Robert Browning: link to: Robert
Browning, Dramatic Monologue, & Modern Poetry
[you'll need your "Back" button to return to this page]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: annotation:Elizabeth
Barrett Browning & Female Heroic
including The
Soul's Expression / To George Sand
/ When our two souls
& links to more
EBB poems / link to Aurora
Leigh
Emily Dickinson: annotation: Dickinson
& Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson's
Grammar
Walt Whitman: link to: Manuscript
pages of "Song of Myself"
from
Emerson's
"The Poet"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning &
Female Heroic
With notes from Helen Cooper, “Working into Light: Elizabeth Barrett
Browning.” Shakespeare’s Sisters:
[I'll finish the citation and page citations for this as soon as
I find the *(*!%*! book!}
As you read EBB, think about how Romanticism altered the “female subject
positions” possible in English language poetry. In what ways are women
poets empowered by new ideas of poetic power? In what ways disempowered?
The roots of these questions haunt us still today.
ST: Like young women of my generation, and all the generations
in between, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was taught the lie that she was
the first, that there were no foremothers. Hence, in 1845 she wrote:
England has had many learned women, not merely readers but
writers...in Elizabeth's time and afterwards--women of deeper acquirements
than are common now...and yet where are the poetesses? The divine
breath...why did it never pass, even in the lyrical form, over the lips
of a woman?...I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none. It
is not in the filial spirit I am deficient, I do assure you--witness my
reverent love of the grandfathers!
Of which Helen Cooper says: …Nor did Browning ever formulate a political
or social analysis of the factors contributing to the absence of great
women poets. In a letter to Robert Browning she asserts "there is
a natural inferiority of mind in women...” then goes on to contradict herself
by extolling the "colossal nature" of French novelist George Sand.
EBB: The divineness of poetry is far more to me than either
pride of sex or personal pride...And...though I may be turned out of "Arcadia,"
and told that I am not a poet, still, I should be content...that the divineness
of poetry be proved in my humanness, rather than lowered to my uses.
Cooper: The relationship between EBB and Edward Moulton Barrett,
her father, has become legend, but the love between the poet and Mary Graham-Clarke,
her mother, has been ignored by critics. Certainly her father educated
her...and was intensely a part of her adult life. However the education
the young poet received from her mother about the nurturing power of love
between women also needs exploration and documentation, for it is this
that resonates through such poems as her sonnets to George Sand and Aurora
Leigh.
EBB on poetry: I cannot remember the time when I did not
love it--with a lying-awake sort of passion at nine years old, and with
a more powerful feeling since...At this moment I love it more than ever--and
am more bent than ever, if possible, to work into light...not into popularity
but into expression...whatever faculty I have. This is the object
of the intellectual part of me--and if I live it shall be done...for poetry's
own sake...for the sake of my love of it. Love is the safest and
most unwearied moving principle in all things--it is an heroic worker.
To this poet love is not self-denial and resignation, but a powerful energy
source...
The Soul’s Expression
With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound,
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it, --as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.
ST: Contrast this sonnet to the one most frequently anthologized,
"How Do I Love Thee." In this poem, it is easy to see why Browning
was such an important model and influence for Emily Dickinson. Also
interesting to compare Dickinson's self-chosen immurement in her father's
house with what Cooper calls Barrett Browning's "eight year captivity as
a Victorian female invalid" prior to her elopement with Robert Browning.
She wrote in "Prisoner":
...Nature's lute
Sounds on, behind this door so closely shut,
A strange wild music to the prisoner's ears,
Dilated by the distance, till the brain
Grows dim with fancies which it feels too fine:
And this sonnet, To George Sand:
True genius, but true woman! dost deny
The woman's nature with a manly scorn,
And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity?
Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry
Is sobbed in by a woman's voice forlorn,--
They woman's hair, my sister, all unshorn
Floats back dishevelled strength in agony,
Disproving thy man's name: and while before
The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,
We see thy woman-heart beat evermore
Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,
Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore
Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire!
Cooper: In Poems of 1844 there is a strongly evolving consciousness
of herself as a woman poet and of her belief that the "sole work" of the
poet "is to represent the age,"... but this new voice and subject matter
were not supported by nor obvious to...her friends.
[Cooper quotes this letter in which Dickinson defends her subject and
prosody:
I differ with you, the longer I live, on the ground of what
you call the "jumping lines"...and the tenacity of my judgement [arises]...from
the deeper study of the old master-poets--English poets--those of the Elizabethan
and James ages, before the corruption of French rhythms stole in with...and
was acclimated into a national inodorousness by Dryden and Pope.
[And to another correspondent:
Oh, and is it possible that you think a woman has no business
with questions like the question of slavery? Then she had better
use a pen no more. she had better subside into slavery and concubinage
herself...
Resume Cooper: Barrett Browning specifically repudiates her assigned
role as "lady" who knows only "How the heart melts and tears run down."
She designates herself as spokesperson for those less-privileged women
who "weep and curse, I say/(And no one marvels), night and day," thereby
defying patriarchy's division of "ladies" from working-class women...[Even]
the homely domestic ballad [seen] as being purified in the hands of women
is subverted by Barrett Browning to condemn men's seduction and exploitation
of women. [See "The Rhyme of the Duchess of May," "Amy's Cruelty,"
"Bianca Among the Nightingales" and others-ST] Barrett Browning explores
the reality that a woman who truly wishes to be herself, to experience
her sexuality and some kind f fruitful relationship with the male world
will be challenged by the more acceptable norm of the woman who has learned
to remain all beautiful surface, hidden both from herself and from the
men she must please... [She also] wrote powerfully about the
institution of motherhood in patriarchy, and the experience of biological
motherhood.
[See "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," which portrays Mary's pain
at mothering a child simultaneously hers and not hers, moving into the
implications for all sons in a patriarchal society. In contrast to
Anne Bradstreet's use of Queen Elizabeth in her poems, Barrett Browning
wrote of Queen Victoria becoming "mother" to her country at her coronation,
and dwells on what she has lost, on her isolation as a token woman in a
male system.]
Resume Cooper: Barrett Browning had four pregnancies in the four
years after her marriage. Only the third ended with a birth, that of her
son, Robert Wiedeman ("Penini") in 1849....She records in her letters what
a powerful and health-giving experience childbirth was. Even today,
forty-thee is considered late for giving birth to a first child. For Barrett
Browning, almost given up as dead three years earlier, to have that much
physical power was exhilarating.
[From "Only a Curl"]
...I appeal
To all who bear babes--in the hour
When the veil of the body we feel
Rent round us, --while torments reveal
The motherhood's advent in power,
And the babe cries!--has each of us known
By apocalypse (God being there
Full in nature) the child is our own,
Life of life, love of love, moan of moan,
Through all changes, all times, everywhere. One of her last poems, "Mother
and Poet,"...fuses three of Barrett Browning's preoccupations in her writing--art,
politics, and motherhood--as a manifestation of powerful womanhood....In
her own career she was increasingly convinced that women as "artists and
thinkers" must be concerned with social interaction, social conditions,
and political events.... [In Mother and Poet she performs] an assessment
of great integrity about her own complicity in patriarchy. She understands
that the energetic womanhood manifest in the bearing of children is undermined
by mothers, like herself, who incorporate patriarchal values into their
own consciousness ad become breeders of cannon fodder...a sophisticated
insight into women's contribution to their own oppression....Realizing
that "the personal is the political," she used her physical and emotional
experiences as a woman to illuminate the public sphere.
...we should all be ready to say that if the secrets
of our daily lives and inner souls may instruct other surviving souls,
let them be open to men hereafter, even as they are to God now. Dust
to dust, & soul-secrets to humanity--there are natural heirs to all
things.
[End Cooper]
Here follows Susan Tichy’s favorite EBB sonnet:
When Our Two Souls (Sonnets
from the Portuguese, XXII )
When our two souls stand up erect, and strong,
Face to face, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curved point,--What bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher
The angels would press on us, and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved,--where the unfit
Contarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.
"Mother
and Poet" & more EBB poems on line
Her feminist novel in verse, Aurora
Leigh, complete, provided by
A Celebration of Women Writers at the University of Pennsylvania
Emily Dickinson & Elizabeth Barrett
Browning:
That Mrs. Browning fainted, we need not read Aurora Leigh to
know...and George Sand 'must make no noise in her grandmother's bedroom.'
Poor children! Women, now, queens, now! And one in the Eden of god.
I guess they both forget that now, so who knows but we, little stars from
the same night, stop twinkling at last? Take heart, little sister,
Twilight is but the short bridge, and the moon stands at the end.
If we can only get to her! Yet, if she sees us fainting, she will put out
her yellow hands. When did the war really begin?
--Emily Dickinson, 1861 (on the death of E.B. Browning and the
outbreak of the Civil War
Because she was a woman and a queen.
And had no beard to bristle through her song,
My teacher, who has taught me with a book...
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh Book VII
Hundreds of phrases in Dickinson's poems and letters suggest she had Aurora
Leigh almost by heart. When a friend went to Italy, Dickinson asked
that he visit her grave and "put one hand on the Head, for me--her unmentioned
Mourner--" And though Dickinson mentioned Browning frequently, alluded
to her work within her poems, wrote a entire poem on Browning's posthumous
Last Poems (#312), and one on first reading Aurora Leigh (#593), she remains
yet today an "unmentioned mourner" in most of the criticism devoted to
either poet. -- Perhaps because Dickinson's star has risen so far while
Browning's has been sinking. (We do well to remember that Aurora Leigh
was one of the best selling poems in history.)
Ellen Moers (in Literary Women: The Great Writers.Anchor/Doubleday,
1977) details a few parallel passages, and proposes that the Dickinson
poems
serve almost as arias in rhyme to break up the onrushing blank
verse recitative of Aurora Leigh; and I rather suspect that Emily
Dickinson sometimes wrote a verse or two with just that complementary function
in mind--that is, to underline and elaborate the emotional content of something
that happened in Aurora Leigh, rather than in her own life. (p. 89)
When this relationship is discovered, it is often treated as a scandal.
John Evangelist Walsh (that's truly his name) devoted half a book (The
Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson, 1971) to identifying Dickinson's allusions
to and borrowings from Browning and other women writers--as if her participation
in a woman's tradition was a dirty secret. (Imagine the scandal that would
break if we were to discover that Eliot read Pound, or Pound read Swinbourne.)
In fact, Dickinson relied heavily on the woman's tradition in literature--her
reading in the male tradition was surprisingly slim for one of her class
and opportunities. (The first woman poet with a chance to attend
college, she withdrew after a year.) The list of 19th century women
writers, now forgotten or newly rediscovered, that figured among her favorites,
runs to a long paragraph, though she also (and especially) valued George
Eliot, Mrs. Browning, and the Brontes. It is thus clear that Dickinson's
self-consciously female voice is neither an accident nor a mysterious orphan
found on the doorstep of literature: she saw herself as part of the new
and exciting increase in women writers in her century.
Of George Eliot's death notice, Dickinson wrote: "The look of the words
as they lay in the print I shall never forget. Not their face in
the casket could have had that eternity to me. Now my George Eliot."
From Susan Howe's My Emily
Dickinson:
Over a hundred years ago Dickinson marked this passage in her copy of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh:
By the way,
The words of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Produccing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you're weary--or a stool
To stumble over and vex you...'curse that stoo!'
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not
But would be for your sake. Alas! Alas!
This hurts most, this--that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps. (AL 3, II, 455-469) (p.
14)
[Howe then invites us to read Dickinson's "This Chasm, Sweet, upon my life"
(#858) as a female riposte to Milton's "Methought I saw my late espoused
Saint."]
Resume Howe: In 1864 was marriage Epithalamion or entrapment?
Is Death a soothing mother or a mastiff-father? Is Awe Nature; and destruction
the beginning of every Foundation? Do words flee their meanings?
Define definition... (16)
For this northern will to become I -- free to excavate and interrogate
definition, the first labor called for was to sweep away the pernicious
idea of poetry as embroidery for women. (17)
[It is not a male critic against whom Howe is arguing: this business
of embroidery comes from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, two feminist
critics for whom, as Howe says, "a writer may conceal or confess all if
she does it in logical syntax." Dickinson, singular though she was, was
no Madwoman in the Attic. As Howe says, it is "a sorry illustration of
the ... vulgarization of the lives of poets" when even Feminist critics
perpetuate the
Resume Howe: Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein...conducted a
skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary
history. Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection,
and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?
What inner articulation releases the coils and complications of Saying's
assertion? In very different ways, the countermouvement of these two women's
work penetrates to the indefinite limits of written communication...[French
feminist] Helene Cixous [has] an often eloquent plan for what women's writing
will do...[yet] all the elements that Cixous longs for in the writing women
will do, can be found in Stein, who clearly broke the codes that negated
her.... (11-12)
The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach
indifferent to worldly chronology.
[End Howe]
Dickinson & Robert Browning:
Dickinson also owes a debt to Robert Browning, one which has only begun
to be delineated by scholars. Howe discusses her relationship to
"Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came," (which is peculiar enough before
Dickinson gets hold of it...). Others have pointed out that nearly
all her poems can be read as if they are miniature dramatic monologues--someone
speaks (we're not sure whom or to whom) who is not quite the poet, yet
not quite other, either. The situation is obscure, but the revelation
powerful. As a bridge to 20th century ideas of speaker and persona,
the route from Browning through Dickinson is one that intrigues.
Her poems, remember, were first published in somewhat complete form at
the height of early Modernist explorations of form and voice. She was reviewed,
for example, by Marianne Moore.
Dickinson's Grammar:
Critics tend to focus on certain elements of Dickinson's poems: her
metaphor, her verse structure and rhyme, her dramatic yet ambiguous speakers.
All these elements depend not only on Dickinson's extraordinary diction,
but on her manipulations of grammar. Christanne Miller, in Emily Dickinson:
A Poet's Grammar (Harvard University Press, 1987) writes:
...The element of controlled intimacy, and through it
controlled power, that written communication provides is a key to Dickinson's
method in her poems as it is to her reliance on letters from exchange with
her friends.
All epistolary correspondence assumes some kind of separation or distance,
whether unavoidable or willed. In the great age of letter writing,
Samuel Richardson writes that "the converse of the pen...makes distance,
presence..[and then] brings back to sweet remembrance all the delights
of presence... (9)
The physical distance created by letter writing and the metaphorical
distance created by opaque and elliptical language function as metaphorical
equivalents... (12) [So does rhyme and meter.-- ST]
...In writing from a distance, Dickinson may give all in language that
she withholds in fact...
In her poems Dickinson uses both the strategy of the weak in her attempt
to win over the world as lover, and the strategy of the strong, in her
attempt to win against it as rival. The narratives of most pomes adopt
some version of the former strategy; the language of all her poetry reveals
the latter. (18)
Re: Dickinson's grammar, Miller points out that:
Almost all of Dickinson's unusual uses of language contribute
to the same limited number of basic effects: multiplicity of meaning, indeterminacy
of reference and degree of personal involvement in the poem, and the establishment
of a diction that swings between stylized aphorism and the informality
of speech. [These] provide the poem with the linguistic and psychological
freedom she needs to express, or inscribe, herself... She speaks with authority,
in pure essence, or else carefully, with the "infirm Delight" or outright
suspicion of her audience in mind. In her poems Dickinson uses both
the strategy of the weak, in her attempt to win over the world as lover,
and the strategy of the strong, in her attempt to win against it as rival.
The narratives of most poems adopt some version of the former strategy;
the language of the all her poetry reveals the latter.
[In the following notes on the grammar, Miller's words appear in quotation
marks. My words are frequently a paraphrase of hers, and unless bracketed
all ideas may be assumed to be hers. In Miller's discussion of Dickinson's
grammar, most examples are drawn from the following set
of poems, in which you should be able to find examples of all the grammatical
practices Miller isolates.
#675 Essential Oils -- are wrung
#315 He fumbles at your Soul
#448 This was a Poet -- It is That
#754 My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun
#1247 To pile like Thunder to it's close
#510 It was not Death, for I stood up
"COMPRESSION...may stem from ellipsis of function words, dense
use of metaphor, highly associative vocabulary, abstract vocabulary in
complex syntax, or any other language use that reduces the ration of what
is stated to what is implied." In ordinary speech, words left out
can be recovered, or reconstructed. In poetry, often not. Dickinson
uses both kinds of compression, but it is from her nonrecoverable deletions
that the peculiar force of the poems arises...
"Dickinson tends to write either in short, simple, subject-verb-object
sentences or in highly clausal, complex sentences. The former syntax
characterizes the majority of her sentences and is paratactic...the opportunities
for understated connection are multiple...Parataxis could be called the
disjunctive or coordinate linking of ideas rather than a thematic or subordinate
linking. Information is presented sequentially, without hierarchical
restriction or conjunction....Dickinson uses almost no conjunctive adverbs
and few nominal or adjectival connectors (the only frequently used one
is "more")."
Parataxis has been said to have an "inexhaustible potential in
the production of new sentences--the very core of creativity." It
is inexhaustible in two senses--first, because any number of sentences
may be joined by "and"; second, because "the effect of joining sentences
without any explanation beyond the contextually ambiguous 'and' often resembles
that of metaphor. The hole of meaning which, filled, would explain
the relation of one event or proposition to the next is left unfilled.
Here the potential for meaning is perhaps not 'inexhaustible,' but it does
not yield to single or fight conjunction. all explanation is interpretive,
not syntactic."
Through paratactic syntax, Dickinson gives the impression of artlessness--as
if anyone could write these simple sentences--coupled with emotional intensity
and referential obscurity. That's the signature Dickinson tone.
Her stylistic sources doubtless included the Bible, church hymns, and the
paratactic style of George Herbert.
Syntactic Doubling: using a single phrase to cover two nonparallel
syntactic contexts or to describe two different subjects. The poet
deletes what would be the repeated phrase. This multiplies meanings
and increases indeterminacy. In Dickinson, it is often used to identify
the speaker of the poem with the poems' subject.
Patterned Contrast between latinate or foreign polysyllables
and concrete Anglo-Saxon diction--as in "Essential Oils -- are wrung" whose
diction includes "attar," and "screws". Critic Allen Tate attributes
the contrast to immortality/permanence on the one hand and death/decay
on the other. Suzanne Juhasz categorizes them as conceptual and dimensional
(ideas vs. time & space). However you choose to conceive the
categories, the contrast is marked--and patterned. And the trouble
with most of our concepts: she often uses concrete words to define abstractions....She
also plays semantically with the metrical manipulation of her polysyllabic
words. She rarely employs elision, but more often lengthens a word
to give weight and clarity to each syllable, with its "delicate edge of
wonder."
DISJUNCTION Theories of foregrounding often stress that
the more stable the background, the more affective any variation.
Dickinson uses the most traditional unifying features of poetry--rhyme,
meter, stanzas, and verbal, syntactic, thematic and figurative repetitions.
In this context, she "quietly" sets off her little explosions of disruptive
punctuation, inverted syntax, ellipsis, occasional metrical irregularity,
off-rhyme, and "general ungrammaticality." Disjunction in general
is not new in Dickinson--but hers occurs at every level of style.
Her language is "essentially, not superficially, disjunctive," in that
it gives "structural body" to the poet's perceptions and experience.
Her many variant drafts for the poems create a further "disjunction" in
our interpretation of any given passage.
Punctuation: Dickinson lists alternative words in poems;
she apologizes for her misspellings and modernizes archaisms in later copies
of early poems; but she never apologizes for her unorthodox punctuation
or provides variants for it. Therefore, we must read her punctuation
as meaningful, intentional, and expressive. To further complicate
the case, in holograph it is apparent that those nice, familiar dashes
are mere a mere typesetters' convenience. Her actual marks are far
more ambiguous--slanting different directions, some of them curved, and
so forth. Her dashes (or whatever they are) operate rhetorically,
not syntactically. They isolate words for emphasis, provide rhythmical
syncopation to the meter and phrase, and act as hooks on attention, slowing
our progress through the poem. She uses the period infrequently.
Capitalization: is equally difficult to recognize and standardize
in Dickinson's manuscripts. Her capitalized words suggest emphasis,
presence, and at the same time deny it, resembling as they do the traditional
capitalization of The Great Abstractions, personifications, and the like.
Experimental Grammar: Dickinson is especially marked by form/class
grammatical experiments: verb for noun, suffixes omitted, unusual juxtapositions,
high ratio of verbs to nouns and adjectives. Most often, adjectives,
verbs, and adverbs function as nouns, and nouns function as adjectives.
This kind of grammar "disguises complex predication" and gives the reader
a complicated set of relationships to work out. She also takes liberties
with singular vs. plural forms, which also obscures or enriches reference.
Her manipulation of verbs often involves dropping its marking features
-- voice, tense, person, mood) or altering its transitive/intransitive
properties. She seems to have discovered that verbs express a relatively
stable meaning; nouns a more flexible range of meanings. Uninflected
and subjunctive verbs are startlingly frequent. Some scholars have
argued that her verb forms are frequently colloquial or archaic forms well
known to Dickinson's contemporaries.
REPETITION was adored in Dickinson's century--think of Poe, Webster,
even Whitman--so repetition alone does not distinguish her verse from others'.
She does stand out, however, in her frequent repetition of nonspecific
pronouns and of definite pronouns used without antecedent -- it, you, this,
that. Often these teasing words appear in metrically and/or rhetorically
stressed positions in the line. And sometimes they imply elided phrases.
"'It' often acquires extraordinary significance in Dickinson's poems because
it remains absolutely mysterious and absolutely feared or desired."
SYNTAX: "A poem will remain partially blank until the reader
becomes engaged in filling it out. More specifically, her irregular
syntax may be structurally symbolic, or imitative of a poem's sense...usually
her inversions and omissions are readily understood. [Miller compares the
accessibility of her syntax favorably to several 20th century poets]
Negation and Contrast: "...[N]o creates space and therefore
potential for new seeing and new meaning. No opens the doors that
normal definitions close. Negation keeps the poet honest to her own
sense of a changing world and experience, and it allows her to create her
own boundaries of definition and meaning." In paratactic constructions,
negatives may give a "tone of impulsiveness"--a speaker working things
out as she goes. Dickinson also uses "not" or "but" to create a negative
definition, to create absence, to illuminate the subject of the poem by
specifying what it is not. "Dickinson uses her whole poem as a name
or definition; the poem fills the hole it creates by outlining the boundaries
that no word has yet been designed to fill." [See Jean Kammerer]
The SPEECH-LIKE characteristics in Dickinson include its general
paratactic, disjunctive, fragmented style, its questions and exclamations,
repetitions, and ellipses. But its most important speech-aspect lies in
voice--the use of colloquial idiom and of feminine diction and syntax.
Dickinson manipulates the stereotypically female imagery of household and
housework, dressing, marriage, and virtue. Beyond diction, Dickinson's
poems are marked by several gender-marked means of expression recognized
in our century--including disjunction, exclamation, question, and interactive
expressions. in her own time, the speech of women in Dickinson's
class was expected to be soft and gentle, truthful, persuasive. Studies
of ladies' magazines of the century reveal a high use of direct address
("you"), the present tense, and nonassertive bows to others' authority.
Though writers of either sex may have greatly different reasons for choosing
a language pattern or literary style, Dickinson's indirection and metonymic
figurative structures do seem to link her with a history of women's language.
from Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Poet
(published 1844):
"The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative.
He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of
his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of
genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is.
They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more... [The
poet] is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but
with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner
or later. For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression.
In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study
to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other
half is his expression....
"The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is
a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is jot painted
or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some
beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe...The poet
does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily,
so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken...For poetry was all
written before time was...Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of
the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
"The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which
no man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells;
he is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance
which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of
the necessary and causal. For we do not now speak of men of poetical
talents, or of industry and skill in mere, but of the true poet...
"For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem--a
thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an
animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new
thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but
in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet
has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell
us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.
For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the
world seems always waiting for its poet....Every one has some interest
in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him.
We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall
be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of
face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the
value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may
frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds....It is the truest word ever
spoken, and phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the unerring
voice of the world for that time.
"All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is
the principal event in chronology...
"Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol,
in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand
has expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius.
all form is an effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the
life; all harmony, of health; (and, for this reason, a perception of beauty
should be sympathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beautiful
rests on the foundations of the necessary...The universe is the extension
of the soul.
"No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them
with a religious regard...Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets,
and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also
hunters, farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their affection
in their choice of life, and not in their choice of words.
"The inwardness, and mystery, of this attachment, drives men of every
class to the use of emblems. The schools of poets, and philosophers,
are not more intoxicated with their symbols, than the populace with theirs...Beyond
this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness
of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple, whose walls
are covered with emblems, picture, and commandments of the Deity...[T]here
is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature...
"We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; workmen, work, and tools, words
and things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize with the
symbols, and being infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do
not know that they are thoughts. The poet...gives them a power which
makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every
dumb and inanimate object...[T]hrough better perception, he stands one
step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives
that thought is multiform...
"By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker...and
therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it,
a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our
words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained
currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker
and to the hearer...Language is fossil poetry.
"[N]ature has a higher end...than security, namely, ascension, or the
passage of the soul into higher forms...The poet...resigns himself to his
mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem
["the same, yet different"] in a manner totally new. The expression
is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated....Like
the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms, is their change
into melodies...A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing
than the iterated nodes of a seashell, or the resembling difference of
a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds, is an idyll...; a tempest
is a rough ode...; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored,
is an epic song...
"It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly leans, that, beyond
the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a
new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself),. by abandonment to the
nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power...there is a great
public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human
doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll ad circulate through him:
then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder,
his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants
and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only
when he speaks somewhat wildly...This is the reason why bards love wine,
mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco...and...prize
conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling,
war, mo bs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication,
which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the
true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer
to the fact...
"Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously,
but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto
men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl.
"I the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other
men...The poets are...liberating gods. The ancient British bards
had for the title of their order, "those who are free throughout the world."
They are free and they make free...
"There is good reason why we should prize this liberation...On the brink
of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness
of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come
near to it,--you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest.
Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore
we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or
in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought.
He unlocks our chains...
"I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with
sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to
life...If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating
it...Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal
cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America,
with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials,
and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival
of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the
middle ages; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper
and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people,
but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the
temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling,
our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians,
our boasts,, and our repudiation, the wrath of rogues, ad the pusillanimity
of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing,
Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes;
its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long
for metres." [Emerson continues, here, to name the English poets
"wits, more than poets", even Milton, who is too literary, and Homer too
literal and historical. He doesn't seem to notice that Homer wasn't
English...]
"Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or methods,
are ideal and eternal, though few men every see them, not the artist himself
for years, or for a lifetime...Doubt not, O Poet, but persist. Say,
'it is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering
and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage
draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine
own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which
a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing
walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and
walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power,
his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs
and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark...
"O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not
in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are
hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only..."
Optional: "The
Poet" entire
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