In his 1836 essay "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson, the reigning man of letters at the dawn of American poetics, asks: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition...?" The tradition Emerson alluded to was, of course, the intellectual domination of European literary canons and the continued emulation of British poetic forms by newly-minted, post-colonial American poets.
Sixty years after the Declaration of Independence, American poetry had not caught up with the elegant rhetoric of this liberation document. Emerson passionately calls for a poetry native to American life and American language. His challenge is soon answered by several radically different voices, among them Emily Dickinson, whom he was never to read. Of the few poems Dickinson officially published in her lifetime (1830-1886), one that appeared anonymously in an anthology called A Masque of Poets, “Success is counted sweetest/by those who n’er succeed,” (P67) was ironically and mistakenly attributed to Emerson.
In near obscurity and artistic isolation, Emily Dickinson produces a paradise of poetry unlike her contemporaries. Through poems, letters, and critical writings, we will examine her philosophical temperament and aesthetic strategies. We will pay special attention to the editing, defacement, and partial recuperation of the body of work for which she leaves no specific instructions. We will look at how she experiments with voice, persona, syntax, rhyme, meter; how she delightedly appropriates from and corresponds with a variety of literary masters; how ambiguity, multiplicity, and ellipsis are the well-spring of her aesthetic; how she deliberately constructs an anti-career in the service of her genius. And how her poetry has been deeply absorbed by late 20th and early 21st century writers.
- Instructor: Gloria Frym