In "I'll Tell Thee AllHow Blank It Grew" she flings all the windows open in closing with the words "outvisions paradise," rhymeless after three stanzas of unusually regular rhymes.
Her "teacher" rebuked her for these audacities, but she persisted in them. She did not stoop to explain or defend them. The Colonel's unwillingness to publish the work showed her that he did not consider her a poet, however much he may have been struck by individual phrases. She continued to enclose an occasional poem in her letters to friends, but they seem not to have asked to see "lots of them." The hope of encouragement and the thought of a contemporary audience grew more and more remote. Yet the possibility of a literary fame, of an ultimate glory, never ceased to trouble her. In poem after poem she derided renown; she compared it to an auction and to the croaking of frogs; but at the same time she hailed it as this consecration of the poet's "vital light." What did she do about it? She took five steps forward and two steps back. It is no inconsiderable advance toward literary pretension to write two thousand poems; yet the condition in which she left them is a no less conspicuous retreat. She called on posterity to witness that she was indifferent to its approval, but she did not destroy her work. She did not even destroy the "sweepings of the studio," the tentative sketches at the margin of the table. Had she left fair copies, the movement would have been five steps forward and one step back; had she directed that the work be
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burned by others, it would have been three steps back.
I am convinced that she went even further in her wish to appear indifferent to our good opinion; she deliberately marred many a poem; she did not so much insult our intelligence as flout it. As we read the more authentic work we are astonished to find that poem after poem concludes with some lapse into banality, or begins flatly and mounts to splendor No one would claim that she was free of lapses of judgment and of taste, but the last three words of "How Many Times These Low Feet Staggered" or the last verse of "They Put Us Far Apart" are, poetically speaking, of an almost insolent cynicismthe first for flatness, the second for cacophony.
That is to say, Emily Dickinson frequently wrote badly on purpose. She did not aspire to your praise and mine, if we were the kind of persons who cannot distinguish the incidental from the essential. She had withdrawn a long way from our human, human, human, discriminations and judgments. As we have seen, she was singed, if not scorched, in early life by the all-too-human in her family relationships. Thereafter she was abandoned"betrayed" she called itby the person (or as I prefer to see it, by the succession of persons) whom most she loved. She withdrew from us: into her house; and even in her house she withdrewthe few old friends who came to call were required to converse with her through a half-open door She became more and more abstract in her view of people She did not repudiate us entirely, but she increasingly cherished the thought that we would all be more estimable when we were dead. She was capable of envisaging the fact that there may be no life hereafter: "Their Height in Heaven Comforts Not" acknowledges that the whole matter is a "house of supposition... that skirts the acres of perhaps" But only such a company, unencumbered with earthly things, would understand what she was saying, and she took ample pains to discourage all others. The poem that begins "Some work for Immortality,
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the chiefer part for Time," is not primarily about books sold in bookstores.
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), American writer, won Pulitzer Prizes for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.
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Emily Dickinson and the Poetry of the Inner Life
By
Elizabeth Jennings
Emily Dickinson seems to have been one of those poets who have extracted the largest possible amount of material from the most outwardly meager and restricted personal experience Yet she constructed neither a world of pure fantasy nor a series of exquisite objects which, in the manner of Marianne Moore, might be loaded with agitating emotions or pressed into an ecstatic stillness which poetry surrounds but seldom penetrates. Limited in subject-matter and in metrical cadence though they are, her poems somehow give the effect of largeness, of reverberations. The simple quatrains which Emily Dickinson usually employs seem to be not merely neat, box-like forms holding and sustaining poetic trouvailles, but rather delicate poetic structures which have the power of suggesting forms and cadences larger than themselves; it is as if they cast large shadows or, to change the metaphor, produced momentous and memorable echoes.
But her skilland it is greatis not the most noticeable thing about Emily Dickinson's poetic æuvre. She is one of those poets who depend finally on personal honesty, on the faithful recreation of a unique experience, to make their effect. She is, briefly, completely naked to experience and lays that experience, with all the nerves exposed, before her readers.
Her subjects are few and constantly repeateddeath, love, frustration, self-questioning, lonelinessbut they are presented completely, entirely accessible to the reader. Emily Dickinson is also, in a very real sense, a voice rather than simply a person,
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and it is for this reason that she can describe experiences which might, in the hands of less painstakingly honest poets, be self-pitying or mawkish. She works at that heightened level where passion is so undiluted that it can become almost something impersonal. It is not surprising that she was a prolific poet, one who worked at white-heat, continually examining and presenting the same subjects, the same obsessions. At the very center of her work, herself both the subject and object of her poems, she wrought, out of her own highly individual and nervous self-analyses, a poetry which, paradoxically, generates a universal not a merely personal or particular passion. It is this power which places her among the major American poets.
As R.P Blackmur has said in his study of Emily Dickinson, "The greatness of Emily Dickinson is not . . . going to be found in anybody's idea of greatness, or of Goethe, or intensity, or mysticism, or historical fatality. It is going to be found in the words she used and in the way she put them together." And, while commenting on a particular poem, he continues, "There is no forensic here, nor eloquence, nor justness; it is a bare statement amounting to visionvision being a kind of observation of the ideal." This is fine, sensitive criticism but I would quarrel with two further comments which Blackmur has made on this poet. One is the remark, "It [one of her poems] has nothing to do with wisdom, there is no thinking in it," and the other is "success was by accident, by the mere momentum of sensibility' Now the first statement quoted above seems to be everywhere disproved in the poems themselves.
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