, to be fair, they have adequately indexed it.) And this is just how people work around Dickinson, they get lost in her admittedly vast corpus and throw poems at a book willy-nilly until they stick. As far as I'm concerned, there are several ways to organize her-- alphabetical, chronological, using the numbering systems that several different academics have kindly worked up for us-- and 'no perceptible organization' or 'poorly argued themes' is not the same thing.
Therefore I cannot recommend this edition, although it is no worse than most, and all right, the index is better than one often gets.
Now I will go and not read any Emily Dickinson for oh let us say another fifteen years or so, at which point I am sure I shall think something entirely different.
And the first stanza of the poem listed 88 in her complete works, the one that goes
"Heaven"-- is what I cannot reach!
The Apple on the Tree--
Provided it do hopeless-- hang--
That-- "Heaven" is-- to Me!
has always read to me as something sharing an essential kinship with "Οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾽ ὔσδῳ ἄκρον ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῳ λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπνεσ, οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐδύναντ᾽ ἐπίκεσθαι"; which, I mean, the Dickinson is not nearly as good but anything that reminds me of that particular Sappho fragment for even like thirty seconds wins major, major points in my book. (It's the one about how the best of the apples was left by the gatherers, not intentionally, but because they could not reach it, and it has so many layers of implied metaphor and context and awesomeness and I have never been happy with any of the English translations ever or I'd have quoted one of those.)
But I can never be entirely content with Dickinson. It's that damn meter, the one she uses in the stanza I just quoted, the one she uses almost all the time for everything, so that the poems of hers that don't use it are always startlingly refreshing. I mean it's a good meter, it's useful, and she knows how and when to break it on a poem-by-poem basis, but if you read a lot of Dickinson you start having trouble separating the sense of the words from the sound, the rhythm that carries from poem to poem. After hearing it go for a while it becomes monotonous. And I can't help but think that her way with capital letters is intentionally obfuscatory. She had to know that she was setting, sometimes, a series of puzzles with her capital letters: is this religious, or not, sacred or profane, public-life-of-the-spirit or private-life-of-the-body or those last two with public and private switched or all of the above? I mean, that sort of ambiguity can be very interesting but I get the distinct feeling with Dickinson sometimes that she is using her technical brilliance and this meter and so on in order to hide, to hide from the reader in plain sight, and I cannot help but find that somewhat annoying because you can learn her fairly well but I do not think you can actually know her. It makes some of her work marginally less true than it might be otherwise. I generally find, after some interval, that I had rather be reading A.E. Housman, or someone else who demonstrates that formalist instincts can coexist with a pure deceptive transparency.
Also large chunks of her nature poetry are boring as hell. She has a way with a caught image, but then she'll pile another image onto it, and another on that, and they don't go together and the poem breaks. The difficulty is that the metaphorical weight of, say, the bee comes back in the non-nature poems, and you get rather more out of them for having a built context for the bee, it's just you've had to wade through a great many variants on nearly the same image about bees to build that context.
Ah well. Every so often she says something that is simply the clearest and best way of saying that thing, that falls into mental vocabulary the way that good poetry functions, so that I find myself using her words when I feel that one particular way, and having a poet be able to give an internal voice to a set of emotions for which there would not otherwise be precisely the correct words is pretty much my definition of a great poet, as I (sometimes reluctantly) conclude that Dickinson must be.
But I don't wind up reading her often.
Critics and book designers are weird about her, too. This particular pocket set of selections has the famous ones, of course, and what I suspect is a fair scattershot from the complete works (I have not read the complete works, or I would not have read/reviewed this; I have read a few chunks from it, but I cannot do more than small chunks at long intervals). They've tried to divide them into poems about poetry, poems about death, and poems about love, and this was honestly a terrible idea, because they have shoved the nature poems in any old how and I could argue that up to ninety percent of these poems are in the wrong section entirely. Convincingly argue, I mean. And they haven't used any of the numbering systems that it is reasonable to use when anthologizing Dickinson; they have put them in in, uh, some order, which they have totally failed to explain. (Though, to be fair, they have adequately indexed it.) And this is just how people work around Dickinson, they get lost in her admittedly vast corpus and throw poems at a book willy-nilly until they stick. As far as I'm concerned, there are several ways to organize her-- alphabetical, chronological, using the numbering systems that several different academics have kindly worked up for us-- and 'no perceptible organization' or 'poorly argued themes' is not the same thing.
Therefore I cannot recommend this edition, although it is no worse than most, and all right, the index is better than one often gets.
Now I will go and not read any Emily Dickinson for oh let us say another fifteen years or so, at which point I am sure I shall think something entirely different.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-31 02:46 pm (UTC)Have you read Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns? I have not, but all the reviews I read of it earlier this year praised its demolition of the Dickinson mythos.
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Date: 2010-10-31 03:24 pm (UTC)