Indeed!
From a piece on Big Think...
The English language is such an unwieldy monster that dominating it seems impossible; most great writers are lucky just to tame it for a while. Not Dickinson: some of her poems are more interesting than others—she grew less radical as she aged—but she never really wrote a “bad poem” after 1861. Her ear, which seemed so eccentric to contemporaries, turned out to be damn near flawless. In her ability to verb nouns, noun verbs, scramble syntax, and mint a seemingly endless supply of original metaphors—all while exploring the outer reaches of intellect and emotion—she’s American literature’s best example of someone “thinking like Shakespeare.”
Like Shakespeare, too, she wears a permanent biographical mask. Who was she, really? Why did she stop leaving the house? Did she suffer from all the mental illnesses she’s been retrospectively diagnosed with—or some, or none of them? (“Much Madness is divinest Sense…”) What was her sexual orientation? (On the evidence, I’d guess predominantly straight, possibly bi-curious—but I wouldn’t risk a bet on it.) One thing is certain: her life, romantic and otherwise, took place almost entirely on the page.
Because misery loves company, Dickinson is the perfect poet to read when you're in pain. Whatever kind you’re feeling—grief, anger, jealousy, loneliness—she’s felt it as intensely and can express it better. Not that she’s always healthy to read at those moments: like Kafka, she’s a paragon of neurotic martyrdom, of acquiescence to the “Geometric Joy” of our daily prisons. Where Walt Whitman provides ringing affirmations of hope, Dickinson’s poems counsel the voluptuous pleasures of “that White Sustenance – / Despair.”
No comments:
Post a Comment