POETS Day! Emily Dickinson, The Myth

Baseball is over for the year. They’re still playing games, but don’t let that fool you. In a particularly cruel twist of plot the Orioles went down in three straight after coaxing long suffering fans into a state of disarmed expectation. Was it better than the old days where we would enjoy a few games at the beginning of the season but tinge that enjoyment with guarded detachment expecting we’d be mathematically eliminated from the postseason by the end of April?

At least knowing meant a stress-free summer. This year was hectic. I had to check standings a lot. Did you know there’s a team called The Devil Rays?

I guess you can call a POETS Day. I don’t know what you’ll do, though. Disillusioned baseball fan grousing period length is dictated by local custom but outside of the Pacific Northwest it’s at least a week so you’ll probably just lay around and eat Wheat Thins. Give it a shot if you want. Get out of work and try jumpstarting the weekend. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but you can sit around and do nothing at work too.

I don’t care. Either way, try reading a little verse. It can make things better or worse, depending on what you pick. A vector is a vector.

Also, I told you so.

***

My Wife: Whatcha readin’?
Me: Emily Dickinson.
My Wife: Em dashes?
Me: You betcha.

Over a year ago I wrote about Emily Dickinson on these pages. She’s iconic and unavoidable so I girded myself and waded into her body of work. She only published ten poems in her lifetime so that means of the eighteen hundred plus works currently in print, we have no idea how many are final drafts or works in progress. I wrote then,

“I don’t like her stuff. I don’t like the em dash even though I use it myself. I don’t like the false rhyme. I just don’t like it.

What I do like is the idea of an insane woman sleeping with her sister in-law Miss Habersham-type peeking out from a pantry wearing all white and thinking that but for an em dash go I. That’s good stuff.”

But Hart Crane liked her – really liked her. In the article “The last Elizabethan: Hart Crane at 100” (The New Criterion, February, 2001) Eric Ormsby posits that Crane was the inheritor of a tradition flowing through Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Whether he was continuing that tradition or its culmination I have no idea, but Ormsby writes, “like Dickinson, he struggled mightily to forge a style of tremendous compression in which by a single multifoliate image, his “petalled word,” he might clasp and conjoin all the irreconcilable torments of a lifetime.”

I consider Crane one of the great crafters of images in the English language, so if he’s compared to Dickinson in that aspect, I figured I owed her another chance. I immediately misstepped.

I mistook one podcast for another and downloaded an episode promising to break down an Emily Dickinson poem. Right away I knew the voice I was listening to wasn’t the expected John J. Miller. I figured maybe he had a substitute that day. The not-Miller host introduced poem 204, which is poem 318 in my copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson – she didn’t give titles so content lists are numbered and indexes are typically by first line. He read the opening, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –“, and interjected running commentary. “Listen to that confidence!” he said. That didn’t sound like a National Review podcast. “I’m listening, Queen!” he said.

I turned it off. Emily Dickinson would be a real disappointment to a lot of people that admire her work because I get the sense that she’s seen as feminist icon. I’m willing to be completely wrong here but when I talk to people who say they read a little poetry but not that much, they almost invariably mention Emily Dickinson and because nowadays we can’t celebrate a work without admiring the creator her talent is completed by the additional incorrect recognition that she was regarded as a wit and broke taboos or some such. I get that surprisingly often. I don’t doubt those people read her poetry and enjoy it. She’s talented and original; hasn’t been my cup of tea, but I’m trying to reassess. I don’t think it’s just that people don’t know much about her life, I think they conflate her with Dorothy Parker.

She certainly writes with confidence, but I don’t think I’d call her “Queen.” She lived a quiet life shut up in a house with her sister. In “The audacity of Emily Dickinson” (The New Criterion, January 1987), Bruce Bawer quotes from an 1881 letter written by the “young wife of a recently hired instructor at Amherst College” to her parents.

“It is a lady [she explained] whom the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. [Austin] Dickinson [the college treasurer], and seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years, except once to see a new church, when she crept out at night, & viewed it by the moonlight. . . . Her sister, who was at Mrs. Dickinson’s party, invited me to come & sing to her mother sometime. . . . People tell me that the myth will hear every note—she will be near, but unseen. . . . Isn’t that like a book? So interesting.

No one knows the cause of her isolation, but of course there are dozens of reasons assigned.”

This is the poem that not Miller read on his not National Review podcast:

318
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –
A Ribbon at a time –
The Steeples swam in Amethyst –
The news, like Squirrels, ran –
The Hills untied their Bonnets –
The Bobolinks – begun –
Then I said softly to myself –
“That must have been the Sun”!
But how he set – I know not –
There seemed a purple stile
That little Yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while –
Till when they reached the other side,
A Dominie in Gray –
Put gently up the evening Bars –
And led the flock away –

That’s one of four poems that she sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in April, 1862 after reading his “Letter to a Young Contributor” in Atlantic Monthly. Higginson and Dickinson began a correspondence that led to a lifelong friendship. He has been described as her mentor, but it seems more that he was fascinated by her talent and saw her work as something to be admired, but beyond his ken and influence.

In the introduction to the earlier mentioned Complete Poems, editor Thomas H. Johnson writes:

“What embarrassed Higginson about the poems was his inability to classify them. In 1891 he wrote an article describing this early correspondence. ‘The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius,’ he said, ‘was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism.’ Higginson’s problem was compounded by the fact that during Emily Dickinson’s lifetime he was never convinced that she wrote poetry. As he phrased his opinion to a friend, her verses were ‘remarkable, though odd… too delicate – not strong enough to publish.’”

Despite initially writing to him in reference to an article he wrote with tips for young writers wanting to publish, in her third letter to Higginson dated June, 7 1862 she wrote,

“I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’ – that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.
If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her – if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase – and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me – then. My Barefoot-Rank is better.
You think my gait ‘spasmodic.’ I am in danger, Sir.
You think me ‘uncontrolled.’ I have no Tribunal….
The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can.”

She was not renowned, but that is witty. It’s charming too.

Below are the remaining three of the first four she sent Higginson in that first letter. She had written around three hundred poems by the time she contacted him though she claimed “no verse – but one or two – until this winter.” All her trademark flourishes are already present. Her famous em dash she considered a musical direction. I haven’t found a good explanation for her odd capitalizations. Like Sylvia Plath would later, she had a private mythology. “Morning” often means Judgement Day, for example. It may be that she’s assigned the capitalized words, which seem to usually be nouns though not always, their own constellation of concepts – the “petalled word.”

216

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
Untouched by Morning –
And untouched by Noon –
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection –
Rafter of Satin – and Roof of Stone!

Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –
Soundless as dots – on a Disc of Snow –

319

The nearest Dream recedes – unrealized –
The Heaven we chase,
Like the June Bee – before the School Boy,
Invites the Race –
Stoops – to an easy Clover –
Dips – evades – teases – deploys –
Then – to the Royal Clouds
Lifts his light Pinnace –
Heedless of the Boy –
Staring – bewildered – at the mocking sky –
Homesick for steadfast Honey –
Ah, the Bee flies not
That brews that rare variety!

320

We play at Paste –
Till qualified, for Pearl –
Then, drop the Paste –
And deem ourself a fool –

The Shapes – though – were similar –
And our new Hands
Learned Gem-Tactics –
Practicing Sands –

UPDATE: This post was originally published the morning of 10/13/23. I was watching Jeopardy later that evening while making dinner and Ken Jennings gave a quote as a clue. I started laughing because I knew the quote and knew (KNEW!) what was going to happen. A contestant buzzed in and answered, “Who is Emily Dickinson.” He got the sad beep and a quick “Sorry No.” No one else buzzed in, time ran out, and Ken said, “It’s actually Dorothy Parker.”