Blackmur. He sees the religious climate in which she livedthat of a "puritan theocracy"as the atmosphere in which her particular kind of poetry could function most effectively. Thus he declares: "It gave an heroic proportion and a tragic mode to the experience of the individual . . . it had an immense, incalculable value for literature; it dramatized the human soul."

These are large words and perhaps they overstate their case; yet at least they gave a plausible reason why Emily Dickinson's sort of poetry could be written in the latter half of the nineteenth century in America. Such general observations about society and religion are not value judgments, they neither clarify nor annotate the poems themselves. They are, in fact, extraliterary reflections, useful scaffoldings, not pathways into the poetry. But they do clear the ground round the poems and enable the reader to examine them on their own terms.
It has been suggested already that Emily Dickinson's poems are notable for their nakedness, for their fearless presentation of

 

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experiences which are deeply, and often painfully, personal. But this poet was such a finely adjusted instrument for recording experience that the findings of vision, pain or pleasure which appear in her verse often have a universal application. And it is, oddly enough, sometimes a kind of wry wit which makes this generalizing power so effective, as in the following short poem:
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To hang our head ostensibly 
And subsequent, to find 
That such was not the posture 
Of our immortal mind
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Affords the sly presumption 
That in so dense a fuzz 
You too take cobweb attitudes 
Upon a plane of gauze.
It is difficult, I think, to see how any critic could claim that Emily Dickinson had no thinking power when they have the evidence of such a poem as this before them.
If Emily Dickinson often seems epigrammatic, even aphoristic, her ideas and her wit are not reproving or admonishing. She is, in one sense, always speaking to herself. It is as if we, her readers, were privileged to overhear her meditations and her arguments with herself. This intense poetry in the very best sense, taut and vibrant not with emotions and ideas which the poet has already formulated outside her poems, but alive with the very process of thought and feeling. A vision is thus caught on the wing, not trapped but held and halted momentarily, just long enough for the poem to be written.
James Reeves, in his sensitive Introduction to a selection of the poems, goes far towards explaining the nervous honesty of Emily Dickinson's work when he says, "She did not withdraw from the world because she hated it: there was nothing in her

 

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of the grand romantic manner, rejecting society because the palate had become jaded. Her isolation was a calculated choice, the loss weighed against the gain, with a clear conviction of the necessity and worth of what she had to do." And again, Reeves declares, "Friends were her estate, but language was her province, and she delighted in perfecting it, whether in verse or in prose. She had what can only be called an aristocratic spirit, high-minded but without a trace of priggishness, serious without self-importance, shrewd enough to be malicious had she wished, but too gentle and kind for malice." Reeves is also eager to point out that there was nothing escapist about Emily Dickinson's attitude to life. On the contrary; if she appears to have been retiring and almost eremitical, it was because such an existence enabled her to live more fully, to face her personal predicaments with more dedication and more fearlessness. For her, language was what prayer is to the religious contemplative She has indicated this in the following eight-line poem:
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The soul unto itself 
Is an imperial friend, 
Or the most agonising spy 
An enemy could send
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Secure against its own, 
No treason it can fear. 
Itself its sovereign, of itself 
The soul should stand in awe.
Emily Dickinson usually restricts herself to the quatrain or the six-line stanza, but if she thus severely limits herself in the matter of form, she compensates for this limitation by her extremely skilful use of half- and quarter-rhymes and also by her extraordinarily apt and original handling of language. Her poems are fresh not simply because they are quite unlike

 

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anyone else's but because they seem to have appropriated a poetic speech and vocabulary hitherto unknown in American or English verse. She has a complete mastery of both sensuous and abstract words, and the success of her best lyrics is often due to a cunning juxtaposition of these two modes of language She is one of the very few poets who can shock and delight as easily and directly by her handling of abstractions as by the justness and decorum of her concrete imagery. Let me give an example of what I mean by quoting one of her poems:
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Exultation is the going 
Of an inland soul to sea, 
Past the houses, past the headlands, 
Into deep eternity.
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Bred as we, among the mountains, 
Can the sailor understand 
The divine intoxication 
Of the first league out from land?
Death is the subject of many of Emily Dickinson's poems, and death for her is as near, as familiar, as commonplace even, as love affairs are in the poems of less self-sufficient poets. Yet she is not a domestic poet, nor a writer who has found a comfortable niche among matters and subjects which are usually thought to be the special province of women poets. Her poems are as bare as Emily Brontë's, as ecstatic as some of Blake's shorter lyrics. If her poems are short, if she is economical and extremely severe with herself, this is because her subjects are so large that they are more effectively presented, more resonant, if they are only hinted at rather than considered at length or extended into long meditations. Her visions are so elusive that to be truthful to them, to suggest the momentariness of their coming and going, she too must be

 

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brief but also precise. So in the following twelve-line poem, she tells us more about the questing, visionary mind than many other poets have succeeded in doing in a complete æuvre:
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The soul selects her own society, 
Then shuts the door. 
To her divine majority 
Present no more.
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Unmoved she notes the chariots pausing 
At her low gate; 
Unmoved, an Emperor be kneeling 
Upon her mat.
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I've known her from an ample nation 
Choose one, 
Then close the valves of her attention 
Like stone.
Allen Tate has some useful things to say about this power of Emily Dickinson's to ensnare and hold an elusive idea:
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It is a poetry of ideas [he says], and it demands of the reader a point of viewnot an opinion of the New Deal or of the League of Nations, but an ingrained philosophy that is fundamental, a settled attitude that is almost extinct in this eclectic age. Yet it is not the sort of poetry of ideas which, like Pope's, requires a point of view only. It requires also, for the deepest understanding, which must go beneath the verbal excitement of the style, a highly developed sense of the specific quality of poetrya quality that most persons accept as the accidental feature of something else that the poet thinks he has to say.

 

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Thus Emily Dickinson's poems would seem to demand not only an open sympathy from the reader but also the deepest and most sensitive kind of poetic response. She asks for a total engagement, not necessarily a complete surrender but certainly an acquiescence of the mind and an alertness of the senses. As has been said already, this is a poet who extorted the largest possible amount of poetic material from the most apparently meager personal experience The explanation of this phenomenon is, of course, that Emily Dickinson had an intensely rich inner life. One might almost say that what mountains were to Wordsworth and what social life was to Pope, the movements of her own mind and heart were to Emily Dickinson.

Elizabeth Jennings (b.

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