The literary canon is defined as those works of literature that are timeless. As the centuries pass by, canonical works continue to inspire and amaze. Poetry, that ever-elusive sub-genre of literature, has its own canon. Canonical poets include the old dead-white-guy-boring-familiars: the anonymous author of Beowulf, the blind Greek Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, Keats, Frost, and Eliot. When read under the right circumstances and with the right direction, these poets have the power to delight and surprise us.
Chaucer delights us with his tales of corrupt clergy, noble knights, and possibly promiscuous women. Keats asks us to ponder art on an ancient Grecian urn to find truth and beauty. Frost asks us to take the road less traveled. Eliot sees fog as cats and asks us to do the same.
But what of the female poets? What do they ask us to do?
Emily Dickinson asks us to embrace death. Not in a morbid, it’s-coming-anyway-might-as-well kind of way, but as an inevitability replete with images of bridal fashion and chariots, as only a mid-19th century Puritan New England recluse with pagan sensibilities could.
The persona of Emily Dickinson has been handed down to us as the crazy lady in the attic, pencil in hand, scribbling away nonsensical, non-titled, non-punctuated, obsessive thoughts about death and solitude, quite possibly her only friends.
Emily was different and hence wrote differently. Having little legacy of female poets upon which to draw, she looked to Keats and the Brownings for inspiration. But her poems are snapshots of unbridled, undisciplined passion. Sometimes the passion of these poems makes the reader squirm: the ease with which she accepts death, as a lover or tyrant, is unnerving to the 21st-century reader.
Her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts wasn’t ready for this kind of morbid feminine creativity and neither was the rest of the world. During her lifetime, Emily published only a handful of poems.
The other 1700 poems were published posthumously.
The genius of Emily Dickinson can be experienced in one of her most famous poems, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.”
The eerie ease with which the bridal-veiled narrator of this poem climbs aboard the death carriage and leisurely rides through town at dusk, marveling at the landscape and the schoolchildren at recess, and finally reaching her grave (a house that seemed/A swelling of the ground) makes us think had Emily lived today, she would have been either a Goth princess or a Zen master, or both:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ’tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.
Yes, she’s weird. She’s wearing wispy, spider-web clothes (gossamer, tippet) and seems to be rather enjoying her ride with and toward Death, which she calls her home. She even tells us she’s going to concentrate on the ride and the ride only, and puts away “My labor, and my leisure, too/For his civility.”
Because putting down your labor and leisure is the polite thing to do when Death shows up to take you on a ride to his house.
But perhaps the coolest thing about Emily Dickinson, the thing your teachers never told you because it’s not academic enough, is that this poem is written in iambic quadrameter.
Which means you can sing it to the theme of Gilligan’s Island.
I say we enjoy the ride and put her in the canon.
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Shelly Lane said:
How do you even notice these things? That’s awesome! I’m sitting here singing it…..
November 8th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Emily Dickinson and the Nature of Language « SheSpoke. Find out what she said said:
[...] to do that with my personal favorite crazy lady in attic, Emily Dickinson. The pudding is over at Great History. [...]
November 8th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Pete said:
Brilliant observation about Gilligan’s Island and the fact that Emily Dickinson is far more interesting than we ever learned in school!
November 17th, 2009 at 4:10 pm