EMILY DICKINSON
1830–1886
Selected Poems
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, the daughter of a prominent lawyer. Her formal education ended after one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary when she returned home, at the age of eighteen, to live permanently in her father’s house. She took two or three short trips to Washington and Boston in the next few years but otherwise she never left Amherst, becoming more and more reclusive as the years passed, although she maintained correspondences with several persons whom she hardly ever saw face to face.
She never married. She probably experienced one or two love affairs; we know little about her inner life. If these love affairs were unhappy it is also probable that the failure was on the man’s side, not on hers. Or she may have decided the man was not up to her standard. Certainly her poetry gives the impression of a woman who very well knew her own mind.
She began writing verse during her school days and never stopped, although her finest poems were written just before and during the Civil War—from 1858 to 1866. Few knew that she wrote them, but she did send a few samples to a family friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who for many years gently urged her not to publish. Apart from seven heavily edited poems, she never did. But after her death in 1886, her family, together with Higginson, brought out a small volume, Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890). The reviews were bad, but people bought the book, and other collections soon followed.
Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems are glancing blows at life, which is too big a subject, she may have felt, to take on directly. She chips away at the rock of existence, piece by little piece, until she is surrounded by a pile of fragments, and a figure emerges. That figure is never wholly clear; like Michelangelo, she was content to leave this or that aspect of her work unfinished. But when she chose to emphasize a point or line, it emerged with blinding clarity.
A few scattered lines and couplets demonstrate her talents:
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain.
The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
After great pain a formal feeling comes.
Those lines were chosen almost at random. Few poets are so consistently good. Emily Dickinson hardly ever misses, hardly ever loses her exquisite touch. And she is always saying something extraordinary. Take the poem that begins, “The soul selects her own society/Then shuts the door.” That is indeed the way we are. We choose a friend, we fall in love, and then we turn our backs on all the other people, doubtless some of them equally interesting and beautiful, in the world. Why do we do it? That is another question, and Emily Dickinson does not answer it. One thing at a time. The observation was worth making for its own sake.
An old name for poet was “troubadour,” taken from an old French term that comes down in modern French as trouver, to find. A poet, then, was a finder. And is: Nothing that poets do is more important than this finding, which is also discovering, noticing, observing. The great poet sees things that we have not seen, that are plainly there to see once he has pointed them out, but that no one could see before they were limned. Emily Dickinson was above all a finder, a troubadour.
She is easy to read, but there is the danger that her ease and apparent simplicity will lead you to think she really is simple, even simpleminded. That would be foolish, like thinking Socrates was simpleminded because he discussed philosophy in plain terms. Emily Dickinson seems simple because she is so controlled, because the weapon of her poetry is so sharp that when she cuts there is no sound, no quiver of the blade. The piece she has cut off of reality simply lies there, at her feet. She looks at you with her level glance, not smiling. There, she seems to be saying, do you see? Do you understand? And do you know how much more hard work there is to do?
The physical form of Emily Dickinson’s poems is usually odd: they were scratched out on stray slips of paper, thrown into a box all higgledy-piggledy, as if she didn’t care what became of them. Why do poets do things like that? Shakespeare seems not to have cared about his manuscripts, either—they survive by accident, or at least the goodwill of friends, not the effort of their author. I think Emily Dickinson was challenging posterity to recognize her greatness, a greatness that was unknown to her contemporaries. I believe it was known to her. It is known now by everyone, and it is not rare to hear it said that she and Whitman are the two greatest American poets. Oh, if only she could know that! Except, again, she probably does.
Since Emily Dickinson is such a consistently good poet it hardly matters which poems are read first. Any good anthology contains a wealth of possibilities.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
1822–1888
Poems
Criticism
Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, which through various reforms he had raised to the rank of a great public school rivaling Eton and Harrow. His son was educated there and at Oxford. Matthew’s great career began in 1851 when he was appointed an inspector of schools, in which capacity he served for thirty-five years, traveling all over England and on the Continent. His first book of poetry was published in 1849; it was followed by many more. On his honeymoon, two years later, he began writing “Dover Beach,” his best-known poem and one that deserves its fame.
He and his bride stand at a window listening to the waves as they fling pebbles “up the high strand” and, returning, “bring the eternal note of sadness in.” “The sea of faith was once, too, at the flood,” he feels, but now he only hears “its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” “Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” he cries, for there is “neither joy, nor love, nor light,” and we are here “as on a darkling plain,” where “ignorant armies clash by night.”
“Dover Beach” is one of the saddest poems ever written. Arnold was aware that many changes were occurring in England and elsewhere, changes produced by the Industrial Revolution and all it represented and entailed. J.S. Mill, Baudelaire, Dickens, and George Eliot, too, had heard that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” I believe we can hear it still.
In his fifties, Arnold turned to prose instead of poetry to express his deep pessimism about the way the world was going. He called for “high seriousness” in literature and nominated a dozen “touchstones” of great poetry that he urged poets of his day always to keep in mind as they wrote, famous lines and images from Homer, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and a few others—not many. Employing a famous phrase, he described the “Cultured” man as distinct from the “Philistine,” culture being represented by the possession of “sweetness and light.” He was mocked in his time, and the real meaning of those words has been totally lost. But for Arnold, “sweetness” was beauty and good taste, while “light” was intelligence and knowledge.