The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (24 page)

It is essentially in the world of spiritual forces that her depth of poetic originality is shown. Others may describe nature, but few can describe life as she does. Human nature, the experiences of the world of souls, was her special study, to which she brought, in addition to that quality of intensity, second characteristic,—keen sensitiveness to irony and paradox. Nearly all her perceptions are tinged with penetrating sense of the contrasts in human vicissitude. Controlled, alert, expectant, aware of the perpetual compromise between clay and spirit, she accepted the inscrutable truths of life in a fashion which reveals how humor and pathos contend in her. It is this which gives her style those sudden turns and that startling imagery. Humor is not, perhaps, a characteristic associated with pure lyric poetry, and yet Emily Dickinson’s transcendental humor is one of the deep sources of her supremacy. Both in thought and in expression she gains her piercing quality, her undeniable spiritual thrust, by this gift, stimulating, mystifying, but forever inspiring her readers to a profound conception of high destinies.

The most apparent instances of this keen, shrewd delight in challenging convention, in the effort to establish, through contrast, reconcilement of the earthly and the eternal, are to be found in her imagery. Although her similes and metaphors may be devoid of languid aesthetic elegance, they are quivering to express living ideas, and so they come surprisingly close to what we are fond of calling the commonplace. She reverses the usual, she hitches her star to a wagon, transfixing homely daily phrases for poetic purposes. Such an audacity has seldom invaded poetry with a desire to tell immortal truths through the medium of a deep sentiment for old habitual things. It is true that we permit this liberty to the greatest poets, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, and some others; but in America our poets have been sharply charged not to offend in this respect. Here tradition still animates many critics in the belief that real poetry must have exalted phraseology....

The expectation of finding in her work some quick, perverse, illuminating comment upon eternal truths certainly keeps a reader’s interest from flagging, but passionate intensity and fine irony do not fully explain Emily Dickinson’s significance. There is a third characteristic trait, a dauntless courage in accepting life. Existence, to her, was a momentous experience, and she let no promises of a future life deter her from feeling the throbs of this one. No false comfort released her from dismay at present anguish. An energy of pain and joy swept her soul, but did not leave any residue of bitterness or of sharp innuendo against the ways of the Almighty. Grief was a faith, not a disaster. She made no effort to smother the recollections of old companionship by that species of spiritual death to which so many people consent.... The willingness to look with clear directness at the spectacle of life is observable everywhere in her work. Passionate fortitude was hers, and this is the greatest contribution her poetry makes to the reading world. It is not expressed precisely in single poems, but rather is present in all, as key and interpretation of her meditative scrutiny. Without elaborate philosophy, yet with irresistible ways of expression, Emily Dickinson’s poems have true lyric appeal, because they make abstractions such as love, hope, loneliness, death, and immortality, seem near and intimate and faithful.

—from
Atlantic Monthly
(January 1913)

1. Is it possible to abstract a consistent philosophy or religion or morality from Emily Dickinson’s poetry?

2. What are the attributes of Emily Dickinson’s God?

3. That Love is all there is,

4. Take a poem by Dickinson that moves you. Scan it and the prevailing meter is almost sure to be iambic (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). See whether the irregularities are significant. In general, do you feel that there is a convergence of form and content in her poems? After all, she has many subjects but writes mostly within one form.

Letters.
3 vols. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Based on the three-volume edition is the one-volume
Selected Letters,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. The 1971 edition is the source for most of the quotations in the Introduction to this edition. Dickinson’s letters are an indispensable supplement to the poems.

The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Edition.
Edited by R. W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Allows readers to see Dickinson’s poems, and her frequent use of variant words, in her own hand.

The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson.
Edited by R. W. Franklin. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
3 vols. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. This edition, with the poems arranged chronologically and the poet’s idiosyncrasies intact, includes variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts. A distillation of the three-volume edition is the one-volume
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), which brings together the original texts of all 1,775 of Dickinson’s poems. In the Introduction to this edition, quotations from poems not included in this edition are from the one-volume publication.

The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Edited by R. W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. The most accurate version available today.

The University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, in its
American Verse Project,
contains poems from several editions of Dickinson’s poems edited by Thomas Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd (
Poems
, 1891, 1910, and 1914).
(www.hti. umich.edu/index.html)

Farr, Judith.
The Passion of Emily Dickinson.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Farr says that “although this book is not a biography, it attempts an inclusive vision of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, read in the context of her time, environment, and personal circumstances.”

Habegger, Alfred.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson.
New York: Random House, 2001. Habegger writes that this book was written “with the feeling that it was time someone assess recent findings and claims relating to this poet.”

Sewall, Richard B.
The Life of Emily Dickinson.
1974. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Generally agreed to be the most thorough biography of the poet.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin.
Emily Dickinson.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. Particularly interesting for its psychoanalytic insights.

Bennett, Fordyce R. A
Reference Guide to the Bible in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997.

Capps, Jack L.
Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 1836-1886.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Diehl, Joanne Feit.
Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Traces the influence of romantic poets on Dickinson’s work.

Keller, Karl.
The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Places Dickinson in the context of other American writers, from Anne Bradstreet to Robert Frost.

St. Armand, Barton Levi.
Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Solidly locates Dickinson in her time, exploring contemporary attitudes toward death, heaven, nature, etc.

Webster, Noah.
An American Dictionary of the English Language.
1828. Reprint: New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970.

Bennett, Paula.
Emily Dickinson, Woman Poet.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990.

Bogan, Louise, Archibald MacLeish, and Richard Wilbur.
Emily Dickinson: Three Views.
Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 1960. Three sensitive papers by poets, delivered at the Amherst Bicentennial in 1959.

Cameron, Sharon.
Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Cameron argues that Dickinson’s manuscript variants should be treated as an essential part of the poems.

Farr, Judith, ed.
Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Fast, Robin Riley, and Christine Mack Gordon, eds.
Approaches to Teaching Dickinson’s Poetry.
New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989.

Ferlazzo, Paul J., ed.
Critical Essays on Emily Dickinson.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

Halio, Marcia Peoples, ed.
Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Poems.
Harcourt Brace Casebook Series in Literature. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College Publishers, 1998. This small book includes several of the best, most representative essays on Dickinson, as well as advice to students writing about her.

Howe, Susan.
My Emily Dickinson.
Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1985. Perhaps the most personal book of criticism on Dickinson; Howe’s exploration of Dickinson’s variants and her lengthy interpretation of “My life had stood a loaded gun” (
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson, poem 754) are especially dazzling.

Kazin, Alfred. “Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson’s Room of Her Own.” In his
An American Procession.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Martin, Wendy, ed.
The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Helpfully divided into sections biography and publication history, poetic strategies and themes, and cultural contexts.

Miller, Cristanne.
Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Excellent.

Oberhaus, Dorothy Huff.
Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: Method and Meaning.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Paglia, Camille. “Amherst’s Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson.” In her
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Paglia asserts that “violence is her love song and lullaby.”

Wolosky, Shira.
Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Wolosky counters ahistorical readings of Dickinson by arguing that many of her poems are responses to the Civil War.

Byatt, A. S.
Possession: A Romance.
New York: Random House, 1990.

Collins, Billy.
Picnic, Lightning.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Cope, Wendy.
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.
London: Faber and Faber, 1986.

Crane, Hart.
The Poems of Hart Crane.
Edited by Marc Simon. New York: Liveright Publishing, 1986.

e. e. cummings.
e. e. cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962.
Edited by George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright Publishing, 1994.

Farr, Judith.
I Never Came to You in White.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Frost, Robert.
The Poetry of Robert Frost.
Edited by Edward Con nery Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

Kalstone, David.
Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Contains remarks about Dickinson by Elizabeth Bishop.

Rich, Adrienne.
The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950- 2001.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Stevens, Wallace.
The Collected Poems.
New York: Vintage Books, 1982.

Williams, William Carlos. Interview in
Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews,
edited by George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1989.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue, ed.
An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Contains entries on all aspects of Dickinson’s life, culture, and work.

The Emily Dickinson International Society. The Society creates a forum for scholarship on Dickinson and her relation to the tradition of American poetry and women’s literature. (
www.cwru.edu/affil/edis/edisindex.html
)

Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, eds.
The Emily Dickinson Handbook.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. A source for quick reference containing basic and up-to-date information on the poet’s life, her art, the manuscripts, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship.

A bird came down the walk

A cap of lead across the sky

A charm invests a face

A clock stopped—not the mantel’s

A death-blow is a life-blow to some

A deed knocks first at thought

A dew sufficed itself

Adrift! A little boat adrift!

A drop fell on the apple tree

Adventure most unto itself

A face devoid of love or grace