Dickinson's Misery (17 page)

As Winters's essay unfolds, the epigraph comes to stand for both Dickinson's and her twentieth-century readers' critical blind spots. According to Winters, both Dickinson and her modern readers underestimate the value of lyric poetry: Dickinson because “no poet of comparable reputation has been guilty of so much unpardonable writing”; and Dickinson's readers because “one cannot shake off the uncomfortable feeling that her popularity has been mainly due to her vices; her worst poems are certainly her most commonly praised” (283). The punch line is that “as a general matter, great lyric poetry is not widely read or admired” (283). For Winters, “My Cricket” is an instance of Dickinson's lyric power,
not
the sort of thing that the public would appreciate, and the sort of poem Dickinson herself rarely achieved.

Winters is not just interested in elevating this particular poem, but in placing lyric itself in such an elevated position that it must be alienated from both ordinary poet and ordinary reader. That elevation was for Winters a moral stance, a perspective that made him controversial among the literary critics that John Crowe Ransom would dub “New” in 1941.
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As
Winters put it, his “theory of literature” was “absolutist” in the sense that he believed that “the work of literature, in so far as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of objective truth.” He goes on: “The form of literature with which I am for the most part concerned is the poem; but since the poem exhausts more fully than any other literary form the inherent possibilities of language, what I say about poetry can be extended to include other literary forms with relatively unimportant qualifications” (11). Winters's lyricization of poetry (“the poem” rather than any particular kind of poem) thus extended to a lyricization of literarature tout court, with the result that the reading of lyric became for Winters, as for New Criticism generally, the test case, the zero-sum game, of literary interpretation, and literature became the test case of cultural interpretation.
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The importance of the lyric to the New Critics has become the most characteristic—and oft caricatured—aspect of the mid-twentieth-century criticism that continues to have a formative influence on the study and, especially, the pedagogy of literature in the United States. As Mark Jeffreys has written, “lyric became a metonymy for New Critical ideology” in the literary critical eras that emerged as New Criticism began to loosen its hold; but as my attribution of grasping agency and Jeffreys's attribution of the term “ideology” to New Criticism indicate, that metonymy was hardly a neutral or purely contingent association.
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It would be more accurate to say that lyric became a
metaphor
for the New Criticism, in the sense that both the genre and the critical perspective on that genre came to stand for one another—so much so that the ahistoricism attributed to New Critical close reading became confused and identified with an inherent ahistoricism of the lyric genre itself. Yet while many studies have exposed just how historical New Criticism actually was (as a conservative reaction to the new Left of the 1930s, as a post-Reconstruction Southern phenomenon, as a product of Eliot's literary theology, as an institutional grab for power in the postwar university), few have focused on how historically inflected the still-prevalent New Critical notion of “the lyric” was.
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One place to notice that inflection is in the New Critics' embrace of Dickinson. In Winters's reading of the poem he knew by the title “My Cricket,” lyric isolation is actually the subject of the interpretation. Winters' reading is worth citing in its entirety because it frames Dickinson's lines in exactly the terms that would be so influential, not only for the interpretation of Dickinson but for the interpretation—and formation—of the genre:

In the following poem, we are shown the essential cleavage between man, as represented by the author-reader, and nature, as represented by
the insects in the late summer grass; the subject is the plight of man, the willing and freely moving entity, in a universe in which he is by virtue of his essential qualities a foreigner. The intense nostalgia of the poem is the nostalgia of man for the mode of being which he perceives imperfectly and in which he cannot share. The change described in the last two lines is the change in the appearance of nature and in the feeling of the observer which results from the recognition of the cleavage:

The first two lines of the last stanza are written in the author's personal grammatical short-hand; they are no doubt defective in this respect, but the defect is minor. They mean: There is yet no diminution of beauty, no mark of change on the brightness. The twelfth line employs a meaningless inversion. On the other hand, the false rhymes are employed with unusually fine modulation; the first rhyme is perfect, the second and third represent successive stages of departure, and the last a return to what is roughly the stage of the second. These effects are complicated by the rhyming, both perfect and imperfect, from stanza to stanza. The intense strangeness of this poem could not have been achieved with standard rhyming. The poem, though not quite one of her most nearly perfect, is probably one of her five or six greatest, and is one of the most deeply moving and most unforgettable poems in my own experience; I have the feeling of having lived in its immediate presence for many years. (292–93)

The scrupulous formalism for which the New Critics, and especially Winters, became known is abundantly evident here, as is the cultivated appreciation of each formal feature. As R. P. Blackmur wrote of Winters in 1940, “his observations carry the impact of a sensibility which not only observed but modified the fact at hand; and we feel the impact as weight, as momentum, as authority.”
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That presumption of moral authority alienated Winters from much of the contemporary critical culture with which he was in conversation.
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But the important thing about his formalist, somewhat picky reading of Dickinson is that its aim is to establish her as “one of the greatest lyric poets of all time” (299). What Winters wanted to isolate and secure was the
literary
Dickinson—or Dickinson as definition of the literary, and especially of the lyric. He accomplishes that isolation in his full critical (and aesthetically italicized) citation of the poem and in his demonstration of its craftsmanship. The one “defect” that Winters finds in Dickinson's artistry are two small lines “in the author's personal grammatical shorthand.” Winters quickly dismisses the lapse as “minor,” but his remark speaks volumes by the time we get to his reading's stunning conclusion: the “personal” touch interferes with the critic's own personal identification with the poem's portrait of isolation. What matters for Winters's reading of the poem is not when it was written, how it was written, or who read it—in fact, for the image of literary isolation he wants to find in the poem, it is just as well that he does not know any of that. If he did, the lines would seem insufficiently lyric.

The ways in which Winters's investment in Dickinson's abstract alienation is also an investment in a certain definition of the lyric become even clearer when we notice that Winters's essay was in part a response to an essay on Dickinson that Allen Tate had published in 1932. Entitled “New England Culture and Emily Dickinson,” Tate's essay also identifies Dickinson's work as definitively literary, going so far as to claim that in order to appreciate Dickinson, one must have “a highly developed sense of the specific quality of poetry—a quality that most persons accept as the accidental feature of something else that the poet thinks he has to say. This is one reason why Miss Dickinson's poetry has not been widely read.”
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Tate's conclusion is a counterfactual statement: as we have seen, Dickinson's poetry
had
been widely read by 1932, most recently in a flurry of attention surrounding Aiken's and Bianchi's editions in 1924. But what is interesting about Tate's assertion is why it matters that his view of Dickinson rests on that fiction. As his title suggests, Tate wants Dickinson to represent not only “the specific quality of poetry” but to personify culture, namely American intellectual culture before and after what Tate calls by the Southern title “the War between the States.” As others have pointed
out, Tate's view is certainly informed by his own regional loyalties, and the form that regionalism takes in his version of Dickinson is that her work becomes regionally representative. In the passage that Winters cites from Tate just before his reading of “My Cricket,” Dickinson's local culture becomes evident in her relation to nature:

The enemy of all New Englanders was Nature, and Miss Dickinson saw into the character of this enemy more deeply than any of the others. The general symbol of Nature, for her, is Death, and her weapon against Death is the entire powerful dumb-show of the Puritan theology led by Redemption and Immortality … we are renewed by Nature without being delivered into her hands. When it is possible for a poet to do this for us with the greatest imaginative comprehension, a possibility that the poet himself cannot create, we have the perfect literary situation. Only a few times in the history of English poetry has this situation come about: notably, the period between about 1580 and the Restoration (159).

Vanderbilt and Norcross and Higginson and Niles and Todd would be surprised by Tate's view of Dickinson's “weapon against Death,” but perhaps that is because they shared Dickinson's culture. Tate's view is possible only from a temporal and regional purchase outside that culture—indeed, it is the otherness of “all New Englanders” in his account that allows his characterization of “the entire powerful dumb-show” in which they were, apparently, puppets. Tate's Dickinson becomes the voice of that “dumb-show,” a poet able to redeem not nature but culture itself: a Shakespeare, a Milton.

What Dickinson also redeemed for the New Critics was the profession of literary criticism. If Winters's response to Tate was to personalize the cultural alienation that Tate attributed to Dickinson, Blackmur's response a year before Winters's was to objectify alienation: “Mr. Tate builds up a pretty good historical prejudice and makes it available in the guise of insight,” Blackmur wrote, and he went on to identify Tate's partial account of intellectual history as

the prejudice contained in the idea of imagination being fed and dying, or for that matter living or doing anything whatever—that is to say, a prejudice about the nature of poetry itself as the chief mode of the imagination. Poetry is composed of words and whenever we put anything into poetry—such as meaning or music; whenever poetry is affected by anything—such as the pattern of a culture or the structure of a stanza; whenever anything at all happens in poetry it happens in the medium of words. It is also near enough the truth to say that whenever we take anything out of poetry, either to use it or to see just what it is, we have to take
it out in the words—and then put it right back before it gets lost or useless. 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; which we will observe, if we bother to discriminate our observation, as a series of facts about words.
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Blackmur's manifesto may certainly be read as what is now a truism about New Criticism: he insists on divorcing poetry from the sources of self-expression, rendering the poem a pure text to be read by the scientifically detached observer of linguistic “facts” (one can hear structuralism and poststructuralism rustling in the wings beyond Blackmur's performance). But Blackmur's phrase for his abstraction of poetry as pure language is curious: “whenever we take anything out of poetry, either to use it or to see just what it is, we have to take it out in the words—and then put it right back before it gets lost or useless.” Why would we have to take anything out of poetry? What would it mean to take something out of poetry? What is it that we could take out? Could we say that Dickinson's familiar readers “took something out” of her verse (even when it did not contain dead crickets)? If they did, why or how would they “put it right back”? Winters's response to Blackmur was to cast as subjective experience the objective scene of reading that Blackmur describes. Winters scrutinized the formal elements of the poem in order to abstract them and thus identify with their subject; Blackmur's version of an intersubjective relation to the poem is selective and utilitarian: rather than live in the poem's presence, he fiddles with its parts. Thus Blackmur concludes his evaluation of Dickinson by claiming that “she never undertook the great profession of controlling the means of objective expression” (223). Blackmur wants Dickinson to be a professional because he wants literary critics to be professionals, which is to say that the intersubjective function of the poem for Blackmur is not to reflect Dickinson's own intellectual culture or to reflect the individual taste of the reader but to create academic culture.
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