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Bloom's How to Write About Emily Dickinson BLOOM’S HOW TO WRITE ABOUT Emily Dμckins∂n ANNA PRIDDY Introduction by Harold Bloom Bloom’s How to Write about Emily Dickinson Copyright © 2008 by Anna Priddy All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Priddy, Anna. Bloom’s how to write about Emily Dickinson / Anna Priddy; introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7910-9492-1 (alk. paper) 1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Criticism— Authorship. 3. Report writing. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Title: How to write about Emily Dickinson. PS1541.Z5P75 2008 811'.4—dc22 2006100573 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can fi nd Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Text design by Annie O’Donnell Cover design by Ben Peterson Printed in the United States of America Bang FOF 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Th is book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Series Introduction v Volume Introduction vi How to Write a Good Essay 1 How to Write about Emily Dickinson 41 #67—“Success is counted sweetest” 61 #214—“I taste a liquor never brewed” 72 #258—“Th ere’s a certain Slant of light” 79 #280—“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” 90 #288—“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” 103 #303—“Th e Soul selects her own Society” 111 #324—“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” 121 #341—“After great pain, a formal feeling comes” 127 #435—“Much Madness is divinest Sense” 139 #441—“Th is is my letter to the World” 145 #448—“Th is was a Poet—It is Th at” 156 #465—“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” 162 #569—“I reckon—when I count at all” 177 #585—“I like to see it lap the Miles” 183 #613—“Th ey shut me up in Prose” 195 #657—“I dwell in Possibility” 203 #712—“Because I could not stop for Death” 214 #754—“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” 230 #1129—“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” 240 #1732—“My life closed twice before its close” 250 Index 256 SERIES INTRODUCTION loom’s How to Write about Literature series is designed to Binspire students to write fi ne essays on great writers and their works. Each volume in the series begins with an introduction by Har- old Bloom, meditating on the challenges and rewards of writing about the volume’s subject author. Th e fi rst chapter then provides detailed instructions on how to write a good essay, including how to fi nd a the- sis; how to develop an outline; how to write a good introduction, body text, and conclusions; how to cite sources; and more. Th e second chap- ter provides a brief overview of the issues involved in writing about the subject author and then a number of suggestions for paper topics, with accompanying strategies for addressing each topic. Succeeding chap- ters cover the author’s major works. Th e paper topics suggested within this book are open-ended, and the brief strategies provided are designed to give students a push forward on the writing process rather than a roadmap to success. Th e aim of the book is to pose questions, not answer them. Many diff erent kinds of papers could result from each topic. As always, the success of each paper will depend completely on the writer’s skill and imagination. v HOW TO WRITE ABOUT EMILY DICKINSON: INTRODUCTION by Harold Bloom 1 fter fifty-three consecutive years of teaching at Yale, writ- A ing more than thirty books and about a thousand introductions, essays, and reviews, and having read incessantly morn through night for nearly three-quarters of a century, I came to realize that teaching, writing, and reading are, for me, three words for the same activity. Th e ancients regarded what we call rhetoric, psychology, and cosmology as three names for the one entity. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion and defense, while psychology is our ongoing quest for identity, and cosmol- ogy our projection of ourselves into the heavens. Emily Dickinson and William Blake seem to me the two poets in Anglo-American tradition who revive in themselves something of Wil- liam Shakespeare’s highly original cognitive power. Like Shakespeare, Dickinson and Blake thought everything through again for themselves, almost as if there had been no philosophers before them. Th e quar- rel between poetry and philosophy is very old, going back to the Pre- Socratics, the Hebrew prophets, the forest sages of early India, and the masters of the Tao who may have preceded Confucius. Plato, philoso- pher and poet, cast out all external poets, and after a lifetime of internal struggle exiled the poet within himself in his harsh, late treatise, the vi How to Write about Emily Dickinson: Introduction vii Laws. Dickinson, like Shakespeare, was no problem-solver, while the apocalyptic Blake took on the prophetic burden of the Valley of Vision. Emily Dickinson is not quite the very greatest of American poets, but she is only a step or two behind our father, the old man Walt Whitman, who has aff ected all the world beyond the United States, as well as altering his and our nation. Dickinson asserted that she declined to read Whitman, presumably because he was indecorous, yet I suspect that her irony was in play, as she always was darkly playful, and I sometimes detect a glint and glimmer of Walt in the recluse of Amherst. 2 Writing about Emily Dickinson tends not to engage her agile believ- ings and disbelievings, her deliberate evasions of our prosy explana- tion. Did she ever carnally embrace her unstable sister-in-law Sue? I doubt it, but scarcely believe it matters in apprehending the elusive Miss Dickinson of Amherst. Did she embrace Christ? I more than doubt it, though she saw in him a paradigm for her own suff erings, which were mostly in the realm of what Freud was to term “Mourning and Melancholia.” Th e Viennese prophet’s grand metaphor, “the work of mourning,” could be an apt title for Dickinson’s Complete Poems, now wonderfully available to us, though she published fewer than a handful of lyrics during her own life, and those anonymously. Mostly they were taken for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, which may have wryly both aroused and annoyed her. She is very diffi cult to write about (or read deeply, or teach well) because she is vastly more intelligent than her critics (myself included). Shakespeare contains us; he is so universal and so comprehensive that sometimes I believe that I, and all my friends and enemies, are merely thoughts in his mind. Dickinson’s circumference, though always expand- able at her will, is more modest. She puts only a part of each of us upon her stage. Her concern is with her losses, to death and to erotic absence, and to our own vastations in those realms. Shakespeare is always up ahead of us, as Walt Whitman attempted to be. Dickinson, unnervingly, is exactly where we are, in the unlived life or the life no longer fully lived. Her proximity governs and makes problem- atical the enterprise of writing useful criticism of her many hundreds of viii Bloom’s How to Write about Emily Dickinson strong poems. To compose good criticism of any among them, we need to read her closely, bringing to the enterprise our own minds at their keenest and most alert. Rather than continue to state the challenge to all her readers, for whom she becomes a teacher of how to think, I will pro- ceed with an instance. Where there is so much wealth for choice, a kind of arbitrariness had to be indulged, so that I will choose one of her poems that means most to me, but my selection is sanctioned by the justifi ed renown this lyric enjoys. I generally begin a sequence of classes on Dickinson with “Because I could not stop for Death—”, partly because I believe it is widely and deeply misread by many, mostly through carelessness: Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— Th e Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste And I had put away My labor, and my leisure too, For his Civility— We passed the School, where children strove At Recess—in the Ring— We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain— We passed the Setting Sun— Or rather—He passed Us— Th e Dews grew quivering and Chill— For only Gossamer, my Gown— My Tippet—only Tulle— We paused before a House that seemed— A Swelling of the Ground— Th e Roof was scarcely visible— Th e Cornice—in the Ground— How to Write about Emily Dickinson: Introduction ix Since then—‘tis Centuries—and yet Feels shorter than the Day I fi rst surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward eternity— Miss Dickinson, daughter of Amherst’s leading citizen—lawyer, poli- tician, educational founder—cannot “call” upon her Amherst neighbor, Gentleman Death, by stopping her carriage to pick him up for a courtship- drive.
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