Emily Dickinson wrote short. Short does not mean sweet. Short does not mean easy. Just in case you think you can wing it with the nun of Amherst, let me quote Harold Bloom: ‘One’s mind had better be at its rare best’ when reading Dickinson. Approach her with humility and full attention – she has a mind like a laser beam and she can seriously damage your complacency. ‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun’. So does the poetry. She was an aristocrat of the soul and ‘The Soul selects her own Society’ is less spiritual hauteur than moral dignity. She also had great strength of character. It is, as Shelley noted, extraordinarily difficult to continue writing with no hope of publication. Her poem ‘Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne’er succeed’ may in its opening lines speak of that ironic wisdom. However, what follows are not three short verses bewailing her lack of recognition. What we hear is the same ‘distant strains of triumph’ that the defeated, dying soldier hears and the pain of his cruelly untimely death is ‘agonized and clear’. The note, nevertheless, is not political. The poem was written in 1859; the Civil War did not begin until 1861. Though the threat of war and war itself were a constant, and her own poetry is often fiercely violent, Emily Dickinson was possibly the least political poet in nineteenth-century literature. It is perverse wisdom perhaps.
Death, and not only in war, is so close in Dickinson – her elective and constant companion of the imagination that every sense is sicklesharpened, most particularly the sense of sound in ‘I heard a Fly buzz’. As in the three following poems the note is one of great stillness, indeed of resignation. They disconcert with strange, cryptic power. ‘A certain Slant of Light/. . . oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes/When it comes . . ./Shadows – hold their breath’. Impossible, almost, not to hold one’s own. ‘Because I could not stop for Death – /He kindly stopped for me—’ is a shocking and unforgettable opening. ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’ (the selection of the word ‘formal’ is a mark of great emotional insight) and ‘My life closed twice before its close–’ bring death and the maiden ever closer. The ‘death’ in the last poem freezes us in the icy waters of lost love – a parting no less terrible than the second, indeed, almost secondary, final death. Philip Larkin, whose own obsession with death was as extreme as that of Dickinson, found her poetry ‘odd’, which in itself is odd. ‘Poetry,’ he said, is ‘an affair of sanity’ and he went on to list the ‘big sane boys Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Hardy . . . the object of writing is to show life as it is, and if you don’t see it like that you’re in trouble, not life.’ We’re all in trouble, as he well knew, and that’s the trouble with life. This unlikely juxtaposition of Dickinson and Larkin proves only John Bayley’s point that ‘Poetry wanders through the mysterious implications of its own exactness.’ Exactly.