Happy Birthday to The Belle of Amherst

Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830. It is not known why she withdrew from society so completely. Theories abound. Books have been written. But the mystery remains. What we have are her poems. A wide interior life lived in one room. Extraordinary.

EMILY DICKINSON FREAKS ME OUT.

I can’t settle into her poems and flip through the pages of her volumes with satisfaction and happiness and enjoyment of the verse. It’s all too jagged for me. It’s too raw. The long dashes in her lines, the lack of titles, the fact that she wrote all of this with the assumption that they would not be read – so there is a dashed-off immediate quality to almost all of it … like she would be sweeping the parlor, an entire poem would pop into her brain full-blown about, oh, death, or love, or fear – and she would stop sweeping, jot it down on a scrap of paper she kept in a pocket of her dress, and then go back to sweeping. Like that’s what all of her poems feel like to me, and it freaks me out. There is a great mystery surrounding Emily Dickinson (what happened to her? Why did she become a recluse?) and I, for one, hope the mystery is never solved. I enjoy reading the theories, I enjoy speculating … but I think I like the mystery better.

She CAN’T have really existed, can she?

Here is Ted’s post on Emily Dickinson. Ted and I collaborated, years ago, on a show about Joseph Cornell (my post about him here) who made some of his most famous “boxes” for Emily Dickinson (even though she was long dead). The entire cast immersed itself in Dickinson’s work, looking at it in a whole new way – trying to see it through Cornell’s eyes. It was a really vital and new and exciting process, and brought Emily Dickinson to life for me from the periphery. She became a Muse (Cornell was all about muses), a wise woman in a tower, throwing scraps of poems down on the populace (mainly Cornell) below. She was witty, fierce, she could be unforgiving, she withheld, nothing could convince her to unloose the bonds that tied her. She loved the bonds. Camille Paglia has always theorized that Emily Dickinson was an heir to the Marquis de Sade (gotta love Camille – or at least I do) – that her insistence on boundaries, limits, restraints – has more in common with the erotic underbelly of literature, the sado-masochism of some of history’s criminals, like de Sade – than with any of Dickinson’s contemporaries. In many ways, Dickinson stole from no one. She read widely, she loved poetry, but it appears that she had her own voice from the start. If you read early Sylvia Plath, you can FEEL her influences. Roethke, mainly, some of her poems steal his images wholesale, she imitates his line-length, his rhyme scheme … This sort of “stealing” is not plagiarism, it’s working out who you are as an artist and what you want to say. You read a writer and you think, “Ah. Now THAT is what I would like to do.” And in the beginning stages, you may imitate too much. You have not owned it yet. Eventually, you must shake off all of your influences, and emerge on your own two feet. Dickinson sounds like no one else. But generations of writers following her imitate her. She is that distinct. She is one of the few poets where you can recognize a poem of hers just by the look of it.

Such a shy retiring lady. But with a personality as giant as a movie star’s. What must she have been like in person? Underestimate her at your peril.

I went through a big Emily Dickinson phase in high school, even though she freaked me out even then. I remember being devastated once – I think I had asked a guy to the prom and he said no. I had cried for 24 hours. It was a tragedy. Friends called me up to comfort me. I wailed into the night. The next day I was exhausted from all the crying. And I wrote in my journal, “After great pain a formal feeling comes.”

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Like, yeah, I think Emily Dickinson might have been talking about something a bit more wrenching than not going to the Prom – but still! I remember vividly the feeling of being washed out, and almost timid and quiet in the aftermath of all the tears – and I realized that I did feel rather “formal”. She was right!

But still. It makes me laugh to think of today.

Back to Camille Paglia. Her giant book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson covers Emily Dickinson – as a matter of fact, Dickinson is the final chapter. I highly recommend that book anyway – there’s a lot in it that is silly, but boy is it fun to read. I love her. Her view of Dickinson is quite individual – she sees Dickinson as an aesthete, or a decadent, at least emotionally. She didn’t live it in the outer world like Oscar Wilde did, but her inner world was all decadence … she was someone addicted to the sensations of life. You can feel it in the breathless tone of her poems. Like she is constantly pricking herself with a pin, and gasping with the pain. The pain is pleasurable almost. Pain is a doorway to pleasure. When Dickinson writes about pain, she writes about briars and thorns and cold – when she writes about love she writes about sunshine and green and warmth … It is all in the senses. Connected by little dashes that make each poem seem breathless. She is bombarded by sensation, feeling … it sweeps over her like a wave.

Again, she seems virtually impossible to me. I love her for it.

Michael Schmidt wrote, in his wonderful book Lives of the Poets (which I’ll get to when I get to in this book excerpt thing):

She sewed her poems into little books and put them away, one after another, in a box, where after her death her sister found them, nine hundred poems “tied together with twine” in “sixty volumes.” And it’s not an untenable theory that the beloved whom she mourns, departed, may be Christ, the soul’s lover, rather than a particular man — or a particular woman.

Her poems vibrate with pain, feeling, thought, humor. She scares the shit out of me. The emotional life is a vast universe. You don’t have to travel widely to “have a life”. You don’t have to have tons of experiences. You are alive. What does it feel like to be alive? That’s the place Emily Dickinson writes from.

Here’s a poem.

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I taste a liquor never brewed —
From Tankards scooped in Pearl —
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air – am I —
And Debauchee of Dew —
Reeling — thro endless summer days —
From inns of Molten Blue —

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door —
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” —
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats —
And Saints – to windows run —
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the — Sun —

In the poem below, we could read whatever we want into it, it’s not “clear” – who is “You” – it would depend on where you are at in your life, the answer. You could read it as being addressed to God. Or it could be to a great lost love, one of those experiences that mark a person forever. “Because you saturated Sight / And I had no more Eyes / For sordid excellence / As paradise”. I have felt that way about a man.

640

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to —
Putting up
Our Life — His Porcelain —
Like a Cup —

Discarded of the Housewife —
Quaint — or Broke —
A newer Sevres pleases —
Old Ones crack —

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other’s Gaze down —
You — could not —

And I — Could I stand by
And see You — freeze —
Without my Right of Frost —
Death’s privilege?

Nor could I rise — with You —
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus’ —
That New Grace

Glow plain — and foreign
On my homesick Eye —
Except that You than He
Shone close by —

They’d judge Us — How —
For You — served Heaven — You know,
Or sought to–
I could not —

Because You saturated Sight —
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be —
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame —

And were You — saved —
And I — condemned to be
Where You were not —
That self — were Hell to Me —

So We must meet apart —
You there — I — here —
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are — and Prayer —
And that White Sustenance —
Despair —

Quotes and excerpts below about Emily Dickinson, in honor of her birthday.

“She is the spider, not the fly.” — Alison Brackenbury

“Her relationship to books , to literary preedent and example, was similar. She was no ransacker and devourer of libraries. Like Lincoln, she knew relatively few volumes but knew them deeply. As a girl she attended Amherst Academy and also Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, a few miles distant, during her seventeenth year, but school gave her neither intellectual nor social satisfactions to compensate for the reassuring intimacy of home and family she keenly missed. The standard works she knew best and drew on most commonly for allusions and references in her poetry and vivid letters were the classic myths, the Bible, and Shakespeare. Among the English Romantics, she valued John Keats especially; among her Englishc ontemporaries she was particularly attracted by the Brontes, the Brownings, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and George Eliot. None of these, however, can be said to have influenced her literary practice significantly. Indeed, not the least notable quality of her poetry is its dazzling originality. Thoreau and Emerson, especially the latter, as we know from her letters, were perhaps her most important contemporary American intellectual resources, though their liberal influence seems always to have been tempered by the legacy of a conservative Puritanism best expressed in the writings of Jonathan Edwards. Her chief prosodic and formal model was the commonly used hymnals of the times with their simple patterns of meter and rhyme.” — Norton Anthology of American Literature

“No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson …” — Richard Chase

“When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse — it does not mean — me — but a supposed person.” — Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

“Dear friend,
I congratulate you.
Disaster endears beyond Fortune —
E. Dickinson”
— letter written to a friend after the friend’s house had burned down

“Throughout her life ED was especially sensitive to such occasions.” — Emily Dickinson’s editor, commenting on a poem Dickinson wrote on the 4th anniversary of Charlotte Bronte’s death

“Whitman, Dickinson and Melville seem to me the best poets of the nineteenth century here in America.” — Randall Jarrell

“The language is not literary. It enacts heard experience. Kinsmen, unexpectedly met, chatting late into the night from their different places: it brings beauty and truth into intimate focus. Strange: These are the same great terms of Keats’s ‘cold pastoral’.” — Michael Schmidt

“Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood.” — Richard Chase

“I never read his book – but was told that he was disgraceful.” — Emily Dickinson on Walt Whitman

“My Mother does not care for thought.” — Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

“I am growing very handsome indeed!” — Emily Dickinson, age 14

“More than any other poet, Emily Dickinson seemed to tell me that the intense inner event, the personal and psychological, was inseparable from the universal; that there was a range for psychological poetry beyond mere self-expression.” — Adrienne Rich

“We have the legend, but the crucial facts in the recorded life are absent. Dickinson’s reticence seems part of her poetical strategy: if we could assign the poems to specific emotional events, we would ground them. As it is, they are a miracle and a mystery of language.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

“Her wit is accuracy.” — Alison Brackenbury

“Immense in scale and oratorical in tone, this amazing short poem [Safe In Their Alabaster Chambers] departs from Dickinson’s usual four-line stanza format, based on sturdy Protestant hymn measure. The first five-line stanza rolls out in a single, thrilling sentence, delivered in the magesterial public voice of a sermon or eulogy. Its as if the poem’s disturbing theme – the dead and their defeated hopes – can barely be contained by traditional structure.” — Camille Paglia, “Break, Blow, Burn”

“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.” — Emily Dickinson to Thomas Higginson, 1862

“Emily, you wretch! No more of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.” — Samuel Bowles, shouting up the stairs at Emily. Emily finally did come down.

“A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face a little like Belle Dove’s; not plainer – with no good feature – in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said ‘These are my introduction’ in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice — & added under her breathe Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say — but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously — & deferentially — sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her — but readily recommencing…I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.” — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Joseph Cornell, American artist, who specialized in making boxes – built boxes for Emily Dickinson. Her ghost haunts those boxes (of course even more so when you know which ones are the “Emily boxes”). But he didn’t build them as gifts FOR Emily Dickinson (who, of course, was long dead). He built them as spaces that she might inhabit. He was “preparing a place” for her. That’s why so many of the Emily boxes are empty. With open windows. Which is interesting, too. He always wanted to make sure that Emily had a way to escape.

Here is the most famous box he made for Emily Dickinson. It is called “Towards the Blue Peninsula”:

Haunting, isn’t it?

I can feel her presence in that box. It’s like she just left, via the window, but an afterimage remains. The Belle of Amherst has already flown the coop.