Two chapters from Poetry as Survival.

The following two pieces are excerpted from a book entitled Poetry as Survival, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002 as part of its Life of Poetry series. The first piece is the preface to the book; the second a chapter on Emily Dickinson.

The book presents a cultural and psychological context for what I call the "personal lyric." A central premise is that the personal lyric is omnipresent in human cultures because it serves an essential function: to assist in the survival of individuals as they undergo existential crises. The first third of the book presents a psychological model for that survival. The second third explores the linguistic and experiential dynamics of the personal lyric and how they assist in survival. The final third historicizes the survival project while examining the work of five poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, and Wilfred Owen) in relation to trauma and the transformations poetry can effect. The first two-thirds of the book proposes that the writing and reading of personal lyrics restabilizes the self destabilized by some form of disorder, be it joyous or catastrophic. The final third considers the situation of poets whose very self has been threatened with annihilation by trauma of one sort or another. Parad oxically, this annihilation of self presents the poet with a necessity and an opportunity: to create a new self in the body of the work. To use an image favored by both Keats and Whitman, the transformative poet must, like a spider, create a new web of meanings and relationships to replace the web shredded by trauma. Each lyric poem by such a poet can be seen as a web the self spins from "his own inwards" and briefly inhabits (like the "airy Citadel" and "beautiful circuiting" Keats celebrates in his letter of February 19, 1818). The new self and the new meanings the poems disclose not only sustain the poet, but also discover visionary possibilities for readers--new ways of being and new human possibilities or values.

Preface: Everywhere and Always

  It is difficult
  to get the news from poems
  yet men die miserably every day
  for lack
  of what is found there.
                        --William Carlos Williams
              from "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower"

As a poet, I've always hated the fact that poetry often intimidates people. Many people I know feel that poetry is a test they can only pass if they are smart enough or sensitive enough, and most fear they will fail. Many refuse the test altogether--never read poetry--for fear of failure. Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its value and purpose, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives.

There is something special about poetry and about lyric poetry in particular, but it's not what most people think. It's not that poetry is written by very intelligent or very sensitive people and is appreciated only by others of equal intelligence and sensitivity. What's special is quite the opposite of this elitist notion of poetry. What's special is that lyric poetry is written down or composed in every culture on the planet at this moment, which means something like 1,000 different cultures and 3,000 different languages. All cultures on the globe have a conception of the personal lyric. What's more, members of all these cultures feel free to write it down or compose it aloud as song or chant, whether they are from tribes in the equatorial rain forests or Inuit and Eskimo in the frozen Arctic; whether they live in Paris or Buenos Aires or Beijing.

In addition to being omnipresent on the planet at this moment, lyric poetry appears to have been written and composed in every ancient or historical culture we have been able to investigate. For all we can tell, poetry may be almost as ancient as the use of language itself. Certainly, when civilizations first made use of written language, poetry was among the first things chosen to be preserved by this new technology of permanence. The Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, transmitted orally for several centuries, were written down 2,700 years ago, shortly after the development of the Greek alphabet, and the lyric poems of Archilochus and Sappho followed soon after. In China, the collection known in the West as The Book of Songs or The Book of Odes was also transmitted orally for several centuries before being written down almost 2,500 years ago. Many of these ancient Chinese poems are lyrics that speak about things that still matter in our lives, like the love longing in this one spoken by a woman:

Blue, blue your collar,
sad sad my heart:
though I do not go to you,
why don't you send word?

Blue blue your beltstone,
sad sad my thoughts:
though I do not go to you,
why don't you come?

Restless, heedless,
I walk the gate tower.
One day not seeing you
is three months long.
         --Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, p. 30

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered four collections of love poetry compiled during the New Kingdom period 3,300 years ago. Three of these "anthologies" are on papyrus fragments, the fourth was carved on the side of a stone vase. Here is a translation of one of these Egyptian poems, spoken by a male lover plotting to get his sweetheart's attention:

I shall lie down at home
and pretend to be dying.
Then the neighbors will all come in
to gape at me, and, perhaps, she will come with
 them.
When she comes, I won't need a doctor,
she knows why I am ill.

How simple such a poem is and yet how emotionally complete and amusing--how easy it is for us to enter into the situation and the speaker's feelings. And yet it was written over three thousand years ago.

It seems important to say at the outset that the kind of poem I am discussing, what I call the "personal lyric," does not by any means constitute the bulk of the world's lyric poetry legacy. For complicated reasons, personal lyrics are often not preserved with as much care as other kinds of lyrics, especially those which express and reinforce the governing religious, political and social structures of a given society. Thus, although we encounter a powerful poet of the personal lyric at the very beginning of Greek literature, namely Sappho, most of the Western lyric tradition up until the Romantics consists of what I call "social lyrics" and "sacred lyrics." In the pages that follow, I'll focus on the personal lyric and a variant on the personal lyric, the transformative lyric, hoping to describe how they function in the life of the individual poet and reader. It's my belief that this kind of poem has a crucial role to play in our psychological, imaginative and spiritual lives.

We often experience the world as confusing and chaotic, especially during crises. This confusion can be outside us, in the objective conditions of our social and political lives, or it can be inside us, in the swiftly-shifting world of emotions, thoughts, and memories. Even as we recognize the power of disorder in our experience, we are likely to become aware of a strong need we have to feel there is some order in the world that helps us feel safe and secure. Our day-to-day consciousness can be characterized as an endlessly-shifting, back-and-forth awareness of the power and presence of disorder in our lives and our desire or need for a sense of order. Most of us live most of our lives more or less comfortably with the daily interplay of these two awarenesses, but in certain existential crises, disorder threatens to overwhelm us entirely and in those cases, the very integrity of the self is threatened, and its desire or ability to persist is challenged. Among the most obvious and dramatic of these upheavals w e could include intense romantic passion or the sudden death of someone near and dear to us. And yet our instability is present to us almost daily in our unpredictable moods and the way memories haunt us and fantasies play themselves out at will on our inner mental screens. We are creatures whose volatile inner lives are both mysterious to us and beyond our control. How to respond to the strangeness and unpredictability of our own emotional being? One important answer to this question is the personal lyric, the "I" poem dramatizing inner and outer experience.

Human culture "invented" or evolved the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crises represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one. This survival begins when we "translate" our crisis into language where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it. This same poem also arrays the ordering powers our shaping imagination has brought to bear on these disorderings. Thus the poem we compose (or respond to as readers) still accurately mirrors the life crisis it dramatizes, still displays life's interplay of disorder and order. But in the act of making a poem at least two crucial things have taken place which are different than ordinary life. First, we have shifted the crisis to a bearable distance from us: removed it to the symbolic but vivid world of language. Secondly, we have actively made and shaped this model of our situation r ather than passively endured it as lived experience.

And yet, the project of poem making I wish to describe, this active taking-hold of one's emotional life, begins with a passive receptivity which is best expressed by the final lines of the D. H. Lawrence poem that gives this book its title:

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
       --from "Song of a Man Who Has Come
                           Through," 1914

The first three lines I've quoted dramatize the terror we might feel when faced with the unknown and unexpected. The-final two lines respond not only with a cryptic reassurance about the identity of our visitors, but also with firm advice about how we must respond to them. We must overcome our fears and open our doors to them; we must admit their radiant, disturbing power into our psychic lives.

The survival value of personal lyric is for listeners/readers as well as writers. Broadly speaking, its function is to help us express and regulate our emotional lives, which are confusing and sometimes opaque to us. This survival function of the personal lyric can be quite readily recognized when we consider that in our culture much of popular music consists of what I would consider personal lyric poetry. I am not saying that the lyrics of popular songs are as coherent or sophisticated in their patterning as poems written for the page--that's a different story, since much of a song's meaning is carried by rhythm and melody. I am saying that the particular songs that you love deeply help you to live just as surely as do the poems you cherish. Popular music (be it rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country, folk, rap, or whatever) has the power to express and regulate our emotions. Popular music of one kind or another is important to the subjective lives of most of us, but it is especially crucial during adolesc ence, when it can almost seem as if we exist from one passionately loved song to the next--as if adolescence were a series of leaps through swirling darkness in which we landed on the bright, shining stone of one song after another. I know I couldn't have made it through that part of my life without rock and roll--that is, without songs I loved intensely, songs that I felt expressed and channelled the powerful and inchoate feelings that churned inside me. I say "rock and roll" and I mean the whole field of popular song. My parents' generation survived on lyrics by Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter I couldn't have lived without certain songs of Dylan or the Beatles. My youngest daughter loves Lou Reed and the British band Pulp. The music changes (radically) from generation to generation, but the survival function remains the same.

That the discovery of poetry can have enormous transformative power is something I know from my own experience. I grew up in the fifties in the countryside of upstate New York and had had a rifle of my own since the age of ten. When I was twelve years old I was responsible for a hunting accident in which my younger brother died. To say that I was horrified and traumatized by the event is only to state the obvious. I've written elsewhere (in poems and a memoir) about my emotional responses to this experience; I won't rehearse them here. Two years after my brother's death, my mother died suddenly, at the young age of thirty-six, after a "routine" hospital procedure. In 1965, at the age of eighteen, I worked briefly as a volunteer in the South for the Civil Rights movement and was on the receiving end of both state-organized political violence (numerous police beatings with clubs) and vigilante rage (being abducted at gunpoint in rural Alabama and held in solitary confinement for eight days). These various exper iences gave me a terrifying sense of how fragile human life is, how easily and quickly people can vanish.

Since, in the hunting accident, I was the child holding the gun that killed my brother, I also acquired an enormous burden of guilt and anguish: a burden that threatened to overwhelm my adolescent ego with despair and worse. My parents were so devastated and upset by my brother's death that they were unable to offer me any consolation for my deed, or even to speak with me about it. At the time of my brother's death, a friend of the family counseled me that my brother's death was all part of God's plan, which was necessarily inscrutable to us on earth. This notion of a divine order that had the power to subsume such violent disorder didn't seem believable to me and failed to help me live through the traumatic crisis that had become my life.

Other people, including my parents, told me my brother's death was "an accident." They were right, of course, at one level. But what they did not seem to realize was that for me the word "accident" was the name of the horror that had happened, not a response to it--not an ordering, not a meaning. Who could live in a world composed of accidents so terrible as to leave your little brother, who was standing beside you one moment, the next moment a lifeless corpse at your feet? Unbearable word, this "accident." Unbearable world.

My twelve-year-old consciousness desperately needed meaning in order to survive what I had done. That day of my brother's death I did find, for myself and by myself, something in the Bible that spoke to my situation: the story of Cain and Abel, the one brother slaying the other in a field. This was not, on the face of it, a very consoling story to identify with, but it helped me survive the earliest part of the trauma, even if it meant that I came to secretly believe that I was Cain. At least Cain lived, I told myself; that Cain continued living after Abel's death was part of the story, part of the story's strange meaning.

At the time of my brother's death, no one proposed philosophical attitudes to me, but had they done so I doubt I would have gained any consolation or understanding from them. In my experience, the conceptualizations philosophy offers are not adequate to the sudden death of a loved one, nor the anguish in families that follows.

I lived for about four years after my brother's death without any hope at all. Nothing that I found in my culture sustained me. Even my relationship with the natural world, that had been so important to me earlier, was not enough to alter my grief, despair and guilt. Then, thanks to Mrs. Irving, the librarian in my small public school, I discovered poetry. I had previously had a vague desire to write, but nothing had brought me to lyric poetry or the writing of it. In the small "honors English" class that Mrs. Irving taught in my senior year, she had us write all kinds of things: stories, sketches, plays, haiku. I wrote a poem one day, and it changed my life. I had a sudden sense that the language in poetry was "magical," unlike language in fiction: that it could create or transform reality rather than simply describe it. That first poem I wrote was a simple, escapist fantasy, but it liberated the enormous energy of my despair and oppression as nothing before had ever done. I felt simultaneously revealed to m yself and freed of my self by the images and actions of the poem. I knew from that moment on that all I wanted to do was write poems. I knew that if I was to survive in this life, it would only be through the help of poetry. Mind you, I am not saying my early poems were good, or that I knew anything about the skill of crafting a poem--years of agonized apprenticeship were before me--but the experience of hope and pleasure was revelatory to me then and still underlies my understanding of an essential purpose and meaning of lyric poetry.

It's been my great good luck that what saved my life has, since that moment, become its main preoccupation and the source of my livelihood. I've taught the reading and writing of poetry for the past twenty-five years. Everything I've learned in that time reinforces my own experience that the personal lyric helps individual selves, both writers and readers, service the vicissitudes of experience and the complexities and anguish of subjectivity and trauma.

Much of my book is speculative and meant to be suggestive rather than definitive. Again and again, I have a sense that I am only pointing in certain directions and that other people will see more clearly and express more lucidly what is there waiting to be identified and described. On the other hand, I've done the best I could to interrogate my intuitions and test them against the rich evidence of poems I know and love.

Chapter 13: Dickinson and the Brain's Haunted Corridors

   I suppose there are depths in every Conscious-
   ness, from which we cannot rescue ourselves--
   to which none can go with us--....
           --letter to Mrs. J. G. Holland, June 1878

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) could well be the ultimate poet of the personal lyric. No lyric poet has been her equal for the intensity and variety of subjective states dramatized. She has written great poems of grief, longing, wonder, loneliness, fear, love, madness, joy, anger, ecstasy, solitude, despair, desire. She has written wonderfully about the great mysteries of time, and death, and those imaginings that seem to cancel time and death: eternity and immortality.

It would be possible to write an 800-page biography of Emily Dickinson (such a book has been written). But if that biography confined itself to her activities in the world, it would be appallingly repetitious and boring. In her sixty years of life, she seldom left her small Massachusetts village of Amherst, and, even within the narrow compass of Amherst she had a tendency to stay in her family's house. What's more, she preferred her own bedroom to any other area of the house and would often retire there when visitors arrived. Or she might lower a basket of gingerbread on a rope from her bedroom window to an assembled group of neighborhood children. Was she a timid and batty lady? A small town eccentric who, after a certain point, dressed almost entirely in white? Yes. And yes, the physical excursions she took were few and uninteresting, but her imaginative journeys were incessant and the inner realm she inhabited was vast. She had one of the greatest imaginations of American poetry--the equal of Whitman's, th ough very different in tone. And she was one of the most adventurous and courageous minds of her time (and ours). She was what William Blake might call a "Mental Traveller" and her excursions constituted the most elaborate exploration ever of Keats's "dark passages" of consciousness.

Much as I admire Keats's image of the shadowy corridors of consciousness, it fails to do justice to the boldness and wildness of Emily Dickinson's exploring. We need the sort of rugged, American image Whitman would urge, something equal to the originality and primitive power of Dickinson's venture. Something like those huge cave systems that writhe and dive for hundreds of miles beneath the American soil: Mammoth in Kentucky or Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. I'm thinking less of the huge, operatic rooms hung with stalactites, than the narrow windings that might end in a wall or a duff or a small pool wheretiny, blind fish swim. And Emily Dickinson, our Recluse of the White Dress, crawls there in her other, chthonic incarnation as America's Greatest Cave Explorer. While Emily Dickinson the proper Amherst damsel strolls about town and countryside observing flowers and sunsets with her dog Carlo, Emily Dickinson the intrepid Poet is deep underground, with her lantern helmet of intense rhythms and startling metaphors probing the dark, mapping states of consciousness no one else has had the courage or skill to articulate.

I say a cave system and I mean the human brain:

One need not be a Chamber--to be
  Haunted--
One need not be a House--
The Brain has Corridors--surpassing
Material Place--

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting--
That Cooler Host.

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a'chase--
Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter--
In lonesome Place--

Ourself behind ourself, concealed--
Should startle most--...
                                  --from #670

We know she wrote at least 1775 lyric poems--a staggering number--because she preserved most of them in her spidery handwriting on small, hand-sewn packets she kept in a trunk. How to explain those 1775 poems? She wrote more great poems than any other American poet before or since. And only five of them were published in her lifetime. Even those five were recast, re-punctuated, printed without her permission. I know--she sent her poems to friends, enclosed copies of them in letters, or baskets of baked goods sent to a neighbor, and so on. But the truth remains that almost no one around her could appreciate the audacity and originality of her work. To say that her genius was recognized and understood is simply not accurate. Her solitude was impenetrable. It was the solitude of someone who hears, inside her, an utterly distinct music, who endures and bodies forth utterly distinct and bold imaginings. It's as if she played an invisible harp in her room--a harp only she could see or hear. And each string was a di fferent poem, a different lyric organized around a distinct, intense emotion. Each string was a poem and also a tightrope on which Emily Dickinson walked out and balanced over the Abyss. No safety net. Only the music in her ears, to which she danced, alone there on the wire.

If lyric poetry thrives on its intensity (as Keats claimed), then that intensity is often achieved through compression. Many of Dickinson's poems are imagistically and syntactically dense and hard to understand and they move and shift their images with a kind of lightning rapidity that takes getting used to. (1) I've been reading Dickinson's poems for years and I still feel that in the best of her poems there are always lines or images or turns of thought that I can't follow and yet this in no way diminishes' my sense that I have absorbed the energy and significance of the poem. For me, as a reader, the most important thing is to ignore her eccentric punctuation and read her poems aloud, listening for their tone of voice. Once I can hear the human voice of her emotion behind a particular poem, I feel as if I am inside the poem and its mystery or message is revealed to me. And once you hear her voice, it can be as direct and urgent as anything anyone ever said:

I cannot live with You--
It would be Life--
And Life is over there--
Behind the Shelf
                             --from #640

(and she continues with a metaphor of the frustrated lovers being locked up in a cupboard like broken or old-fashioned china cups; except that it is a sexton, a gravedigger, who locks up the cupboard, and on the poem goes to even more strange yet lucid imaginings).

Or:

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes--
I wonder if It weighs like Mine--
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long--
Or did it just begin--
I could not tell the Date of Mine--
It feels so old a pain--

I wonder if it hurts to live--
And if They have to try--
And whether--could They choose between--
It would not be--to die
                               --from #561

What was her trauma? What hurt her into song? Though Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of letters to her friends and acquaintances, she had almost no one with whom she could discuss poetry writing. The one major exception was T. W. Higginson, a journalist and editor to whom she sent some poems in April 1862 and with whom she corresponded for years. In response to his first letter to her, inquiring how long she had been writing, she says the following:

You asked how old I was? I made no verse--but
one or two--until this winter-Sir-- (2)
  I had a terror--since September--I could tell
to none--and so I sing, as the Boy does by the
Burying Ground--because I am afraid--....
When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me
Immortality--but venturing too near, himself--
he never returned ...
                      --letter of April 25, 1862

So, we know that a loss or losses amounting to "terror" are one motive she claims for writing. We learn about her sense of isolation and how she has turned to nature for consolation:

You ask of my Companions Hills--Sir--and the
Sundown--and a Dog--large as myself, that my
Father bought me--They are better than Beings
--because they know--but do not tell--and the
noise in the Pool, at Noon--excels my Piano.
                                       --ibid.

We learn of her family, with whom she will spend her whole life, although she differs from them, especially in matters of religion:

I have a Brother and Sister--MyMother does not
care for thought--and Father, too busy with his
Briefs (3)--to notice what we do--He buys me many
Books--but begs me not to read them--because
he fears they joggle the Mind. They are religious
--except me--and address an Eclipse, every
morning--whom they call their "Father."
                                       --ibid.

Her father might have feared books would destabilize Emily Dickinson but it might be closer to the truth to note that she was so sensitive to her emotional states that, in a sense, anything was capable of joggling her mind:

when far afterward--a sudden light on Orchards,
or a new fashion in the wind troubled my atten-
tion--I felt a palsy, here--the Verses just relieve--
             --letter of June 7, 1862 to Higginson

That is, her consciousness, her "attention" could be troubled and disordered by a sensation in nature or by her own emotional states--by outer or inner disorder, by joy and wonder (mostly in nature) as much as by terror, pain, despair, and grief (her inner weather). And when these "palsies" struck, she turned to the writing of poems to regain her balance.

When Higginson, responding to some poems she sent him, urges her to write a more regular meter, she responds with some more poems and some pertinent remarks:

Are these more orderly? I thank you for the Truth--
  I had no Monarch in my life, and cannot rule
myself; and when I try to organize--my little Force
explodes---and leaves me bare and charred--
  I think you called me "Wayward." Will you help
me improve?
                         --letter of August 1862

What can we "trust" in Dickinson's letters to Higginson? She is complex: she needs the sophisticated literary response and encouragement she gets from Higginson, but she also knows her own genius and originality, or at the very least she is committed to that originality and does not alter her poems to fit his criticism (though she makes a great show of gratitude in her letters to him). I think we can trust this: her image of being unable to "rule" herself; her sense that when she tries to "organize" and order her language and her emotions, she "explodes." This image isn't of someone who cannot write ordered poems--we see that she writes them masterfully and incessantly. Instead, it is testimony from someone who realizes that she is unstable, who knows that her volatile consciousness can blow up in her face, leaving her "bare and charred." And it is precisely this volatility that she incorporates into her poems in order to triumph over it and, in the process, creates the complex and multifaceted self we know a s the Emily Dickinson of the poems.

How strange to be Emily Dickinson. She is so much smarter and livelier than anyone around her--an inevitable conclusion for anyone who has experienced the delight of reading her letters. And yet, she is a woman. What can she do with her intelligence and imagination? She can't become a lawyer or doctor or professor. She can't go into business. All that her small-town New England world held out to her as possibilities were marriage and motherhood or spinsterhood. No wonder she thought she would burst. No wonder her poems explode.

With Emily Dickinson more than with any of my other heroes of imagination, I am concerned that by trying to pinpoint what specific trauma assailed her, I may be on the wrong track. Ultimately, it's pointless to attempt to locate the specific traumas that initiated the desolation and radical freedom that gave rise to the self-creation of her poems. All we could hope to do is guess. The worst situation of all would be the error of psychoanalytic criticism: to think that by locating and labeling the poet's trauma, we had found out his or her secrets. To think that way would be to look down the wrong end of the telescope at diminishment.

We need to go in the opposite direction: recognizing that the poet's trauma initiates the struggle of transformation that leads to the richly proliferating and glorious incarnations of the poems.

We can't know what hurt Emily Dickinson so, but we do know that something hurt her with enormous force, again and again:

It struck me--every Day--
The Lightning was as new
As if the Cloud that instant slit
And let the Fire through--

It burned me--in the Night--
It Blistered to My Dream--

It sickened fresh upon my sight--
With every Morn that came--

I thought that Storm--was brief--
The Maddest--quickest by--
But Nature lost the Date of This--
And left it in the Sky--

                                       --#362

And we know that she responded bravely, that she "love(d) to buffet the sea!" She meant, of course, an inner sea: the sea of subjectivity, of the rise and fall, the ebb and flow and wild, wave-torn storms of the emotional life. Such storms, turned into words, might take the form of incantatory raptures on an imagined, intimate ecstasy:

    Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
    Were I with thee
    Wild Nights would be
    Our Luxury!

    Futile--the Winds--
    To a Heart in port--
    Done with the Compass--
    Done with the Chart!

    Rowing in Eden--
    Ah, the Sea!
    Might I but moor--Tonight--
    In Thee!

                                             --#249
Or they might articulate despair and fear of madness:

    I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
    And Mourners to and fro
    Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
    That Sense was breaking through--

    And when they all were seated,
    A Service, like a Drum--
    Kept beating--beating--till I thought
    My Mind was going numb--

    And then I heard them lift a Box
    And creak across my Soul
    With those same Boots of Lead, again,
    Then Space--began to toll,

    As all the Heavens were a Bell,
    And Being, but an Ear,
    And I, and Silence, some strange Race
    Wrecked, solitary, here--

    And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
    And I dropped down, and down--
    And hit a World, at every plunge,
    And Finished knowing--then--

                                     --#280
Dickinson can hymn desolation and agony:

    And then--Excuse from Pain--
    And then--those little Anodynes
    That deaden suffering--

    And then--to go to sleep--
    And then--if it should be
    The will of its lnquisitor
    The privilege to die--

                                           #536
And just as fervently, the defiant free will of cre-
ativity examplified by the writing of poems:

    They shut me up in Prose--
    As when a little Girl
    They put me in the Closet--
    Because they like me "still"--

    Still! Could themself have peeped--
    And seen my Brain--go round--
    They might as wise have lodged a Bird
    For Treason--in the pound--
    Himself has but to will
    And easy as a Star
    Abnolish his Captivity--
    And laugh--No more have I--

                                          --#613
She can articulate a sense of cryptic wonder:

    I am afraid to own a Body--
    I am afraid to own a Soul--
    Profound--precarious Property--

                                    --from #1090
Or brood on the loss of religious faith:

    Those--dying then,
    Knew where they went--
    They went to God's Right Hand--
    That Hand is amputated now
    And God cannot be found--

                                 --from #1557
or the mystical humbling of the human heart:

    Not with a Club, the Heart is broken
    Nor with a Stone--
    A Whip so small you could not see it
    I've known

    To lash the magic Creature ...

                                  --from #1304

With Emily Dickinson, it might seem as if we were talking about the poetry of survival--a restabilizing of self through poetic ordering. But subjectivity is so rampant and intense for Dickinson that the truest thing we might risk saying is that subjectivity itself could be said to constitute her trauma. Her emotional life was so excruciatingly volatile and her solitude so deep that simple conscious existence represented a potential shattering of self. And she responds to this curious threat with an equally powerful ordering self, a self created in and through the poems. When we think of the transformative lyric as a project in self-creation, it is worth noting that "I" is Emily's favorite opening word, beginning a full 142 of her poems (only "the" happens more frequently). Who knows the secret nature of the thin lady in white who sometimes opened the door at her father's house when the neighbors came calling? Much fruitless speculation has been expended on her thwarted romantic life--as if identifying this or that acquaintance as the love of her life might illuminate something.

Her true lovers were the three strange angels of Lawrence's poem and when they knocked, she flung wide the door and embraced them. She became Our Lady of the Strange Angels, the Amherst Virgin immaculately conceiving and bringing forth poem after astonishing poem. She took each emotion, each mental state on its own terms and wrestled it into the small space her poems take up.

And she challenges us to be her equal in courage:

Dare you see a Soul at the white heat?

NOTES

(1.) In discussing her poems, I am for the most part not talking about the most frequently anthologized nature poems that are often sentimental or even coy. Dickinson has numerous great poems about the wonder and beauty of the natural world, but she is far more and far different than a poet of bumblebees, butterflies, and sunsets.

(2.) In fact, she has written over two hundred by the time of this letter.

(3.) Her father was a lawyer and her brother would become one also.

GREGORY ORR'S eighth book of poems, The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in April, 2002. His memoir, The Blessing, will appear from Council Oaks Books later this year. This article is excerpted from Poetry as Survival, to be published by the University of Georgia Press this year in its Life of Poetry series. Orr is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia and poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and an editor of Sacred Bearings: A Journal for Survivors.