Critical opinion of Emily Dickinson’s poems

1. What are other people saying about Dickinson? Say anything nasty and you’re dead! Critical opinion of Emily Dickinson’s poems 6th May 2014

2. Objective • To understand critical viewpoints of Emily Dickinson’s poems It is not worth spending hours learning critical quotations but, if you can use one in your answer, it is worth doing.

3. Key Comments • On ‘A Bird came down the walk’: “’A Bird came down the walk’ shows the disturbance caused by human encroachment on the world of nature“ "Dickinson accomplishes the contrast despite the ironical observation that the bird in nature, the beautiful bird, commits the violent act of biting a worm in half and eating it raw, whereas the frightening of the bird and the disruption of nature occurs with the gentle, kind act of offering the bird crumbs" (both Lorcher).

4. Key Comments • On ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes-’: “Its three stanzas faintly shadow forth three stages of a familiar ceremony: the formal service, the tread of pallbearers, and the final lowering into a grave.” (Anderson) “The themes of violation and disorder persist throughout.” (Wolff)

5. Key Comments • On ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died’: “Ironically, although the final, haunting sentence has to do with sight, "I could not see to see-," at no time in the course of the poem can the speaker maintain an ordered visual grasp of the world.” (Wolff)

6. Key Comments • On ‘Because I could not stop for Death’: “The immortality that the speaker achieves for refusal to "stop for Death" is preceded by a recognition - that the subject's suitor was death: that in marrying him, as she presumably intended, the house or domestic sphere to which she would have been consigned was equivalent to a grave, "A swelling of the ground.“” (William Galperin) “'Death,' usually rude, sudden, and impersonal, has been transformed into a kindly and leisurely gentleman.” (Anderson)

7. Key Comments • On ‘My life has stood – a loaded gun’: “The idea that God uses human beings as instruments for his inscrutable and often violent intentions seems a properly heretical Dickinson premise, but it founders on the paradox of the concluding stanza, where the owner is declared to be mortal, and the gun, although deathless, is also lifeless on the owner's disappearance.” (Shullenberger)

8. General Quotes • Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility. • Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadmomasochisticimaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth. • Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering. All from Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae (1990)