Poem of the week
Carol Rumens
January 28, 2008 1:30 PM
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/01/poem_of_the_week_25.html
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A version of this Emily Dickinson no doubt existed. "Hills, the sundown and a
dog large as myself," she replied to her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
when asked about her companions. But perhaps, like many writers, she also
rather enjoyed creating a semi-fictitious persona, enabling her partly to
take cover, partly to be glimpsed.
Protestant hymns, prayers and sermons, alongside the Bible, are included in
the conventional litany of her influences. Again, we may too easily think we
have her measure - the measure of her mental life and her formal influences,
the measure of her "measure".
Of course, her favoured metrical scheme is that of the hymn. Her habit of
using dashes recalls perhaps the kind of evangelical oratory in which the
speaker pauses significantly, so as to emphasise the word just said. And
there is Biblical reference in abundance. But her images and her rhymes, if
not always her rhythms, are startlingly unconventional.
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She is something of a scientist and something of a naturalist. But I think of
her above all as a self-dramatiser. Postmodern avant la lettre, she
explained, "When I state myself as the representative of the verse, it does
not mean - me - but a supposed person." The roles she plays are diverse:
butterfly, queen, death, child. She is not a poet who talks to us but who
invites us to her performance. I feel certain that Sylvia Plath learned much
from her in the creation of poetic personality. The personality is
fundamentally tragic, but also elevated and stylish.
There is another resemblance with Plath. Ted Hughes's re-ordering of the
Ariel text caused controversy, until a revised collection, adhering to
Plath's original arrangement, was eventually published. Dickinson published
no books in her lifetime, and very few poems, but she stitched her poems into
miniature collections of her own. These were dismembered and the poems
re-organised by her earliest editors, firstly, according to old-fashioned
poetic categories such as "life" and "nature", and later, more usefully,
according to chronology. However, in 1981, Ralph Franklin reconstituted the
"fascicles", as scholars termed these little books, and published them as The
Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson.
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