Secular Lyric by Michael John;

Author:Michael, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

PART III

Emily Dickinson

CHAPTER 5

The Poet as Lyric Reader

If Whitman works to embrace and incorporate the crowd into the texture of his poetry and of the self who sings it, Dickinson seems to work equally hard to hold her audience, and sometimes even the world, at a distance. Sometimes she links her poetry to the epistolary impulse to address a single other as in “If you were coming in the Fall, / I’d brush the Summer by / With half a smile, and half a spurn, / As Housewife’s do, a Fly” (F356).1 Sometimes she seems to reject this world altogether to focus attention on the next as in “This World is not conclusion. / A species stands beyond—/ Invisible, as Music—/ But positive, as Sound—” (F373). And among the many poems she wrote about poetry and the poet’s office are a fair number that seem skeptical about the entire enterprise of writing verse as in “I would not pain—a picture—” which concludes “Nor would I be a Poet—/ It’s finer—Own the Ear—/ Enamored—impotent—content—/ The License to revere, / A privilege so awful / What would the Dower be, / Had I the Art to stun myself / With Bolts—of Melody!” (F348). In part because of the amazing variety of poetic expressions contained in the now-printed corpus of her nearly eighteen hundred lyrics, Dickinson has become the touchstone for debates about the nature of lyric as a genre, its status in the nineteenth century, and the validity of modern practices of close reading when applied to texts like hers.2 Because I am interested in the modernity of Dickinson’s poetry, some consideration of these debates will be necessary to move my readings forward.

In the broadest sense, I would say that Dickinson’s poetry fits the broader definition of the lyric that Jonathan Culler has recently advanced. Unlike generations of critics, since the nineteenth century, who have associated lyric with the expression of the lyric “I,” Culler identifies it with epideictic rhetoric, the mode that seeks to describe the world, and sometimes to praise or blame what happens in it. Culler’s argument reminds us that many poems we consider lyrics do not obviously foreground self-expression. Many of Dickinson’s most familiar poems, because of the presence of a lyric or perceiving “I” in them, seem lyrical in this sense. They make statements about the world that sometimes do and sometimes do not depend upon the speaker’s presence in the poem. Her observation of a hunting cat, for example, describes a moment in the world’s existence but does not depend directly on the poet’s “I” in the poem: “She sights a Bird—she chuckles—/ She flattens—then she crawls—/ She runs without the look of feet—/ Her eyes increase to Balls—” (F351).

It remains the case, however, that whether one seeks to define lyric or to define the genre away, Dickinson seems to come to mind. The debates around “the new lyrical studies,” whose proponents often seek to make distinctions between modern close reading practices, modern poetry more generally and the nature of traditional lyric poetry are a case in point.

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