Two chapters from Poetry as Survival

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

With Emily Dickinson more than with any of my other heroes of imagination, I am concerned that by trying to pinpoint what specific trauma assailed her, I may be on the wrong track. Ultimately, it's pointless to attempt to locate the specific traumas that initiated the desolation and radical freedom that gave rise to the self-creation of her poems. All we could hope to do is guess. The worst situation of all would be the error of psychoanalytic criticism: to think that by locating and labeling the poet's trauma, we had found out his or her secrets. To think that way would be to look down the wrong end of the telescope at diminishment.

We need to go in the opposite direction: recognizing that the poet's trauma initiates the struggle of transformation that leads to the richly proliferating and glorious incarnations of the poems.

We can't know what hurt Emily Dickinson so, but we do know that something hurt her with enormous force, again and again:

It struck me-every Day

The Lightning was as new

As if the Cloud that instant slit

And let the Fire through

It burned me-in the Night

It Blistered to My Dream

It sickened fresh upon my sight

With every Morn that came

I thought that Storm-was brief

The Maddest-quickest by

But Nature lost the Date of This

And left it in the Sky

-#362

And we know that she responded bravely, that she "love(d) to buffet the sea!" She meant, of course, an inner sea: the sea of subjectivity, of the rise and fall, the ebb and flow and wild, wave-torn storms of the emotional life. Such storms, turned into words, might take the form of incantatory raptures on an imagined, intimate ecstasy:

Wild Nights--Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights would be

Our Luxury!

Futile--the Winds

To a Heart in port

Done with the Compass

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor--Tonight

In Thee!

-#249

Or they might articulate despair and fear of madness:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading-treading-till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum

Kept beating-beating-till I thought

My Mind was going numb

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space-began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

Wrecked, solitary, here

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing-then

-#280

Dickinson can hymn desolation and agony:'

The Heart asks Pleasure-first

And then-Excuse from Pain

And then-those little Anodynes

That deaden suffering

And then-to go to sleep

And then-if it should be

The will of its Inquisitor

The privilege to die

-#536

And just as fervently, the defiant free will of creativity exemplified by the writing of poems:

They shut me up in Prose

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet

Because they like me "still"

Still! Could themself have peeped

And seen my Brain-go round

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason-in the Pound