"Soul at the White Heat ":
The Romance of Emily Dickinson's Poetry

No one who has read even a few of Dickinson's extraordinary poems can fail to sense the heroic nature of this poet's quest. It is riddlesome, obsessive, haunting, very often frustrating (to the poet no less than to the reader), but above all heroic; a romance of epic proportions. For the "poetic enterprise" is nothing less than the attempt to realize the soul. And the attempt to realize the soul (in its muteness, its perfection) is nothing less than the attempt to create a poetry of transcendence—the kind that outlives its human habitation and its name.


The Essential Dickinson
Selected and with an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

I began reading Emily Dickinson as an adolescent, and have continued through my life; her work retains, for me, the drama and "white-hot" intensity of adolescence, like the work of Henry David Thoreau. Certain of Dickinson's poems are very likely more deeply imprinted in my soul than they were ever imprinted in the poet's, and inevitably they reside more deeply, and more mysteriously, than much of my own work. For the writer is, as Dickinson's poet persona suggests, a creature forever in motion, calculating and breathless at once; casting out demons, joy, gems, "profundity" in skeins of language, then moving restlessly on. Her work, if it endures at all, can only endure, in Auden's striking phrase, "in the guts of the living."


from "Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature"
in (Woman) Writer : Occasions and Opportunities

. . . I leaf through a bulky anthology of poetry, too many years ago to calibrate though I am probably still in junior high school, and the names are mostly new, mysterious, lacking all associations, therefore talismanic, pure. No mere opinionizing went into the assemblage of this book—no literary politics, surely not!—so far as a thirteen-year-old might guess. If I noted the absence of women I have no memory of it and rather doubt that I did, since poetry even more than prose seemed to me then, and seemed to me for many years, a wholly neutral—or do I mean neuter?—genderless activity. (I might have thought—perhaps I still think—that's the beauty of the enterprise!) And it would have struck me as rude, vulgar, insipid, trivializing, a profanation of the very page, to read the poetry that excited me most as if it were the product, even, of a human being like myself; as if it were the product of what would one day be called a "female consciousness." For didn't it mean that, being a poet, having been granted the imprimatur of poet, Emily Dickinson had in fact transcended not only the "female" but the "human" as categories?

I don't remember the first Dickinson poems I read; very likely they were the same poems we all read, and reread, and were puzzled and haunted by, as by a child's riddle of such evident simplicity you feel you must understand it—yet can't, quite. Of the frequently anthologized poems it was the darker and more mysterious ones that struck me as embodying poetry's very essence. The Dickinson who fascinates most is the Dickinson of the great elegiac poems, the poems of "madness," the terse elliptical statement poems that carry with them an air very nearly of belligerence, they are so short, and complete:
The competitions of the sky
Corrodeless ply.
And:
Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born —
And:
We outgrow love, like other things
And put it in the Drawer—
Till it an Antique fashion shows—
Like Costumes Grandsires wore.
All good poets resist paraphrase; Emily Dickinson frequency resists simple comprehension. And should we "sense" her meaning we are inevitably excluded from her technique, marveling at the rightness of certain images, sounds, strategies of punctuation—the ellipses of a mind accustomed to thinking slantwise— yet unable to grasp the poem's ineluctable essence. (And the identity of the poem's narrative "I," shifting as it does from poem to poem.) When we read Dickinson the nerves tighten in sympathy and wonder. Fragments leap out at us as powerfully as fully realized poems:
It is the Past's supreme italic
Makes this Present mean —


Oh Life, begun in fluent Blood
And Consummated dull!


The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly — and true—
But let a Splinter swerve —
'Twere easier for You —

To put a Current back —
When Floods have slit the Hills —
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And trodden out the Mills

Joyce Carol Oates as Emily Dickinson


Emily Dickinson on the Web

Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson International Society


Image of Emily Dickinson courtesy of
AMHERST COLLEGE LIBRARY

[JCO Home] [Table of Contents]

Maintained by Randy Souther
Last updated 1-20-97
Send comments and suggestions to Randy Souther