 Okay, I've got ten after the hour, so let's get started. Can you hear me in the back row? I hope we don't have another day like we had last Wednesday, and it was blistering in here. Alright, so today we're moving on to Emily Dickinson, who lived from 1830 to 1886. Her life, like Whitman, spans the 19th century, though not as long. And like many readers, I want to see her with Whitman as a precursor of modernism, of the modern, but with a distinction, because Dickinson is a kind of temperamental and stylistic opposite of Whitman, who, with his barbaric yop, is loud, outspoken, all containing, I contain multitudes, he says. And Dickinson, by contrast, is aloof and delicate, elusive, web-like, frail. Her whole world takes place in very small spaces in her room, to which she retreated toward the end of her life. And those of you who have taken 45A may recall one Italian word for a room is stanza, no chalk. Stanza is the Italian word for a room, and she exploits us in her poetry. A number of the poems you read have to do with dancing and walking, too, and of course poetry is measured in feet. So you think about somebody ambulating in a room, like working with feet in a stanza. Her existence in her room is a kind of poetry. Then outside of her room there's the world of the garden and nature, and the town of Ampersht. But these small spaces, like her poems, contain virtually everything. We have that poem number 632 in the anthology on page 38, saying, the brain is wider than the sky, because inside this little space, the whole sky will fit, and much more, too. Dickinson was a writer from the start of her life. In 1850, at the age of 20, she published her first work in a college newspaper, The Amherst Indicator. She wrote a valentine to a friend who was a writer who decided he would publish it, and he published it along with a note wondering who the author was and praising her for, quote, her power to cast spells, quicken the imagination, and cause blood to run frolic through the veins. So it was a prophetic occasion and prophetic remarks. And also, unfortunately, one of the few critical responses that Dickinson got in her life, after that unsought college publication, 40 years pass with a few exceptions, very few publications. When she was 31 in 1866, she sent 40 poems and 30 letters to a guy named Samuel Bowles, who's the editor of a local newspaper, The Springfield Daily Republican, and he published about 12 of them. Those are the only poems she published in her life. Later, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly at the time, a guy named Thomas Higginson. One of the letters is one of the handouts I passed out to you, asking for advice to a young writer. He was encouraging to males, not so much to females, and they started up a 24-year correspondence in which he advised her not to publish while she was working out her style, which he regarded as spasmodic, wild, and uncontrolled. We'll look at some reasons for this in a while. In November of 1890, four years after her death, a neighbor of hers with whom she was friendly, Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson, the editor of the Atlantic, he had underwent a change of heart and they persuaded a publisher in Boston to bring out a volume of her poems. 116 of the poems were published out of 1,775 that she left when she died, and within two years this book went through 11 editions. It made a smash and obviously spoke to something in the American sensibility. One of the first reviewers, among many who praised her, said there's hardly a line that fails to throw off a gleam of genuine original power of imagination, of real emotional thought. But at the same time, he said, here's the complaint about technical imperfection. Again, there is not a stance that cannot be objected to on the score of technical imperfection. What he's referring to is the unorthodox punctuation and the syntax. Look at the soul selects her own society on page 35. And the way that words are separated by dashes cause some perturbation. But this unorthodox kind of writing, which I'm going to dissect before the hour is over, is analogous to the kind of, it's half barbaric. Species of art. And I'll recall the Amherst instead of Whitman. It's not meter, but meter making argument that makes a poem. A thought so passionate and alive that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own in adorned nature with a new thing. So only 12 poems in her life, she didn't publish it. Unlike Whitman, whose poem got bigger and bigger and took on more and more, she tended to do the opposite and to compress and make her poems more and more concise and tight. Her family was well to do and supportive and they did everything they could for her except understand her, as you put it. She was too far out there for them. The grandfather was one of the founders of Amherst College and a prominent lawyer, civic leader, church leader. And the father, too, was a treasurer for Amherst College and a loyal churchman and a lawyer. All of them were into business and civicism. So the family was supportive and disconnected. The letter I passed out gives her life in a nutshell. And in the last paragraph, she says, I have a brother and sister. My mother does not care for thought. And father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books but begs me not to read them because he fears they juggle the mind. They are religious except me and address any clips every morning whom they call our father. But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn, could you tell me how to grow or is it unconveyed like melody or witchcraft? No, look at the way the sentences end up with dashes, too. Could you tell me how to grow? What's she saying here? The syntax gets a little unorganized and gives us a clue to what some people objected to in the poetry. But the letter is telling and it tells us the mother doesn't like thinking and the father distrusts literature. Too busy with his briefs. Her main family allies were her brother, Austin, who was three years older, an avid reader, an intellectual companion and competitor who eventually went off to Boston and got married. And she had a devoted sister, LaVinie, of whom she said it's like we came from two different worlds. They couldn't talk about anything because Vinnie was into like domestic work, pie baking and housekeeping and stuff. The family also had a daily prayer devotion in the morning. When Dickinson died, somebody discovered there were 19 Bibles in the house which Dickinson made fun of these prayer ceremonies. She calls God the Father a big eclipse in this letter. And her father, she said, he seems like an old, old kind of foreigner. They just lived in different worlds. She had some enamorments in her life. In the letter she mentions a father's apprentice who was a kind of intellectual companion. This is probably Benjamin Franklin Newton who was nine years older and came to study law with her father. On the name Benjamin Franklin Newton, I just wanted to digress and point out that in Whitman's nine siblings, he had three brothers called George Washington Whitman, Thomas Jefferson Whitman and Andrew Jackson Whitman. Early America. Benjamin Franklin Newton spent some time with Dickinson. He was a literary and spiritual tutor and preceptor. He eventually moved away. They corresponded for a while. He sent her a copy of Emerson Poems. Emerson actually came to Emerson and talked while Dickinson was alive so she would have heard him. The head note to the Norton anthology tells you that she heard of Whitman but didn't read him because he was, by reputation, disgraceful. She had a second kind of love interest. Another tutor for her father. The guy eventually came out here to San Francisco and she lost track of him. But if you think that she was a prude, read poem number 249 on page 33. Maybe I'll get to it. Wild Nights. It's a poem that asks to spend wild nights in luxury. And luxury is, of course, a homonym for a luxury. Luxury, luxury. And the poem ends up with a kind of prayer that I could more inside of you. Read it the way you want to. If we have time, I'll get back to it. As she got older, she retreated more and more to her second story room. Her stanza kept to herself. As Vinny said, she had to think. She was the only one of us who had to do that. And at the age of 30, for obscure reasons, she stopped going to church. Some speculation is that she felt a distaste for the concept of original sin that innocent babies are born like stained and in sinful. Or distaste for like the August sublimity called the eclipse in the letter. But her withdrawal from church distanced her even further from her family and also from their community. Gradually she lost contact with neighbors and friends and ended up with a small circle of friends. She withdrew. Not for lack of love and affection, obviously, but because she had work to do. And she wouldn't count that with the publishers and critics. Despite Higginson's advice for her not to publish, she went ahead and kept on writing. It says good things about her family, her exclusiveness and stride. There were no fights or recriminations. That was the way she was. And on her part she wrote them with affection. So, if any writes, we all lived like absolute monarchs each in his own domain, each in his own room. So Dickinson, I think, offers us a different kind of vision of American independence and freedom. It's not the kind of freedom that comes as in Whitman with taking to the open road and having more and more experiences and embracing more and more opportunities and containing multitudes. Dickinson discovers freedom inside. One of the brothers' recriminations was that nobody in the family comprehended her because she had gone really deep inside in places where the rest of the family couldn't. And her personal style comes across in her poems, which are like her as a sensibility, frail-looking, frail-appearing, wispy and delicate and web-light and slight, yet they're way out there and powerful and deep, practicing with the last word in that letter I handed that is witchcraft, a kind of witchcraft. And they attained their power because she has this penchant for, as it's put in the last poem in the anthology, telling it slant, which is operating in riddles and puns and dizzyingly bottomless enigmas. So let's look at that poem, number 1129, on page 40 of your anthology. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. The essence circuit lies, too bright for our infirm delight. The truth superb surprise is lightning to the children ease with explanation kind. The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind. There's a hard poem to read because of the syntax. It's hard to know how the words connect, which may be its first mystery. The poem works in the way that it's key terms indicate, that is by indirection or slantedness, by circling around a topic that's moving in circles rather than just stating some things straightforwardly. It pulls you in by way of the statement made in the first two lines and then it stumps you. And it does so because Dickinson Evolver invented her own system of punctuation, a weird system of punctuation that's full of dashes of different lengths and commas and spacing. Nobody knows what it means. It's one of the reasons why she was charged with critics with being spasmodic and technically imperfect. Recently readers have argued that what she's doing is inventing a kind of language that resists patriarchy and that's feministic. Let me say to begin with what you're reading in the anthology is first of all somebody's interpretation of Dickinson. She's been reduced and made less interesting than she might be. One of the things I passed around is a manuscript page of her poems. This sheet. And if you decipher her penmanship you'll see that the poem on the left hand page is poem number 754 which appears on page 39. My life had stood a loaded gun. And the poem on the right hand page is her manuscript version of the soul selects her own society. Poem number 303 which is on page 35. Take a look at page 35 in the soul selects her own society and compare it to this so in the anthology there's a dash at the end of the first line as indeed there is in her manuscript but after the soul selects there seems to be something that's a dash and that's not included in the poem. Why not? And then look at the way the poem in the anthology is printed. The last line of this poem like Stone ends with a dash but in the manuscript it looks like a period. And then notice in the second line the editor doesn't include the dashes that appear after, is that a dash after then shuts and the, are those dashes or are they accent marks? And then there are two plus signs in front of the last four lines nobody knows what those means and those aren't replicated in the version you've got so the editor has taken out a lot of these marks which might be very significant for all we know. Some readers think that they're not not dashes but instead marks that indicate like we're looking at the historical emphasis to be laid and also the dashes are not all the same length so they mean the same thing to Dickinson. And then notice also while you're looking at the manuscripts the spacing of letters and words sometimes the words are far apart as if they're like independent from each other they have to be examined separately so I want to start thinking about our poetry as like Whitman's a union of independent states these little words and lines and constructions that are put together and united through the construction of a poem. So if you're going to become a Dickinson scholar the standard work by B.W. Franklin includes volume one is the manuscript poems typed out and volume two is a very orm which gives all the kind of variations of the poems the editors have gotten and the third volume is the facsimile of the poems because if you're really going to work with Dickinson you have to look at our manuscripts and decide what these marks are over which is what all these marks get reduced to in the print are the loosest of the punctuation in English they make very loose connections so look at poem 657 on page 38 lines 9 to 10 of visitors the fairest for occupation this the spreading wide my narrow hands together what's the relation all these words do they fit together syntactically or they're just kind of like held up together all these words are united and joined but they're also operating independently so in this poem what are we to make of lines 3 to 6 the first two lines seem fairly straightforward tell all the truth but tell it slant success and stricke it lies too bright for our infirm delight the truth surprises lightening the children ease with explanation kind it doesn't help if there are no commas or periods to separate the words what's too bright for our infirm delight in line 3 when you first read the poem come out of line 2 success lies too bright for our infirm delight it seems like it's the object of the verb lies which of course makes a contrast the word lies makes a contrast with the word truth and when we get to the fourth line the truth is a perfect surprise we realize retrospectively that what's too bright for our infirm delight is the truth surprise but notice that we have to circle back to get the meaning so the poem is kind of illustrating what it means it's only after we make a mistake do we realize that we're not too bright and we've missed the truth we have to return to it note to the play on words bright and delight people who think they know it all are really blind they are delighted they're taking away of light that means of course an rapture may make happy but it's the denial of light to take light away now as we go through the poem we'll notice a string of words that are related conceptually on bright delight, lightning, dazzle blind all of which suggest a progression and perhaps the experience of a lightning bolt so bright and powerful that it renders you blind and of course there's a narrative history of this kind of phenomenon too I think notably of St. Paul then Saul on the road to Damascus anti-Christian who's blinded by God and is suddenly enlightened to the truth so the metaphor starts to invoke paradoxes that are a common in the mystic tradition in which conversion is a process in which you're blinded in order to be able to see, in order to get insight you have to be blinded on and the idea is that meaning emerges gradually through indirect circuitry growing deeper as we gain access to this poem and as nuances and weights reveal themselves if you can see the meaning immediately what you see is trivial to tell things straight out is trivial you're blind to it if you think you can see it right away I'm thinking now of the saddleback the saddleback forum and the question like when does life begin this is an easy answer to that question so the poem works I suppose like the experience of Saul on the road to Damascus where it gives us a verbal texture of this riddling it's telling its slant and figures in an enigma as an aspect of Dickinson's style and it's one that draws on the Bible too we go back to Whitman now who draws on the Bible because it's an epic of creation Dickinson's work draws on 19th century Protestantism, hymns and secular versions of the Bible but Dickinson's poems were quite differently by asking you to guess what I mean and that makes you as a reader an active force in the poem, you have to participate in a kind of out-cyker to get to where she's going so she's also not making statements and yelling at you like Whitman or clobbering over the head these poems instead become like little installations of words each of which is separate and discrete but all of which are unified each of which asks you to stop and look and away and then go on as you circle around and around and put these resonances together so let's look at another poem that works by circuitry and by telling its slant with another complex set of issues but not before noticing that the odd word slant reappears in poem 258 on page 34 there's a certain slant of light and this is only to begin to notice that single words in Dickinson slant, heft, reappear and make of these independent poems a kind of unit too before moving on away from this poem Nick the wordplay that she gets by in the opening lines tell all the truth but tell it slant, success in circuit lies she's evoking the idea of like there being a legal tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth to help you God it's not always easy to do and then she ends the first line with the word slant and everybody knows that you can slant the truth and then the second line ends and the word lies so the truth is seem to be a complex thing that can only be approached maybe asymptotically by the kind of circuitry that she makes available to us I want to move next to a poem with a live object at its center a poem 328 on page 35 a bird came down the walk so did all of you read Dickinson in high school so there's a certain way of teaching Dickinson which comes across as like the purveyor of little moral nuggets which is not the kind of Dickinson that we're interested in now that you're all in college so I'll read this and then talk about it a bird came down the walk he did not know I saw he bit an angle worm in halves and ate the fellow raw and then he drank a dew from a convenient grass and then hopped sideways to the wall to let a beetle pass he glanced with rapid eyes that hurried all around they looked like frightened beads I thought he started his velvet head like one in danger cautious I offered him a crumb and he unrolled his feathers and rode him softer home then or as divide the ocean too silver for a scene or butterflies off banks of noon leap plushless as they swim so it seems really simple and frail on the surface but once you start to push this poem it takes you into wild places the opening lines immediately introduced what seems to me the enigmas and puzzles at the heart of the poem by raising the question do birds or other animals know that you're supposed to walk on sidewalks that you're supposed to wait for traffic lights that you're supposed to obey the rules and follow straight and narrow what does it mean that the bird comes down the walk so this is the central tension of the poem attention between the categories and ideas that are available to the speaker those are terms which define human life the categories that are relative to the bird which has no consciousness it does not know as a second line tells us a bird came down the walk he did not know I saw that can mean two things I saw I observed that he did not know he couldn't see it he didn't know he was supposed to walk on the sidewalk he knew nothing but at the same time it's saying he didn't know that I was looking he did not know I saw because his eyes are all over the place they look like frightened beads hurrying all around is the bird even observant so the bird has no consciousness and then the tone starts to get jarring and shocking he bit an angle worm in halves and ate the fellow raw and that partly humanizes the bird by connecting him to like human practice angle worm the word angle starts to sound like England or English and ate the fellow we're dealing with human beings here until we get to that word raw and then we start to realize this is something like cannibalism so the speaker has a hard time recognizing this bird outside of human categories then we get to the second stand that he drank a dew from a convenient grass is it possible not to hear the word glass nothing's more intense than slam on a dew in the next description where the bird pauses to let a beetle pass suggest that it's got manners an idea of social behavior and so it again humanizes them so at the end of these considerations part of what we're being asked in this poem is whether or not you ever see anything raw if you ever see nature without human lines paths and sidewalks are rules there there's a contemporary philosopher named Baudryard B-A-U-D-R-I-L-L-A-R-D who invents this term hyper reality to infer refer to the world we live in his argument is that everything is mediated for us everything that we know in the world comes to us through print or film has anybody been to Afghanistan how do you know it's there you've never really seen it it comes to you by mediation Baudryard points out that before we go to the really wild places in the world Yosemite we've seen Yosemite times on TV or in books that when we get there we know exactly where to look and how to frame things it doesn't surprise us or shock us because we almost never experience reality so the poem is fascinated by the ubiquity of mediation nature's already kind of interpreted for us and made to look comfortable as if like these creatures out there behave like human beings that we know they don't so can we ever see anything outside of cultural forms and civilization as Dickinson goes on to describe the birds his eyes look like frightened beads I thought he started his velvet head the terms start to dress him up beads, velvet the next thing we need to have a nice woman's outfit is some feathers now beads, velvet and feathers and where the feathers come from violence is somewhere down at the bottom of this poem too women don't go west like Whitman and Carrie Shotguns but they need things killed in order to make their wardrobe as well so at the end of this poem I think what we're seeing as the speaker just fails to make contact with this bird as a human can't understand and if in the first stands the bird did not know anything about like human rules or customs in the last stands is we're seeing that human beings don't know either they don't know what it is to be without consciousness not to be burdened with consciousness and to have the kind of freedom of the bird and the last image I think of the bird rowing him home the word path in the beginning turns into road here and it reminds us of different ways of proceeding on land along paths and in water where there are no paths humans follow paths and follow lines birds are pathless the images of like jumping into water which is maybe as close as we can know what it's like to fly and not to have to follow a path but the implication is that human beings can't know what it is to be a bird we live in two different worlds so if the if the speaker fails to like understand the bird the poem doesn't fail because what it captures for me in part is the fathomless unknowability of this bird this creature which becomes a cipher for nature an item of penetrable enigmaticness and there's lots of this in Dickinson a sign of like the real mystery and deplessness of the world in which we're planted maybe a sign of a human fall following this in her modified and secularized Christian world so to suggest how issues escalate I want to take another animal poem that Dickinson writes this would be poem 986 on page 40 in your anthology page 40 this is one of the 12 poems that was published in Dickinson's life and I think it may have been published with the title of Snake at one point because that's what it's about as it becomes clear and let's stop to note that many of Dickinson's poems are about animals perhaps because she's female and the connection would be that animals live outside of the world regulated by human activity which is to say the world regulated by males so that a kind of sympathy or identification with other creatures that are domesticated may enter into the writing about animals there's a poet who should have been our syllabus to Mary Ann Moore she's on page 430 in anthology who writes a lot of poems about animals for I think the same reason they're outside the system of male control so let me read this and then comment on it an arrow fellow in the grass occasionally rides you may have met him did you not his notice sudden is the grass divides with a comb a spotted shaft is seen and then it closes at your feet and opens further on he likes a boggy acre a floor too cool for corn yet when a boy in barefoot I'm more than once at noon have passed I thought a whiplash on braiding in the sun which stupid to secure it it wrinkled and was gone several of nature's people I know and they know me I feel for them a transport of cordiality but never met this fellow attended or alone without a tighter breathing and zero at the bone what a great last line I mean two words that are so common we all use them but would you ever think of putting them together zero at the bone I'll get back to it it's like the bird poem in some ways it begins with images that civilize or put in understandable and comfortable terms something that's outside of civilization so some of the words that Jesus in the opening couple stands as fellow rides his notice like presenting a business card shaft comb just grooming these words could be put together to describe a date a guy coming along on a carriage with a shaft combed hair to take you out and this is what's in our mind all the time civilization and its problems dating coupling these are human concerns that the snake doesn't seem to care about so the familiarity of course is undercut by the insistent thinginess of the snake some readers hear an insistent hissing the fourth line his notice is his notice is it's tricky to do things with sound but at this point the poem gets a little hair-raising as everybody had the experience of almost stepping on a snake you know there are rattlesnakes up in the east but I took a hike up there once and I was tooling along down the path and suddenly I heard a sound like water being poured on a skillet and looked down there was a brown asparagus stuck going like that before I knew it I had moved backwards 20 yards and yelled out Jesus in that moment my brain disappeared I didn't know what I was doing I wasn't thinking there are moments when you get so frightened that you lose track of all the biases and preconceptions you have and are just there wrong in the world this is a moment that's a kind of experience of English literature it's the experience in which you encounter something so unexpected and so unpredictable that it can't be categorized or boxed in it's the opposite of the kind of mediation that Dickinson is looking at the poem also plays with some of the kind of spooky superstitions and fears that people have about snakes the lines the grass divides with a column and then it closes at your feet and opens for the run you can imagine the experience of a snake crawling through grass so you can see its track and then losing track of it how many horror movies do they have like snakes crawling between girls legs in places where snakes shouldn't go but the grass is closing at the person's feet here so where did the snake go and at this point the poem starts to explore the sublime because it moves away from boundaries defined lines and locales into a swamp he likes a boggy acre a floor too cool for a corn I think corn must be in wheat the boggy acre is a swamp no fences, nothing grows there it's indefinite at the same time the poem leaves the present in the actual and goes back in time to childhood to a time before civilization to evoking a time I think of primitive fears primitive attitudes and also this this personage now is barefoot which increases the vulnerability and menace all the more words if you step on a snake and they had riddle snakes in New England when Dickinson was alive if you step on one with bare feet I think the poem gets primordial and it goes backwards in history and in social history to evoke a whole history of snakes being vilified in the book of Genesis and the Garden of Eden and I don't know if any of you have seen cats or dogs or horses react to snakes they don't particularly like them either they bristle there's something about the snake the conversion of the speaker into a boy there's no reason why we can't assume it's a boy in the first couple stanzas but it becomes explicitly a boy in the third stanza it evokes a time when girls are more like boys than boys anybody who's taken a class that's dealt with sexuality or Freud knows that for Freud there's a period of childhood the first three years or so the pre-edible period before boys know that they're boys or girls know that they're girls before sexual identity is fixed when everybody is kind of equally gendered Dickinson may be going back to this part of her history but it also tells us we're also reminded too that the snake is a phallic menace both to boys and girls both we both have to succumb to patriarchy and growing up and the poem starts to move away from being about animals now toward humans however let's look at the snake the way it's described here is symmetrically patterned like a braid lying on the grass stretched out and coiled but this is a braid that's not like a necklace it's described as a whip and a lash and whips and lashes are both things that can suddenly strike out and hurt you and sting you as a result of a sudden stinging action they're like the snakes and while we're here let's notice the comb the combs have teeth there's a lot of hidden menace underneath the language of this poem well on 17 and 18 tell us that several of nature's people I know and they know me and that there's cordial relations and this puts us in the mind of how people are eager to domesticate nature and make it something that is not threatening think about pets or animals that we kind of half humanize so we call them names and talk to them the snake is not one of these fellows it's not in that world the snake can induce a zero at the bone think about these words zero what are the connotations of zero it means nothing and therefore resonates with the word bone the material of the skeleton to evoke death you get bit by the right snake you can die and be reduced to zero at the bone and of course the snakes fangs are made of bony parts too so we're getting an account here of what might happen if this meeting actually resulted in a bite and the sounds of the last line zero at the bone ee oh the signs of crying out in horror I think Milton sounded on the wall of denchians here which is full of the sound oh a lot of wailing and moaning so I would say the poem is creepy it's a bit of a thing that creeps it evokes the word creepy you don't get this kind of like shiver in Whitman as you do from her from this girl who's sitting alone in her room at night spinning out a dozen words they get under your nerves it is a kind of witchcraft let's turn all these terms over again metaphors work both ways the snake is being compared to a neurofellow in the grass but the snake is an emblem of the unpredictable menace you never know when you go out happy and expectant you might meet a fellow and end up dead you've all seen looking for Mr. Goodbar you never know what's out there but the terms can all be like reversed now to apply to the human beings snakes are dangerous and they can cause damage and hurt you but human beings can hurt too they can be sarcastic and biting and back biting and stinging and can cause a kind of backlash even greater than anything a snake can cause some of the terms here I've lost my place a neurofellow in the grass neurofellow is a kind of off rhyme but we think about narrowness applied to people some people are narrow minded they don't understand women who write poetry for instance some people are prudish and follow straight and narrow and of course we all know that there are people who are like snakes in the grass you can't trust them so I'm going to stop go on reading this poem I'm reading between the lines for the rest of the class and the next class too but I'm going to stop there because there's other things to look at I do want to point out that there's a greater and more acute sense of animality in this poem than there is in Whitman it's closer to like the animal which the animate the things that are alive the word animal comes from the line word anima meaning soul in them souls and psyches animals and Dickinson are mysterious and beyond the realm of the human and so the poems become these kind of intense forays into the exploration of interiority and human depths Whitman compared Dickinson to Whitman Whitman is a domesticator everything he runs across goes into him and becomes him something to celebrate he seems to me oblivious to the idea that there's anything truly alien out there beings that he can't become friends with or become or can't engulf nothing they can't be domesticated he minimizes the dark side of nature note hurricanes, earthquakes, floods fires snakes, bugs, scorpions or tarantulas in Dickinson or never a situation like one that resulted in the Donner party where people ate each other I wish I had a piece of chalk there's a great work of literary criticism by a man named Eric Auerbach A-U-E-R-B-A-C-A it's called Mimesis the representation of reality in western literature oh chalk I'm addicted to chalk the book is Mimesis and he basically says that as you look through western literature there are two kinds of realistic representation one of which is represented by the example of Homer he has an essay called Odysseus the Scar he analyzes Homer's description of the moment when Odysseus his nurse washes him and notices he's got a scar on his thigh that identifies him to her as like the Odysseus who got wounded by a boar when he was young and it's a moment of recognition and what Auerbach points out that this is that moment Homer describes the scar Odysseus the nurse and also tells the story of the hunting party in which Odysseus went out with his friends to hunt the boar you get descriptions of the horses, the warriors the shields, the weapons, the boar the hunt, everything is told that's one kind of realism the other kind that Auerbach talks about is biblical a kind of realism that works with stories and parables that are bottomless and that leave us with questions and he gives the example of the story and genesis of Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac you have no idea what Abraham looks like how tall he is, what color his hair is what kind of clothing he's wearing nor do you have any idea of Isaac you don't know if there are any trees in the background what the setting is like but you're getting a true account of human affairs that's almost exclusively psychological and moralistic and interior so I would place Dickens in the first the first of these two kind of categories of realism and Dickens in the second and hence the power of her poems which seem frail and slight on the surface but once you get lost in their circuitry they turn out to exercise a powerful form of witchcraft I don't know where to go from here we got about 10 minutes some poems that deal with her status as a woman I want to talk to and one of those is a poem I passed out poem 1670 it used to be in the Norton anthology and it took it out and I was pissed because I like it but I like it the last line tells us that it's a dream and so the poem is surreal I won't read it all but I'll summarize it for you the first stanza she's in a room in winter and notices a pink lank and warm worm there and she doesn't like it so she ties it up and secures it and feels comfortable then in the next stanza the snake starts to grow and get bigger the worm becomes a snake it gets bigger and becomes ring with powers and as the snake gets bigger in the second to last stanza she shrinks and there's an exchange in which the snake says how fair you are propitiation's claw, afraidiest of me no cordiality and then she runs she runs from town to town to town until she ends up where she started in her own room so in part of course it's a commentary on sexual what do you make of a pink lank warm warm worm so the fact that the poem is a dream tells us that Dickinson like Whitman is growing on a kind of organic form dreams happen when the mind surrenders control and just lets it bleed and something like that happens here the poem as usual opens with tensions between the winter which is cold and the room which is warm so I see that as a tension between comfort and pain which becomes associated with the snake it recurs in the jarring contrast of the bedroom and the giant worm you don't want worms or snakes in your bedroom in a place of comfort it induces pain and discomfort aliveness and strangeness and the second part of the first stands suggests that she exists in a comfortable relation with this worm because she's in my room at home secure and the snake is something neighboring something you can tolerate and live with then I connected this poem to the one I read before the snake because it's about a snake this one has creeping blood in the fourth line of the second stands the word creep the snake is now under the skin as in the poem before and it also increases in size and becomes ringed with power that's led some readers to see the snake as a kind of cobra with the head inflating as it inflates and gets ready to strike but ring also has associations of interest for women you put on a ring and your life is over in one way of thinking about it so hence like as a snake it's bigger she shrinks and then we get these strange lines how fair you are propitiations claw afraid he is to me no corgiality so who speaks is it the snake and if so is this not like the moment in Genesis when Eve is tempted by the serpent who you are how fair you are and one way of interpreting these words is the snake is saying are you afraid of me don't you have any corgiality can't you be nice and or is he saying are you afraid of me yes I'm she's saying yes I'm afraid of your corgiality but in that line propitiations claw it's a great line it's like the snake it starts it's two words very small but it turns into something big six syllables and what does it mean to propitiate means to cause to be favorably inclined or to win the goodwill of somebody or to get somebody to like you and the response to this propitiation it seemed to be a claw wanted to be cordial or nice to guys when we get to Virginia Woolf we're going to read a sentence in which she says two of the most detestable things in the world are love and religion are detestable in the view of one of the characters of the novel because what it does is it causes women to get enslaved to propitiate themselves to surrender and to give up their lives so Dickinson's response to the request to propitiate to be nice to guys to maybe take up with a guy is to flee through all the towns and where does she end up in her bedroom where she works it may be that Dickinson is the discoverer and exponent of a truer form of freedom than Whitman what being locked up in your bedroom yes and for these reasons you know the room the word room is related to the German room the word room is related to the German word realm which means space your room is your space as in I need room space so what happens if you pursue freedom and look for a room in the way that Whitman or Davey Crockett or Daniel Boone did by going west you go west and you find space and you build a little room and crawl inside of it so that you don't have to deal with all the dangers and menaces and you lock yourself up in your room so that poem on page 57 on page 38 I do all the possibility on the word on words for power the Latin word posse means to be able it gives us the word possibility a present participle is potens potency I do all the possibility, a lot of power in this woman alone in her stands or a room poem 33 I think shows us that Dickinson is just as free as Whitman and her coverage just a poem about eros and a new sense of depth inside of her psychology wild nights, wild nights where I would be, wild nights should be our luxury futile of the wind to a heart and port, done with a compass done with a chart, rowing in Eden ah the sea might I have more tonight in the so if you look at the meter, it's by meter it's two beats per line wild nights, wild nights where I should be critics have pointed out that the double beat is the beat of the heart and the unit of this whole poem is the couple the pairing, the formal feature of the poem reflecting the last line is two words, two syllables twoness, coupling is at the heart of this poem whose first stands ends up with the word luxury in the letter I passed out to Higginson she says that after her tutor leaves her only companion is her lexicon she would have known that luxury is related to the word luxury into lust which the poem is about and then futile the winds in the second second stands, what's futile passion no passion what seems to be futile is passion to somebody who renounced travel and companionship to somebody who's in a port notice the word heart stands out there capitalizing this poem that deals with double beats so the tools of getting out there into the world the compass and the chart those are a lot of people to go away from home to strange ports these are done, they've been put away she's not traveling, she's left herself in her room and without rules she travels without the chart and the compass and looks for Eden those of you who studied the Bible know that Eden is the Hebrew word for pleasure and then finally in looking for pleasure I think the speaker she masculinizes the speaker and ends with the wish might I but more in the make of that what you will so but I think her ending up in her room is like her declaration of independence we'll just close on a note on poem 303 the soul selects her own society in which three stands as she talks about the soul figured as a she selecting her own society it's slightly rebelling against the convention of female passivity the females are just passive all they can do is feel things if you're passive you experience passion because you're acted on instead of acting girls are chosen as women were taught in the 19th century but they do not choose but here what she's saying is that the soul selects her own society in the first stand she shuts the door on the divine majority on God majority can also mean like common sense or agreement of the many we've seen that she shuts the door on society too the society of Amherst in the second stand she knows chariots and the emperor and those are both vehicles and things of the world worldly company she shuts the door on that too and then the last stand closes the veils of her attention where veils is a word that works like that phrase in Whitman the exquisite flexible doors it can be a vaginal a vaginal image she's closing herself off too to marriage and human contact so this is saying that she's made a choice she's not relegated herself to a passive position she's chosen to be alone as she is and the poem is complex because it's not like she's rejecting all this thing she's noticing that the divine majority the chariots the emperors they all have an appeal but they're rejected she rejects both the world and the God yet they're valued in the poem because they're contested they're worth fighting for worth of consideration but not as important as her independence and being alone in her room to create her work okay I'll leave you on that note and come back to talk to you on Wednesday about Henry James