In this installment of FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER I will feature American poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s lifestyle, experiences and poetic style stand in sharp contrast to last week’s featured poet, Walt Whitman. Where Whitman was loud and gregarious, Dickinson was quiet and reserved; where Whitman traveled extensively, rarely hanging his hat for very long at one place, Dickinson never ventured far from home, spending the last few years of her life as a near-recluse in her own home; where Whitman’s poetry was big and expansive, Dickinson’s poems are concise and focused. Dickinson was well read, and was familiar with the work of her contemporaries; she, however, never read Whitman because he was too “crude.”
These two poets; Whitman, a man who sometimes wrote of “feminine” themes and was suspected of being gay or at least bi-sexual; Dickinson, a woman, who sometimes wrote about manly objects, provide a nice point-counter point to FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was a successful lawyer and her family had strong community ties. Dickinson lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life, she never traveled far from her birthplace. She studied at Amherst Academy (later re-named Amherst College, a well-known American liberal arts college). Dickinson also spent time studying at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College, the “oldest continuing institution of higher education for women in the world."
After completing her formal studies, Dickinson returned to her family’s home in Amherst. There, the local residents thought of Dickinson as something of an eccentric. She had a penchant for white clothing (a white dress is Dickinson’s only surviving article of clothing) and was reluctant to greet guests or, later in her life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.
Dickinson was a prolific private poet, though fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often utilize slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two subjects which infused her letters to friends.
Dickinson was keenly aware of the ways in which poetry can move people. “If I read a book,” she observed, “and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the way I know it. Is there any way?” Historian and critics have often tried to make a big deal of Dickinson’s “retreat” from society. But as Marianne Moore (another American poet of fame) once remarked, “For a poet there is society in solitude.” Dickinson herself once wrote to a friend, “I find ecstasy in living. The mere sense of living is joy enough.” Clearly Dickinson was not lonely, nor was she without joy in her life; she simply sought out the solitude that enabled her to craft such exquisite poetry.
The extensive use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly supposed.” Dickinson did not write in traditional iambic pentameter, and did not even use a five-foot line. Her poems typically begin with a declaration or definition in the first line ("The fact that Earth is Heaven"), which is followed by a metaphorical change of the original premise in the second line ("Whether Heaven is Heaven or not"). Dickinson's poems can easily be set to music because of the frequent use of rhyme and free verse.
It was not until after Dickinson’s death in May 15, 1886, that the depth and breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Fortunately for her legions of fans, Emily’s younger sister, Lavinia, discovered her cache of poems. Dickinson’s first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable initial reviews, critics now consider Dickinson to be a major American poet.
Here then, for your reading, and listening (poems are meant to be read aloud and never, ever, to be speed-read through), pleasure are a few of Ms. Dickinson’s better known poems.
Notice how Dickinson uses words and imagery to describe a steaming locomotive’s journey through the countryside in terms that any horse lover can recognize. The horse becomes a metaphor for something bigger and more powerful - a steam locomotive.
I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.
In the following poem, Dickinson describes the Zen-like notion that to appreciate “good” one must also experience “bad.” Thus “bad” becomes a necessary part of life – without bad we would never know “good.”
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition ,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
Dickinson often wrote about death. To her, however, death was not the end of a journey it was more like a way-station on the road to a new adventure.
I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth,--the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
And here is more....
The dying need but little, dear,--
A glass of water's all,
A flower's unobtrusive face
To punctuate the wall,
A fan, perhaps, a friend's regret,
And certainly that one
No color in the rainbow
Perceives when you are gone.
Hunger, of the soul and heart, was another of Dickinson’s themes.
I had been hungry all the years-
My noon had come, to dine-
I, trembling, drew the table near
And touched the curious wine.
'T was this on tables I had seen
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.
I did not know the ample bread,
'T was so unlike the crumb
The birds and I had often shared
In Nature's dining-room.
The plenty hurt me, 't was so new,--
Myself felt ill and odd,
As berry of a mountain bush
Transplanted to the road.
Nor was I hungry; so I found
That hunger was a way
Of persons outside windows,
The entering takes away.
There are several online collections of Dickinson’s poems. This one is one of my favorite:
DICKINSON’S POEMS – LISTED BY FIRST LINE
Apropos to today’s FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER, I just read an article in Newsweek magazine about the imminent death of poetry. IS POETRY REALLY DEAD?
Is there anyone who really thinks that poetry is finally “dead?” As long as there are individuals who need to connect with their inner emotions, can poetry be really dead?
Personally I don’t think so.
Let me know what you think.
Enjoy!
