Paradiso

I intend this short, introductory essay to be a companion to my “Dissecting Dickinson” series in which I analyse (or, as it was, dissect) Dickinson’s poems. Each are linked here:
From Blank to Blank —
My wheel is in the dark!
The Guest is gold and crimson

Within Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon there are approximately 800 authors, 26 of whom Bloom especially emphasises for being the most significant as it pertains to their cognitive originality, psychological depth, imaginative capabilities, and a most important trait, as Bloom writes: “[it] has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.” Further adding that what the authors within our canon have in common is: “their uncanniness, their ability to make you feel strange at home.” (The Western Canon: 1994).

I point this out as Dickinson is among the authors within our canon who truly manifests these modes of originality. Shakespeare is the mode of originality itself. And while Shakespeare invented a plethora of personalities in his work (around one hundred original, and around a thousand sub-characters), and reconeptualized personality itself, Dickinson did, interestingly, much the same, but rather than inventing personalities, “she wrote lyrical meditations” (The Western Canon: 1994). In these meditations, Dickinson shows shades of our cognition and psychology in each of her poems, which, in the end, represents central parts of our personality, rather like what Shakespeare did. Or what Cervantes did in Don Quixote. Even the great Montaigne in his Essays.

Each Dickinsonian poem is like a Shakespearean personality, but where Shakespeare’s personalities function not merely as ways in which we can judge and talk to ourselves, they must be seen as external modalities too; modalities that are judging us — whether we want to be judged or not. (I write more on this in my essay on King Lear). Dickinson’s poems are rather the same in so far as they are, to the deep reader, ways with which we can rethink and reconceptualize ourselves (or self’s), and possibly reshape our understanding of cognition. But contrary to Shakespeare: “Dickinson kept to the capital letter ‘I’ while practicing an art of singular economy.” (The Western Canon: 1994).

One can imagine — for the sake of fleshing the concept out — that the total volume of Dickinson’s poems are rather like that of Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s personalities, or Cervantes’s “revelation and celebration of heroic individuality” (The Western Canon: 1994) in Don Quixote. Each are projects/modes of self-reflection, showing shades of our psychology, which, when read thoroughly and carefully, creates a whole: the Self. It is a profound way of approaching the concept of our Self, of consciousness, of human nature. It shows the true power and elasticity of literature.

How should one read Dickinson? It is naturally easier to read authors who have been emulated (or attempted to be emulated) in order to reflect on the individual author’s greatness. I think of Emerson, Freud and Woolf’s emulation of Montaigne. I think of Goethe, Beckett, Ibsen and Joyce’s emulation of Shakespeare. I think of Melville, Faulkner and Dostoyevski’s emulation of Miguel de Cervantes. I do not claim that any quote: “emulator”; have been able to (nor wanted to) reproduce their hero’s works — rather the emulation is a form of reconceptualizing anew. (See The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom)

Who then, I dare ask, have been able to properly assimilate Dickinson? Bloom asks the same question: “The mode Dickinson invented is very difficult to emulate and has not had much effect on our best women poets of this century: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson.” I very much agree, and when Bloom goes on to see Dickinson’s work better reflected in Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, I certainly see Bloom’s point, in the case of Crane especially, less so in Stevens. But where Bloom hits the nail on the head is: “but who [Crane and Stevens] cannot match her intricate intellect.”

Because who can truly match Dickinson’s intellect? I find it an important observation that there are poets of emotional devotion (Shelley, Plath), of religious devotion (Blake, Donne), of natural devotion (Wordsworth, Keats), of prophetic devotion (Whitman, Neruda), but who in our poetic tradition, outside Dickinson, is as devoted to our cognition and intellect, while essentially sublimating all the aforementioned categories, by either mocking them, assimilating them, or going far beyond them, if not for Dickinson? This is exactly why Dickinson is such an uncanny challenge to our own intellect, and why one can find great comfort and solace when reading Shelley, Wordsworth or Byron. But, reading Dickinson, as Bloom points out: “demands so active a participation on the reader’s part that one’s mind had better be at its rare best.” (The Western Canon: 1994).

As a final note I want to once again put great emphasis on Dickinson’s poems as constituting our entire Self, as well as much more than each of our singular self’s can contain. I say this because reading Dickinson incessantly, deeply, thoroughly, will result in something that is difficult, quite difficult in fact, to put into words, but I think Harold Bloom’s final remark does it justice: “Her unique transport, her Sublime, is founded upon her unnaming of all our certitudes into so many blanks,” and this last part of his conclusion is possibly the most eloquent way I have ever read of anyone describing Dickinson: “and it gives her, and her authentic readers, another way to see, almost into the dark.” (The Western Canon: 1994).

Reading Dickinson deeply does just that: it allows you to see in the dark, or, as it was, beyond.