I meant it to be somewhat mysterious as "What the hell do these people have in common?!" but so much for that.Maybe for the best. Some people aren't entertained by "?¿?¿? MYSTERY POST ?¿?¿?".
My memory from the time I was reading ED biography and criticism a couple of decades ago is that pretty much every illness, trauma, psychological orientation, and/or romantic entanglement imaginable had been advanced by somebody or other as the "key" to the poetry.Creosote, you are absolutely right, and it hasn't changed at all. Possibly the most annoying tendency of Dickinson scholars over the years has been their need to advance various illnesses (tuberculosis and epilepsy are common proposals), anachronistic psychological disorders, and romantic disasters as the key to finally unlocking all the mysteries of Dickinson's life. For such an imaginative, cognitively original poet, the dull-witted psychobiographical industry that has sprung up around her is pretty embarrassing to watch.
Todd legend built up a pitiful Emily "hurt" by her "cruel" sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson.This is a frequently repeated assertion by adherents of the Susan Dickinson legacy, including scholars like Martha Nell Smith. Yet many of the sources on Susan's "cruelty" are not Todds at all—in fact, probably the most famous source is Lavinia Dickinson herself, who once said that Susan had shortened Emily's life by several years with her cruelty. There are also the damning letters of Mary Lee Hall, helpfully included in the first appendix to Richard B. Sewall's biography of Dickinson. And there are many of Dickinson's own letters to Susan (as well as one by Susan to Emily!) that address the imbalance in their relationship, with Emily constantly wishing for more from Susan while Susan, who had plenty to worry about on her own, consistently put her off.
Her violent images, the "spasmodic" rhythms Higginson deplored, and the sheer volume of her output show that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into the body.Dickinson is, as Richard B. Sewall has written, a poet of the "unitary moment," the sharp, paralyzing pulse of pain, numbness, or transformative vision. I can't think of another poet who has done this as E.D. does at her best: that is, she arrests in language the kind of human experience that is beyond language, moments in which a human being is seized by the play of forces much greater than herself. We see one such moment here, in a wonderful pair of lines from 1862:
When Winds take Forests in their Paws -And in another of my favorites, "It was not Death, for I stood up":
The Universe - is still -
(Fr477)
When everything that ticked - has stopped -Melville, in an essay of 1850, says of the Bard that "it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare." It seems to me that this is also what makes Dickinson, Dickinson. It has to be kept in mind that the kind of poetry that prevailed in Dickinson's day was almost uniformly smooth, clean, ringing, and musical. Dickinson at her most original is explosive, strange, and daring, with contorted syntax, slant rhymes, and magpie diction—choices that enable her to capture what might be lost to a more conventional poet.
And Space stares all around -
Or Grisly frosts - first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground -
(Fr355)
My loss, by sickness – Was it Loss?Epilepsy has been referred to as "the sacred disease" and often linked to mystics and creatives because the increased activity in the temporal lobe is thought to spike some kind of innate creative power. Whether or not this is empirically true, I have found that there are periods of creativity that precede/follow my seizures and it's an interesting rhythm to try and work around. There's a sense that yes, this is a sickness, but maybe it's also providing some kind of benefit in terms of creative thought.
Or that Etherial Gain –
« Older Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, ... | Sick of the Tea Party? Then tr... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by nathancaswell at 9:25 AM on February 20, 2010