We all have our own Emily Dickinson.
Just as we all have our own Dostoyevsky, our own Jesus, our own Mr. Ed.
The problem when it comes to Emily Dickinson is that too many of us have the same one. I mean the agoraphobic, spinster-recluse of Amherst weaving spiderishly her acerbic enigmatic spells in the seclusion of a dusty obscurity, sex-inverted self-exile from a world she didn't so much renounce and pine for, as never belonged in from the beginning.
Emily Dickinson has become a stereotype more than a poet and like all stereotypes that prevents us from seeing her rightly; more importantly, Dickinson as "special case" becomes the beam in the eye blinding us to the complexity and full power of her poetry. It prevents us from extending to her the intellectual rigor that we naturally give as a matter of course to other poets and that like other poets her work deserves—and demands—if we are to truly appreciate it.
In her controversial essay on Dickinson in her controversial book Sexual Personae, literary provocateur Camille Paglia gave us her Emily Dickinson, an erotically-charged versifying dominatrix whom she perversely reframed and dubbed the Marquis de Sade of Amherst.
In this book, Susan Howe offers us yet another apocryphal Dickinson. Rather than the unsophisticated, accidental poet of myth, Howe evokes an Emily who, though primarily an autodidact, was nonetheless a wide-ranging and insightful student of literature. Her community was literary and she was no stranger to the society of Shakespeare, the Brontes, the Brownings, Emerson, Thoreau, and George Eliot, among many others.
In other words, Dickinson wasn't a variety of idiot-savant, writing in a vacuum, as the dominant myth surrounding her would have it. She was writing, as all great writers do, in dialogue with other writers, both of the past and of her own time, taking her place in an ongoing conversation that would eventually make her poetry an important part of the future, our present, and now, of literary history.
Howe is careful to point out that what kept Dickinson from being recognized as a great poet in her own generation—and for a surprisingly long time afterwards—wasn't only that she was a woman. Of course, her gender had something to do with it. But there were famous women poets in Dickinson's day. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among them. No, what set Dickinson to the side of the road was that she wouldn't—or couldn't—write like a woman. Or for that matter, any man then writing verse. Instead she insisted on exploding the conventions of her time, on discovering and developing her own unique language, technique, and form, much like Whitman and Melville, but even more extreme, for the expression of a vision unlike any other.
In My Emily Dickinson, Howe doesn't only trace Dickinson's literary precursors, but the historical milieu that produced the peculiar socio-religious culture which Dickinson inherited. Howe ranges widely, introducing the fiery sermons of Jonathan Edwards and the luridly popular Indian captivity tales of early pilgrim life as influences on Dickinson's sensibility. Daniel Boone and James Fenimore Cooper factor into the equation, the American Civil War, too, the issues of slavery, women's rights, and the precarious survival of early white settlements in a dangerous, dark, and "godless" wilderness are all traceable in Dickinson's work.
Emily Dickinson, in Howe's vision, is a sum total of her time and all that led up to her time. The recluse poet is not a crank shut-in, but a sybil, a prophetess, whose poetry was oracular; it spoke to and of her time, and speaks forward to our time; it's perfectly understandable that she was ignored while she lived as no prophet, so the gospel goes, is accepted in her own land.
Howe's book is an example of what has become known as "creative scholarship." Instead of taking the cool, objective, if not downright superior posture critics usually take to their subject, Howe engages Dickinson across time and space. She encounters, rather than interprets Emily D, with a passionate immediacy woman-to-woman, poet-to-poet. This makes for a far richer and more rewarding reading experience than provided by the invariably reductive, reasoned arguments of most traditional literary criticism.
Certainly many of Howe's interpretations and conclusions can be disputed. They are meant to be disputed. Dickinson is large; she contains multitudes. That is the overriding message that this book delivers. Howe makes no pretense of finality. This is Howe's Emily Dickinson. She suggests that we each find our own.
What Howe does at long last dispense with is the long-standing image of Emily Dickinson as victim. If Dickinson often referred to herself as a mouse, Howe reveals the intended irony. Shut up in that house in Amherst was a wild untamed tiger, if demurely dressed in mouse's quiet clothing. In this, Howe's Emily and Paglia's Dickinson merge. In both women's view, Emily Dickinson was a force to be reckoned with which no one in her day and age was prepared to reckon. "Luck," acknowledges Howe, "provided her with a devoted family that protected her privacy, a large house, a room of her own, and money." In this, as a woman of her time, Emily Dickinson was privileged, if she suffered for her gender in other, more obvious ways. But there's no reason for us to mourn or feel sorry for Emily D. What she lacked in recognition, Howe suggests, was more than made up for in her revelatory vision—a vision that may have cost her the world but gave her eternity.
Howe writes: "Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun that an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame. Childe Roland at the moment of sinking down with the sun, like Phaeton in a ball of flame, sees his visionary precursor peers ringed around him waiting."
With exalted company like that who could want anything from the common run of society? Recluse, misfit, loner she may have been, but Emily Dickinson was never alone.
bedrock sky—
a deer split clean
down the center
hail dancing
on the hood
the radio
loses its signal
you reach up
to press the on-star button
for directions
its secrets
secrets
secrets
all the way down
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