Emily Dickinson is our great poet of inwardness. The flamelike, always shifting mysterious voice within. She seems to have experienced extremes of raw, terrifying emotion—the intense, erotic joy expressed in poems as: "Wild Nights!—Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our Luxury!" And spiritual collapse: "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—." But the essence for the reclusive, teasing Dickinson, forever dressed in virginal white, in her father's house in Amherst, Mass., has always seemed to me most beautifully embodied in this quicksilver poem: "I hide myself within my flower, / That fading form your Vase, / You, unsuspecting, feel for me— / Almost a loneliness."
From "Getting Into Character" in The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, Oct 29, 1995.
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