Two chapters from Poetry as Survival

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2002 by Orr, Gregory

We know she wrote at least 1775 lyric poemsa staggering number-because she preserved most of them in her spidery handwriting on small, handsewn packets she kept in a trunk. How to explain those 1775 poems? She wrote more great poems than any other American poet before or since. And only five of them were published in her lifetime. Even those five were recast, re-punctuated, printed without her permission. I know-she sent her poems to friends, enclosed copies of them in letters, or baskets of baked goods sent to a neighbor, and so on. But the truth remains that almost no one around her could appreciate the audacity and originality of her work. To say that her genius was recognized and understood is simply not accurate. Her solitude was impenetrable. It was the solitude of someone who hears, inside her, an utterly distinct music, who endures and bodies forth utterly distinct and bold imaginings. It's as if she played an invisible harp in her room-a harp only she could see or hear. And each string was a different poem, a different lyric organized around a distinct, intense emotion. Each string was a poem and also a tightrope on which Emily Dickinson walked out and balanced over the Abyss. No safety net. Only the music in her ears, to which she danced, alone there on the wire.

If lyric poetry thrives on its intensity (as Keats claimed), then that intensity is often achieved through compression. Many of Dickinson's poems are imagistically and syntactically dense and hard to understand and they move and shift their images with a kind of lightning rapidity that takes getting used to.' I've been reading Dickinson's poems for years and I still feel that in the best of her poems there are always lines or images or turns of thought that I can't follow and yet this in no way diminishes my sense that I have absorbed the energy and significance of the poem. For me, as a reader, the most important thing is to ignore her eccentric punctuation and read her poems aloud, listening for their tone of voice. Once I can hear the human voice of her emotion behind a particular poem, I feel as if I am inside the poem and its mystery or message is revealed to me. And once you hear her voice, it can be as direct and urgent as anything anyone ever said:

I cannot live with You

It would be Life

And Life is over there

Behind the Shelf

-from #640

(and she continues with a metaphor of the frustrated lovers being locked up in a cupboard like broken or old-fashioned china cups; except that it is a sexton, a gravedigger, who locks up the cupboard, and on the poem goes to even more strange yet lucid imaginings).

Or:

I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing, Eyes

I wonder if It weighs like Mine

Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long

Or did it just begin

I could not tell the Date of Mine

It feels so old a pain

I wonder if it hurts to live

And if They have to try

And whether-could They choose between

It would not be-to die

-from #561

So, we know that a loss or losses amounting to "terror" are one motive she claims for writing. We learn about her sense of isolation and how she has turned to nature for consolation: