Additional Reading for Next Week:
Friends,
I'm sticking to my five poems/five days format, and will have next week's poems up tomorrow morning. But our subject for this week will be the word and concept "wife"--especially as Dickinson understood it in relationship to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. I'll post some relevant bits from the Sewall bio. But here is a seminal feminist essay on Dickinson, written by the great poet Adrienne Rich. Read it in addition to the poems and biographical snippets for next week. Thanks!!
http://parnassusreview.com/archives/416
Friends,
I'm sticking to my five poems/five days format, and will have next week's poems up tomorrow morning. But our subject for this week will be the word and concept "wife"--especially as Dickinson understood it in relationship to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. I'll post some relevant bits from the Sewall bio. But here is a seminal feminist essay on Dickinson, written by the great poet Adrienne Rich. Read it in addition to the poems and biographical snippets for next week. Thanks!!
http://parnassusreview.com/archives/416
I really enjoyed reading this essay, and think Rich provides a clear explanation of the enormous gap between what most people think of when they hear Emily Dickinson's name (often just "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" and "'Hope' is the thing with feathers") and the sheer genius of which ED was fully capable.
ReplyDeleteAbout a third of the way through the essay, I was disappointed by the quotes Rich cited from three different men about ED and her supposed limitations:
1. "One of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood" (Richard Chase)
2. "A little home-keeping person" who "was not one of those poets who had advanced to that alter stage of operations where manuscripts are prepared for the printer" (John Crowe Ransom)
3. "This dead girl" (Archibald MacLeish) . . . but as Rich notes, ED was 55 when she died, which is to say ED died when she was older than my mother is today
If ED were a man, Rich notes, ED's style and work (as an adult woman who was cool enough to make her own books by hand, thank you very much) would likely be seen as uniquely intentioned. But instead, ED is frequently perceived as naive, amusingly eccentric and strangely reclusive.
I was intrigued by the essay's reference to a 1971 United States Postal Service release of ED postage stamps--featuring an unfortunately bland choice of ED poem, as Rich recounts--and found the New York Times newspaper page from that announcement, of which you can view a scan here: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/06/06/91300116.html?pageNumber=198. The eight-cent postage stamp (eight cents?! if only) "presents the young Emily Dickinson holding a nosegay. The portrait will be in black, presented in an oval frame against a pale green background. Miniaturization, hopefully, will not lose the quiet loveliness of the young woman." . . . which I thought was a little weird. All postage stamps are miniature. Every single person/object/figure/place depicted on any postage stamp ever has to be small, by necessity. As fun as it would be to stick a life-sized picture of ED on an envelope before taking it to the post office, that would be entirely impractical. Any notable feature for a postage stamp will be miniaturized, which is a shame because you might need to squint at the stamp to make out the details, but why did David Lidman at the New York Times have to say anything about ED in particular losing her "quiet loveliness" in the process? Just seemed a bit odd to me.
Anyhow, ED certainly wasn't a naive child, but an insightful and skilled writer. I thought Rich's characterization of ED as "a great psychologist" with "the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence" was particularly apt.