Some Dickinson poems...

Notes on some Dickinson poems... (also sketches of a tent, a puppy, and a sack lunch...)

Important quotes form Habegger...

"The frank erotic passion of Dickinson's mature poetry need not obscure her naivete as a young woman, when she could not allow sex, something 'low' and 'of the earth,' to have anything to do with the love that found fulfillment in 'heaven' (306).

"One of the biggest mistakes we make with Dickinson is to detach her from the religious currents of the 1850s, without which she could not have become herself" (310).

"The pattern running through these varied events - Mother's perplexing illness, Loring's failure, Norcross versus Norcross, the Panic, the A&B fiasco - was one of collapse and cover-up, of trouble too deep-seated to be examined in the light of day" (346).

Whitman day...

Whitman's prose seems too much like his poetry.  He uses many of the same poetic devices, only it's within his paragraphs and sentences.  Why write your prose like poetry, why not just write poetry?

Favorite line from Leaves of Grass, "I know perfectly well my own egotism," (76).  I think Whitman has a hard time separating his narrator from himself.

On pages 60-61, Whitman begins almost every line with "Where;" the use of tis seems to draw people together.  However, in the middle of his "Where" statements are interrupted for a handful of stanzas.  Whitman still uses new locations, but I feel it is important to note that these are not "Where" statements... What is different about these statements?  I admit I'm not sure, but it requires further investigation.  Also, on pg. 60, he mentions "the press" which I believe is his only relation to writers; and it is only the workers in a factory - not real writers.

Whitman's "This Compost"

Something has separated Whitman from nature.
He is angry at nature.
Angry that nature, even though it appears dead, is bringing forth new life; where as his own body as it dies will seem to only die.
The land is continually filled with dead bodies.
How can nature hide all of the death that it has been witness to?
Perhaps the dead things have been buried and can be overturned with a plough or spade.

Perhaps all the soil has once been part of a sick, dead, person!
"The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves." Resurrection - birth from death
The new spring life is so innocent - oblivious to the death it has overcome just be bursting forth from the ground.

Whitman wants to blame the decay of plant life on a diseased wind, yet finds they "... are really not infectious."
He realizes that nature is in fact safe - although in itself causes its own illness, death, and decay.
How can something that dies as if by nothing be safe?
He is amazed that everything can be so clean, fresh, when all of it once came from something that lie dying.

It is this realization that has drawn a line between him and nature.
How can nature "...grow such sweet things out of such corruption?"
Whitman cannot accept that he just cannot understand the workings of the Earth.
How can the Earth be so generous when all we give in return is "death"?

Some Dickinson thoughts...

591 Who's the king?
479 House in the ground? Death passes by in relation to all the sickness around?
756 Mourning a stranger.
401 White heat is what is needed to mold metal into a new creation.
19 Testing the waters between science and Christianity.
51 Dickinson admits that no one will know when she accepts a faith.
101 Who is Shaw?
110 Fascination with nature. Even peasants can appreciate it.
340 The body responds, listens, to the heavens. But Dickinson, cannot hear the heavens calling. All attempt at religion is on the surface bodily level.
344 Trying to watch her family grieve causes her more pain?
379 Understanding and envying the simplicity of a blade of grass.

Becoming a storm cloud...

"Mount Holyoke toughened Dickinson, who worked hard and did well and at one point became 'much interested' in chemistry and physiology."

"One of the questions to be decided was: how would the father Emily took with her, and the father in her mind, shape her adjustment to the close-knit female world she had entered?"

Emily struggled to stay away from the religious influences of the college. "... she had a painful conviction that she ought to 'give up and become a Christian.'"  Emily felt no interest in becoming a Christian.

"Dickinson was becoming a dark storm cloud, with a rising electric potential that would have to declare itself."  Dickinson is given so much power by this author.  Comparing her to a storm cloud is comparing her to a power that is uncontrollable, and also, a power of nature - not a power of humanity.  I think this is a significant comparison to note.  Dickinson herself seems closer to nature through her scientific studies.  Also, the description makes her seem harmful, damaging, destructive - normally poets are thought of as "creators" not "destroyers".

Dickinson seemed to show a general obedience to the law, "As it is, two things stand out in her response - her snapping resentment, and her determined acceptance of 'the law.'"

Many scholars attempt to find a connection between Dickinson and the Women's Rights Movement.  However, this author claims that Dickinson would have not been against the movement, "... was not disposed to see women as an oppressed class or to feel that they must organize themselves in order to free themselves."  However, Dickinson seemed to express little interest in anything which she was not directly affected by.  I find it hard to believe she would have ventured into the political world.  

"All can write autographs, but few paragraphs; for we are mostly no more than names." - B.F. Newton

Dickinson was lent Jane Eyre.  It may have influenced her greatly.

"The double punctuation at the end seems to catch her in the act, disguising her risky opinion as a question deferentially presented to a man almost ten years her senior."

"Nineteen-year-old Emily was in a state of eruption, throwing off the rules her elders had pounded into her."

Walt Whitman's America

"There is a strong nostalgic undercurrent in Whitman's writings, an impulse to revisit the period before his birth, when slavery and the economy were not yet problematic issues."
"Whitman's ancestry can be pointed to as a source not only of his poetic paeans to agrarian values and artisan labor but also of his interest in the American Revolution."
"It was mainly because of the Battle of Brooklyn that George Washington became one of Whitman' important models."
"On this level, Washington hugging his troops becomes for Whitman a kind of ideal private father (a poetic substitute, perhaps, for his own less-than-ideal father), who at the same time was a father of the nation."
"Locke's notion of tabula rasa became for the educators the rationale for an outlook that stressed the role of environment."
"Horace Mann, an educational leader Whitman greatly respected, had written of the effect of surroundings on the child: 'Their influences are integrated and made one with the soul. They enter into spiritual combination with it, never afterwards to be wholly decompounded.  They are like the daily food eaten by wild game, - so pungent and saporific in its nature, that it flavors every fibre of their flesh, and colors every bone in their body.'"
"The hill, the road, and the vista of his childhood give an autobiographical ring to his famous passage in 'Song of Myself'..."
"For now it is sufficient to note that, despite periods of antislavery activism, he always maintained a lurking sympathy for the South."
"The poet's older brother, Jesse, would lose his mind and die in an insane asylum.  His beloved sister, Hannah, became neurotic, possibly psychotic.  His brother Andrew became an alcoholic who died young and whose indigent wife became a streetwalker."
"Whitman spent twenty-eight years of his life residing in Brooklyn - more than in any other place - and absorbed all aspects of its daily life."
"He did not have to struggle, as did Hawthorne or Dickinson, with a personal heritage of repressive Calvinism, although his boyhood visits to different churches did give him some exposure to gloomy religions..."
"The character continues, 'I do, in my heart, believe that we shall live to see poetry done away with - the poetry of form, I mean - of rhyme, measure and cadence.'"
"At eleven, Whitman was forced, apparently by his family's financial necessity, to seek employment."
"'My theory is that the author might be the maker even of the body of his book - set the type, print the book on a press, put a cover on it, all with his own hands: learning his trade from A to Z - all there is of it.'"

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: Chapters 5-9

"As for the impact of all this on the Dickinson children, it looks as if they were much better shielded from illness, cold weather, and physical labor than from their parents' protective anxieties."  I was shocked by how much the Dickinson children were sheltered for most of their life.  However, there seemed to be a double standard when it was concerned with Austin, Emily's brother, who was often allowed more advantages than his sisters.  A copy of The Frugal Housewife was marked with this line - "I would not that servile and laborious employment should be forced upon young."

Often the role of chores would fall on Emily's mother, which it is said that she gladly accepted.  I was confused by this as Emily's mother was frequently mentioned to have health concerns.  It seemed strange that they would sacrifice the health of the mother for the unencumbered life of the children.  Perhaps it is this idea, this attitude which spurred on Emily's anger towards her mother. 

"The inevitable inference is that she never much attached to her mother, that her mother failed her emotionally, and that the result was a profound deformation."

"The passage captures many aspects of the writer's girlhood: the interest in flowers (learned in part from Mother); the questing, pleasure-seeking spirit; the accidental nature of her transgression; her sense that her mother was always weary; and her perception that the reproof did not come from the heart."

Concerning her poem, They Shut Me up in Prose, "Dickinson's poems often lay claim to a kind of sovereignity traditionally identigied with deity itself.  What is striking about this one is that the consciousneess of power seems to originate within a cage." 

"Although it is impossible to quantify her school attendance, it appears she acquired much of her early learning at home, in the presence of a mother who spelled "feeling" with an "a." Does that help explain why Dickinson began "upon" with an "o" for most of her life, or why she and her sister and brother never learned, or bothered with, standard punctuation?"  I know Dickinson uses quite a strange set of punctuation in her novels; however, I don't think I would ever have attributed it to her lack of education.  Perhaps I read it wrong, but it seems that her grammar and punctuation were quite normal in her personal letters to friends and acquaintances.  The way this author seems to talk about her punctuation seems to put her down, blaming it on a lack of education.

In all honesty, this statement seemed to loose my respect for this author of this biography - but perhaps this is a different fault entirely.  Clearly, I place Dickinson on some sort of literary genius pedestal, even without studying all of her work.  Perhaps this is where the fault lies - in me, in our creation of the literary canon.  It has been taught to me through all my years of schooling that her precise use of language and punctuation where for specific purposes, but how much of her work was based on error in punctuation and capitalization.  It is tough for me to assume that she never made a mistake and that this is what has caused us to study her.  Perhaps some of what we contribute to her literary genius is in fact an error that, if she were alive today, would quickly be remedied... but I digress.

One of the most fascinating elements of the Dickinson biography was the mention of the children's magazine, Sabbath School Visitor.  I was shocked at the level of violence and grotesque images illustrated in it; it reminded me of the old Grimm's Fairy Tales.  I wonder why shocking children with these images was the chosen way to pass on information.  I am particularly fond of the story "The Lost Finger" where Elizabeth chops off her finger while doing something she shouldn't in a factory.  At first I found this a strange setting for a children's story, but then I thought it a good glimpse into the society of the time.  I am sure child labor was more prevalent back then and it would have been a good thing to teach. 

Back to Mrs. Dickinson, Emily's mother again.  What was wrong with her?  Is this one reason Emily's father was so over protective of his children?  The biographer notes that Catherine wrote a letter assuring that "...mother and children are 'quite well,' repeating and underlining at letter's end that Mrs. Dickinson was 'perfectly well.' The insinuatiing emphasis points to something the record fails to clarify.