The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

For a long while (until the publication in 1999 of an edition of the poems by R. W. Franklin), most readers, scholars, and teachers regarded Johnson’s edition as the authoritative one. But for some, it did not go far enough. The critics Sharon Cameron and Susan Howe, for example, argue that the variant words Dickinson often included at the bottom of a manuscript page should be read as essential parts of the poems; among Dickinson’s myriad innovations, they claim, is a new approach to poetics in which writers and readers need not always choose one word and meanings can proliferate in fruitful mayhem. (Cameron,
Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles,
and Howe,
My Emily Dickinson
). Others have complained that the fascicles should be treated as separate volumes; or that Johnson’s division of most of the poems into quatrains is too sweeping and Dickinson’s stanza divisions are more varied than he allowed. In the original manuscript, for example, the first words of the poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” (p. 96) are on two lines, with “the Grass” set as a separate line against the left margin; Johnson argues that this was due to lack of writing space, but others suggest a more deliberate experimentation with line breaks on Dickinson’s part.

It should be noted that this edition arranges Dickinson’s poems by theme, and regularizes her punctuation and capitalization; readers eager for a version of the poems closer to the manuscripts should seek out Johnson’s edition, as well as the stimulating criticism of Cameron, Howe, and others.

In a poem not included in this edition, Dickinson wrote about the posthumous fate of poets:

Crudely paraphrased, the poem asserts that after poets die, they are interpreted—if they are “vital” enough—in different ways by different people. This has certainly been the case with Dickinson, who has influenced later writers in an astonishing variety of ways.

Hart Crane’s sonnet “To Emily Dickinson,” though it overlooks her wit and range, tenderly invokes a “sweet, dead Silencer”:

Here and elsewhere, Crane’s obsessive use of dashes shows that Dickinson’s ghost was never far from his side. Archibald MacLeish claimed, somewhat condescendingly, “Most of us are half in love with this girl” (in Bogan,
Emily Dickinson:
Three Views, p. 20). William Carlos Williams remarked in an interview,

Elizabeth Bishop, though she admitted that “I still hate the oh the-pain-of-it-all poems,” noted, “I admire many others” (Kalstone,
Becoming a Poet,
p. 132).

Confessional poetry, with its harsh excavations of the self’s deepest places, would not be as rich without Dickinson’s example. Robert Frost, though seldom classed as a confessional poet, wrote several poems in which exploration of his “Desert Places” leads him to a terrifying inner antagonist, a “blanker whiteness” (Frost,
The Poetry of Robert Frost,
p. 296) that recalls both Dickinson’s customary dress color and her observations: “Pain has an element of blank” (p. 16) and “One need not be a chamber to be haunted” (p. 224). Finding depths within oneself, of course, can be cause for celebration as well as fear, a fact of which Wallace Stevens seems acutely aware in these lines from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”:

Here, as often happens in Dickinson’s work, the human and the divine change places, and the mind’s capacity is found to be equal or superior to God’s.

Several later poets, like Dickinson before them, make death a character: Anne Sexton titled one of her poems “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Death & Co.” personifies not one but
two
Deaths. (There are also numerous moments in the work of both poets when they imagine their own deaths.) And the popular poet Billy Collins cheerfully profanes Dickinson’s woman-in-white mystique in “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” describing how

Adrienne Rich, in several striking poems, presents a feisty and determined Dickinson. In the fourth section of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” she portrays her

And in “The Spirit of Place,” Rich angrily describes the Emily Dickinson Industry’s invasion of her home:

But despite “The remnants pawed the relics / the cult assembled in the bedroom,” the scholars do not get the last word, for “you whose teeth were set on edge by churches / resist your shrine / escape.” Rich vows that her relationship to Dickinson will be a very different one in which “with the hands of a daughter I would cover you / from all intrusion even my own / saying rest to your ghost” (Rich,
The Fact of a Doorframe,
pp. 184-185).

Dickinson’s widespread influence can perhaps best be seen in poets who are in most ways nothing like her. e.e. cummings, as formally explosive as Dickinson was—at least superficially—conservative, begins one poem in this way:

cummings’s “dooms of love,” “sames of am,” and “haves of give” recall Dickinson’s peculiar use of the genitive case in a poem in which she describes heaven as “The House of Supposition” that “Skirts the Acres of Perhaps” (
Complete Poems,
poem 696). In addition, the paradoxes of the third and fourth lines of cummings’s stanza—“each morning out of each night” and “depths of height”—resemble Dickinson’s characteristic trait, discussed earlier, of translating big into small, life into death, and—in the case of poem 696, riches into poverty: “The Wealth I had—contented me—/ If ‘twas a meaner size—”.

Dickinson has even made her way into fiction. Judith Farr’s 1996 novel
I Never Came to You in White
offers a fictionalized biography of Dickinson. And in A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel
Possession: A Romance—a
double love story in which two modern academics investigate the secret love affair of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte—Dickinson is the model for the female heroine. At the beginning of the novel, Byatt provides a list of some of the more silly-sounding articles critics have written about her heroine:

But before long, these limited views of LaMotte give way to a much more rich and complex one, mostly because Byatt lets the poet speak for her eccentric, resourceful self, as in this letter:

Dickinson’s influence can be felt everywhere. Writers are in her thrall; every year the Poetry Society of America offers an award “for a poem inspired by Dickinson”; the 2002 Modern Language Association featured several panels on her work; she even has her own International Society. As Dickinson herself predicted, her light may have gone out, but the lenses of later ages keep reflecting and refracting it in all sorts of inventive and unexpected ways. The intense eyes of the young woman in the photograph will keep peering into ours for a very long time.

 

Rachel Wetzsteon
received her doctorate in English from Columbia University in 1999 and is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University. She has published two books of poems,
The Other Stars
and
Home and Away,
and has received various awards for her poetry. She currently lives in New York City.

I

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.

II

OUR share of night to bear,
Our share of morning,
Our blank in bliss to fill,
Our blank in scorning.

 

Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way.
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards—day!

III

SOUL, wilt thou toss again?
By just such a hazard
Hundreds have lost, indeed,
But tens have won an all.

 

Angels’ breathless ballot
Lingers to record thee;
Imps in eager caucus
Raffle for my soul.

IV

’T is so much joy! ’T is so much joy!
If I should fail, what poverty!
And yet, as poor as I
Have ventured all upon a throw;
Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so
This side the victory!

 

Life is but life, and death but death!
Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath!
And if, indeed, I fail,
At least to know the worst is sweet.
Defeat means nothing but defeat,
No drearier can prevail!

 

And if I gain,—oh, gun at sea,
Oh, bells that in the steeples be,
At first repeat it slow!
For heaven is a different thing
Conjectured, and waked sudden in,
And might o‘erwhelm me so!

V

GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

 

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie
¹
souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

 

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

VI

IF I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

VII

WITHIN my reach!
I could have touched!
I might have chanced that way!
Soft sauntered through the village,
Sauntered as soft away!
So unsuspected violets
Within the fields lie low,
Too late for striving fingers
That passed, an hour ago.

VIII

A wounded deer leaps highest,
I’ve heard the hunter tell;
’T is but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake
²
is still.

 

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic
³
stings!

 

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it caution arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt” exclaim!

IX

THE heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
⁴
That deaden suffering;