The mystery of the white injury

The principal frontage of the house D’Emily Dickinson in Amherst.

"the house is my definition of God" declared Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Blow, it lived more than twenty-five years recluse at it, in Amherst, in Massachusetts. A residence become a place of pilgrimage.

Emily Dickinson incarnates a form D’absolu: L’absence in the world. Not the withdrawal or the jamming of the tracks which manufactures the myths in Salinger, non: voluntary reclusion in the carmel D’a room, far from the glances, with Cœur burning L’gasoline of the things.

Emily Dickinson or the paradigm of the tower D’ivory, this pale and dense matter on which the light slips. Wrapped whiteness, vêtue of flax, C’are with the matity of the paper qu sheet’it entrusts its heart, its enchantments and its angers, its visions, its interrogations, its certainty. No one or almost N’will know anything of it.

Seventy years S’will run out before a complete edition of its thousand seven hundred and seventy-five poems appears, founders with those of Whitman of American poetry. And almost a century before the first reliable biography, that D’a girl of the middle-class D’Amherst, Massachusetts, which one day was withdrawn in its house, then in its room, and N’left there more jusqu’to its death.

During twenty-five years, no one in Amherst did not see its face. Time with other, however, it sometimes happened to him to descend a bread D’spices with the end D’a cord for the children. The residence of cossue neo-classic family of style gave on the street. Of its window, Emily Dickinson could follow L’animation of Street Hand. L’different bay, it saw Evergreen, the house of his/her brother and Susan, his beautifulœur with which it had tied, a few years during, an impassioned friendship. The world is not indifferent for him or foreign, it finds it in the veins D’a petal or the buzz D’a fly.

It is understood that Christian Bobin saw, for a long time, in the white Injury, an Sœur D’election. And text qu’it devotes to him delivers Emily Dickinson to us secret and vibrating, very whole granted to the interior music which L’lives. Qu’one S’does not mislead there. Nothing mièvre, but on the contrary the rate/rhythm haletant of that (celui?) who seeks far from the noise and the fury to tear off with silence some spangles of vérité: "the tyranny of visible done us of the blind men. L’glare of the verb bores the night of the world ", notices it. Nothing narcissistic or D’hypocritically identificatoire, for as much. Not de: "I make pretence speak D to you’it but C’is of me qu’it S’acts" Christian Bobin S’erases, and this obliteration is the only trace, in hollow, of its presence. With him we penetrate in the residence D’Amherst, and the doors are closed again, us delivering in all their purity the search D’Emily, its passions and its despairs "the house is my definition of God", writes the young woman at the same time éperdue of transcendence and rebel to the religion of his pars. As for the father himself, Edward Dickinson, member of the Congress, with Cœur "pure and terrible" according to words' of his daughter, it is the main beam of this house where each one, according to the word of Vinnie, the Sœur, is a king of its own kingdom.

One is grateful in Christian Bobin D’to have penetrated this kingdom without effraction: no psychology (a mother melancholic person, an authoritative father, etc.) but the dialogue with a perforated life of mysteries, woven in the banality of the daily newspaper. Emily gathers its poems per packages of twenty, sews them and arranges them in a drawer "At the same time when she revêt her dress white, points out Christian Bobin, Rimbaud, with the furious negligence of youth, gives up her fairy-like book in the cellar D’a printer and flees towards L’Orient stupefied" both "work to be made forget". Amherst, like Charleville, became places of pilgrimage.
Évelyne Bloch-Dano
The white Injury, Christian Bobin, éd. Gallimard, "L’one and L’different", 120 p., 14,50 €.
Because L’good-bye C’is the night, Emily Dickinson, éd. Gallimard, "Poetry", 448 p., 9,80 €. www.ebloch-dano.com

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The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

by Martha Hale Shackford

Not long ago a distinguished critic, reviewing Father Tabb's poetry, remarked, 'At his most obvious affinity, Emily Dickinson, I can only glance. It seems to me that he contains in far finer form pretty much everything that is valuable in her thought.' Are we thus to lose the fine significance of poetic individuality? A poet is unique, incomparable, and to make these comparisons between poets is to ignore the primary laws of criticism, which seeks to discover the essential individuality of writers, not their chance resemblances. It is as futile as it is unjust to parallel Father Tabb's work with Emily Dickinson's: his is full of quiet reverie, hers has a sharp stabbing quality which disturbs and overthrows the spiritual ease of the reader. Emily Dickinson is one of our most original writers, a force destined to endure in American letters.

There is no doubt that critics are justified in complaining that her work is often cryptic in thought and unmelodious in expression. Almost all of her poems are written in short measures, in which the effect of curt brevity is increased by her verbal penuriousness. Compression and epigrammatical ambush are her aids; she proceeds, without preparation or apology, by sudden, sharp zigzags. What intelligence a reader has must be exercised in the poetic game of hare-and-hounds, where ellipses, inversions, and unexpected climaxes mislead those who pursue sweet reasonableness. Nothing, for instance, could seem less poetical than this masterpiece of unspeakable sounds and chaotic rhymes:--

COCOON

Drab habitation of whom?
Tabernacle or tomb,
Or dome of worm,
Or porch of gnome,
Or some elf's catacomb.

If all her poems were of this sort there would be nothing more to say; but such poems are exceptions. Because we happen to possess full records of her varying poetic moods, published, not with the purpose of selecting her most artistic work, but with the intention of revealing very significant human documents, we are not justified in singling out a few bizarre poems and subjecting these to skeptical scrutiny. The poems taken in their entirety are a surprising and impressive revelation of poetic attitude and of poetic method in registering spiritual experiences. To the general reader many of the poems seem uninspired, imperfect, crude, while to the student of the psychology of literary art they offer most stimulating material for examination, because they enable one to penetrate into poetic origins, into radical, creative energy. However, it is not with the body of her collected poems but with the selected, representative work that the general reader is concerned. Assuredly we do not judge an artist by his worst, but by his best, productions; we endeavor to find the highest level of his power and thus to discover the typical significance of his work.

To gratify the aesthetic sense was never Emily Dickinson's desire; she despised the poppy and mandragora of felicitous phrases which lull the spirit to apathy and emphasize art for art's sake. Poetry to her was the expression of vital meanings, the transfer of passionate feeling and of deep conviction. Her work is essentially lyric; it lacks the slow, retreating harmonies of epic measures, it does not seek to present leisurely details of any sort; its purpose is to objectify the swiftly-passing moments and to give them poignant expression .

Lyric melody finds many forms in her work. Her repressed and austere verses, inexpansive as they are, have persistent appeal. Slow, serene movement gives enduring beauty to these elegiac stanzas:--

Let down the bars, O Death!
The tired flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,
Whose wandering is done.

Thine is the stillest night,
Thine the securest fold;
Too near thou art for seeking thee,
Too tender to be told.

The opposite trait of buoyant alertness is illustrated in the cadences of the often-quoted lines on the hummingbird:--

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal.

Between these two margins come many wistful, pleading, or triumphant notes. The essential qualities of her music are simplicity and quivering responsiveness to emotional moods. Idea and expression are so indissolubly fused in her work that no analysis of her style and manner can be attempted without realizing that every one of her phrases, her changing rhythms, is a direct reflection of her personality. The objective medium is entirely conformable to the inner life, a life of peculiarly dynamic force which agitates, arouses, spurs the reader.

The secret of Emily Dickinson's wayward power seems to lie in three special characteristics, the first of which is her intensity of spiritual experience. Hers is the record of a soul endowed with unceasing activity in a world not material, but one where concrete facts are the cherished revelation of divine significances. Inquisitive always, alert to the inner truths of life, impatient of the brief destinies of convention, she isolated herself from the petty demands of social amenity. A sort of tireless, probing energy of mental action absorbed her, yet there is little speculation of a purely philosophical sort in her poetry. Her stubborn beliefs, learned in childhood, persisted to the end,--her conviction that life is beauty, that love explains grief, and that immortality endures. The quality of her writing is profoundly stirring, because it betrays, not the intellectual pioneer, but the acutely observant woman, whose capacity for feeling was profound. The still, small voice of tragic revelation one hears in these compressed lines:--

PARTING

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

For sheer, grim, unrelieved expression of emotional truth there are few passages which can surpass the personal experience revealed in the following poem:--

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Her absorption in the world of feeling found some relief in associations with nature; yet although she loved nature and wrote many nature lyrics, her interpretations are always more or less swayed by her own state of being. The colors, the fragrances, the forms of the material world, meant to her a divine symbolism; but the spectacle of nature had in her eyes a more fugitive glory, a lesser consolation, than it had for Wordsworth and other true lovers of the earth.

Brilliant and beautiful transcripts of bird-life and of flower-life appear among her poems, although there is in some cases a childish fancifulness that disappoints the reader. Among the touches of unforgettable vividness there are:--

These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June,--
A blue and gold mistake;

and

Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Leaves she all of that for sunsets,--
Prodigal of blue


Never has any poet described the haunting magic of autumnal days with such fine perception of beauty as marks the opening stanzas of 'My Cricket':--

Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.

No ordinance is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.

Most effective, however, are those poems where she describes not mere external beauty, but, rather, the effect of nature upon a sensitive observer:--

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'T is the seal, despair,--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

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, a 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 poem already quoted, ' Let down the bars, O Death!' has its own rustic vividness of association. Even more homely is the domestic suggestion wherewith the poet sets forth an eternally, profoundly significant fact:--

The trying on the utmost,
The morning it is new,
Is terribler than wearing it
A whole existence through


Surely such a commonplace comparison gives startling vividness to the innate idea. Many are the poetic uses she makes of practical everyday life:--

The soul should always stand ajar;

and

The only secret people keep
Is Immortality;

and

Such dimity convictions,
A horror so refined,
Of freckled human nature,
Of Deity ashamed;


and

And kingdoms, like the orchard,
Flit russetly away;

and

If I couldn't thank you,
Being just asleep,
You will know I'm trying
With my granite lip.


More significantly, however, than in these epithets and figures, irony and paradox appear in those analyses of truth where she reveals the deep note of tragic idealism:--

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;

and

Essential oils are wrung
The atter from the rose
Is not expressed by suns alone,
It is the gift of screws.

She took delight in piquing the curiosity, and often her love of mysterious challenging symbolism led her to the borderland of obscurity. No other of her poems has, perhaps, such a union of playfulness and of terrible comment upon the thwarted aspirations of a suffering soul as has this:--

I asked no other thing,
No other was denied.
I offered Being for it;
The mighty merchant smiled.

Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
'But, madam, is there nothing else
That we can show to-day?'

Since life seemed, to her, seldom to move along wholly simple and direct ways, she delighted to accentuate the fact that out of apparent contradictions and discords are wrought the subtlest harmonies:--

To learn the transport by the pain,
As bend men learn the sun;

and

Sufficient truth that we shall rise--
Deposed, at length, the grave--
To that new marriage, justified
Through Calvaries of Love;

and

The lightning that preceded it
Struck no one but myself,
But I would not exchange the bolt
For all the rest of life.

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. Her creed was expressed in these stanzas:--

They say that 'time assuages,'--
Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age.

Time is a test of trouble,
But not a remedy.
If such it prove, it proves too
There was no malady.


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. She looked at existence with a vision so exalted and secure that the reader is long dominated by that very excess of spiritual conviction. A poet in the deeper mystic qualities of feeling rather than in the external merit of precise rhymes and flawless art, Emily Dickinson's place is among those whose gifts are

Too intrinsic for renown.

The Atlantic Monthly; January 1913; The Poetry of Emily Dickinson; Volume 11, No. 1; pages 93-97.

Source: www.theatlantic.com

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EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

"God keep me from what they call households"

Birthplace
Amherst, Massachusetts

Education
Amherst Academy, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

Other jobs
She gradually withdrew from the world and spent much of her life secluded in the family home. She helped with all the work of a large 19th-century household, rising before dawn every day to make the fires and prepare the family breakfast and looking after the conservatory and garden. With her sister Lavinia, she nursed their mother in her final illness.

Did you know?
The house on North Pleasant Street where she lived between the ages of 10 and 25 was built next to a graveyard, with her bedroom window facing the cemetery. Five of her school friends died of consumption and were buried in it during her time there.

Critical verdict
Though known as something of a poet to her friends and family, circulating poems in letters and hand-sewn manuscript books, Emily Dickinson had only a handful of poems published during her lifetime. After her death she became an overnight sensation. The first edition of her poems was produced in 1890, and sold 10,000 copies. This was a regularised version, which flattened out her unconventional spelling, capitalisation and puctuation. It was quickly followed by more of her poetry and her letters. Some early critics marked her down as being part of the avant-garde, condemning her "versicles" for their odd rhyme and "queer" form. One English reviewer remarked that "she reminds us of no sane or educated writer." Others claimed that her poetry was deeply rooted in New England Puritanism, praising her as a "Recluse Woman of Genius". Her reputation dipped after the enormous success of the 1890s, with poets and critics alike preferring Walt Whitman's expansive lines to the "bare, bleak and fragmentary" verse of the Amherst wraith, but has been on the rise since the 1950s. The popularity of her poetry has always been bound up with interest in her unconventional life - a fact keenly appreciated by her first editors. They were the first to understand the appeal of an isolated, shadowy figure, dressed only in white, "starving of passion in her father's garden", and fostered the first of many myths about her life - that she wrote in secret. She has been characterised as a feminist, a Marxist, a lesbian and a covert nun. Early feminist critics indentified her as the archetypal woman poet who "take[s] her own metaphors literally," enacting them in her own life. She has been a central figure in the feminist canon ever since.

Recommended works
Dickinson's poetry presents the editor with a unique set of problems. Only eight of her poems were published during her lifetime, the rest being circulated in manuscript form among her friends and family. Many poems exist in more than one version. Her manuscripts also play with typographical convention in their layout, punctuation and capitalisation. Even in fair copies alternative words or lines are retained, suggesting that for Dickinson there is no such thing as a definitive, final version. Moreover her manuscripts are owned by Harvard University and Amherst College, and access is "vigorously policed and controlled". Many of the cheaper editions substitute commas for Dickinson's vibrant dashes and flatten out her capitalisation and spelling. Faber's 'complete' edition is based on the first edition which did not do so, though due to a dispute over ownership the editor was allowed to see some of the manuscripts only twice. The editor of the now 'standard' Harvard edition had no such problems of access. The brief Everyman selection also keeps her dashes - her striking language, deft changes of register and compressed syntax still seem fresh.

Influences
George Eliot, the Brontes, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats. She discussed literature constantly with her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, sending her many poems in draft form.

Now read on
The same fierce concern with religion may be found in her near contemporary, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and something of the same precise attention to the natural world. He was another poet who was unpublished during his lifetime and he also experimented with form and syntax, though always within a rolling lyricism totally different from Dickinson's deliberate staccato.

Recommended biography
Try Richard B Sewall's The Life of Emily Dickinson. For a more rounded picture of the poet, read it alongside Cynthia Griffin Wolff's biography, Emily Dickinson, which also includes extensive critical analysis.

Source: http://books.guardian.co.uk

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