Bloom's How To Write About Emily Dickinson

273 Pages·2010·15.26 MB·English

B L O O M’ S
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT
Emily
Dμckins∂n
ANNA PRIDDY
Introduction by Harold Bloom
Bloom’s How to Write about Emily Dickinson
Copyright © 2008 by Anna Priddy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form
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Bloom’s Literary Criticism
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Priddy, Anna.
Bloom’s how to write about Emily Dickinson / Anna Priddy; introduction by
Harold Bloom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7910-9492-1 (alk. paper)
1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Criticism—
Authorship. 3. Report writing. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Title: How to write
about Emily Dickinson.
PS1541.Z5P75 2008
811'.4—dc22 2006100573
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CONTENTS
Series Introduction v
Volume Introduction vi
How to Write a Good Essay 1
How to Write about Emily Dickinson 41
#67—“Success is counted sweetest” 61
#214—“I taste a liquor never brewed” 72
#258—“Th ere’s a certain Slant of light” 79
#280—“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” 90
#288—“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” 103
#303—“Th e Soul selects her own Society” 111
#324—“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” 121
#341—“After great pain, a formal feeling comes” 127
#435—“Much Madness is divinest Sense” 139
#441—“Th is is my letter to the World” 145
#448—“Th is was a Poet—It is Th at” 156
#465—“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” 162
#569—“I reckon—when I count at all” 177
#585—“I like to see it lap the Miles” 183
#613—“Th ey shut me up in Prose” 195
#657—“I dwell in Possibility” 203
#712—“Because I could not stop for Death” 214
#754—“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” 230
#1129—“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” 240
#1732—“My life closed twice before its close” 250
Index 256
SERIES
INTRODUCTION
Bloom’s How to Write about Literature series is designed to
inspire students to write fi ne essays on great writers and their
works. Each volume in the series begins with an introduction by Har-
old Bloom, meditating on the challenges and rewards of writing about
the volume’s subject author. Th e fi rst chapter then provides detailed
instructions on how to write a good essay, including how to fi nd a the-
sis; how to develop an outline; how to write a good introduction, body
text, and conclusions; how to cite sources; and more. Th e second chap-
ter provides a brief overview of the issues involved in writing about the
subject author and then a number of suggestions for paper topics, with
accompanying strategies for addressing each topic. Succeeding chap-
ters cover the author’s major works.
Th e paper topics suggested within this book are open-ended, and the
brief strategies provided are designed to give students a push forward
on the writing process rather than a roadmap to success. Th e aim of
the book is to pose questions, not answer them. Many diff erent kinds of
papers could result from each topic. As always, the success of each paper
will depend completely on the writer’s skill and imagination.
v
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT
EMILY DICKINSON:
INTRODUCTION
by Harold Bloom
1
After fifty-three consecutive years of teaching at Yale, writ-
ing more than thirty books and about a thousand introductions,
essays, and reviews, and having read incessantly morn through night
for nearly three-quarters of a century, I came to realize that teaching,
writing, and reading are, for me, three words for the same activity. Th e
ancients regarded what we call rhetoric, psychology, and cosmology as
three names for the one entity. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion and
defense, while psychology is our ongoing quest for identity, and cosmol-
ogy our projection of ourselves into the heavens.
Emily Dickinson and William Blake seem to me the two poets in
Anglo-American tradition who revive in themselves something of Wil-
liam Shakespeare’s highly original cognitive power. Like Shakespeare,
Dickinson and Blake thought everything through again for themselves,
almost as if there had been no philosophers before them. Th e quar-
rel between poetry and philosophy is very old, going back to the Pre-
Socratics, the Hebrew prophets, the forest sages of early India, and the
masters of the Tao who may have preceded Confucius. Plato, philoso-
pher and poet, cast out all external poets, and after a lifetime of internal
struggle exiled the poet within himself in his harsh, late treatise, the
vi
How to Write about Emily Dickinson: Introduction vii
Laws. Dickinson, like Shakespeare, was no problem-solver, while the
apocalyptic Blake took on the prophetic burden of the Valley of Vision.
Emily Dickinson is not quite the very greatest of American poets, but she
is only a step or two behind our father, the old man Walt Whitman, who
has aff ected all the world beyond the United States, as well as altering his
and our nation. Dickinson asserted that she declined to read Whitman,
presumably because he was indecorous, yet I suspect that her irony was
in play, as she always was darkly playful, and I sometimes detect a glint
and glimmer of Walt in the recluse of Amherst.
2
Writing about Emily Dickinson tends not to engage her agile believ-
ings and disbelievings, her deliberate evasions of our prosy explana-
tion. Did she ever carnally embrace her unstable sister-in-law Sue? I
doubt it, but scarcely believe it matters in apprehending the elusive
Miss Dickinson of Amherst. Did she embrace Christ? I more than
doubt it, though she saw in him a paradigm for her own suff erings,
which were mostly in the realm of what Freud was to term “Mourning
and Melancholia.” Th e Viennese prophet’s grand metaphor, “the work
of mourning,” could be an apt title for Dickinson’s Complete Poems,
now wonderfully available to us, though she published fewer than a
handful of lyrics during her own life, and those anonymously. Mostly
they were taken for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, which may have wryly
both aroused and annoyed her.
She is very diffi cult to write about (or read deeply, or teach well)
because she is vastly more intelligent than her critics (myself included).
Shakespeare contains us; he is so universal and so comprehensive that
sometimes I believe that I, and all my friends and enemies, are merely
thoughts in his mind. Dickinson’s circumference, though always expand-
able at her will, is more modest. She puts only a part of each of us upon
her stage. Her concern is with her losses, to death and to erotic absence,
and to our own vastations in those realms.
Shakespeare is always up ahead of us, as Walt Whitman attempted to
be. Dickinson, unnervingly, is exactly where we are, in the unlived life or
the life no longer fully lived. Her proximity governs and makes problem-
atical the enterprise of writing useful criticism of her many hundreds of
viii Bloom’s How to Write about Emily Dickinson
strong poems. To compose good criticism of any among them, we need
to read her closely, bringing to the enterprise our own minds at their
keenest and most alert. Rather than continue to state the challenge to all
her readers, for whom she becomes a teacher of how to think, I will pro-
ceed with an instance. Where there is so much wealth for choice, a kind
of arbitrariness had to be indulged, so that I will choose one of her poems
that means most to me, but my selection is sanctioned by the justifi ed
renown this lyric enjoys.
I generally begin a sequence of classes on Dickinson with “Because
I could not stop for Death—”, partly because I believe it is widely and
deeply misread by many, mostly through carelessness:
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
Th e 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—
Th e 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—
Th e Roof was scarcely visible—
Th e Cornice—in the Ground—
How to Write about Emily Dickinson: Introduction ix
Since then—‘tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I fi rst surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward eternity—
Miss Dickinson, daughter of Amherst’s leading citizen—lawyer, poli-
tician, educational founder—cannot “call” upon her Amherst neighbor,
Gentleman Death, by stopping her carriage to pick him up for a courtship-
drive. Social convention is rigorously and properly preserved: Death follows
decorum by his “civility.” Doubtless cards were exchanged; she was invited
and accepted a particular time on an agreed-upon day, but only to be taken
for an outing, not to die in any sense, whether literal or sexual. Th at is why
the Carriage also conveys the chaperone or duenna, Immortality, in addi-
tion to Death and the Lady. Note also that there is no coachman. Death, as
driver, must concentrate on the road and not on the virgin at his side.
At fi rst, the pace is stately and slow, as is suitable, and so stays within
mundane limits: schoolchildren competing at recess games, and then
the grain fi elds beyond. Th e initial odd touch is the Pathetic Fallacy of
the Gazing Grain, which prepares us for the sudden movement of the
poem beyond social convention. Th e courtly drive turns into an abduc-
tion by a demon lover: “We passed the Setting Sun—.” Dressed probably
in her Sunday best, Dickinson feels the evening Chill, and yet expresses
no alarm at what must be a speeding-up, since the Setting Sun passes Us.
After that, the poem is all questions, each unanswerable. Is her uncon-
cern the presence of Immortality? Hardly, since that mere chaperone has
no power to avert a kidnapping.
Th e penultimate stanza is generally misread, rather hastily, as the
description of a burial mound, yet the structure depicted belongs more
to the realm of faerie or mythology than to a Poe-like gothic. With the
fi nal quatrain, the imperturbable victim of being carried off still displays
no anxiety or, indeed, explicit aff ect of any kind whatsoever. Centuries
have gone by, and yet Miss Dickinson’s perspectivism remains dominant.
Th e centuries seem shorter than the particular day of surmise that Eter-
nity was the journey’s destination.
Emily Dickinson’s ironies, like Shakespeare’s or Chaucer’s, are too
large to be seen by us, to borrow a fi ne observation from G. K. Chesterton.