Much of what I have been reading of late are things to do with Emily Dickinson, mostly criticism with a little biography thrown in. The critics can’t seem to agree on anything, except maybe that she was a poet, and that might be because her lines are usually so short and often fractured that there is no way to see it as prose.

Whether or not Emily was a mystic, for example: lots of people write about her “mystic poetry” and her links to the metaphysical poets by virtue of her obsessions, but then Sister Humiliata (in College English., Vol. 12, No.3, 1950) writes that she isn’t a mystic because she doesn’t renounce life as, according to her, a Christian mystic must. And of course Emily was a Christian, at least her thought patterns, obsessions, and spiritual doorways sought were trained and framed by the Christian doctrine of the Puritan and Transcendental sort.

And Joanne Feit Diehl, Bernikow and Faderman (see Signs, Vol 4, No 1 (1978)) argue about whether Emily’s muse was gendered male or female.

And others whether she can be considered a sort-of transcendentalist.

And whether her idea of circumference puts her more with the 17th century or with the concepts of modernism.

Bah.

Of course I have learnt a good deal from all this reading. I have new ways to think about the poems and letters but I am not sure I have come any closer to understanding what Emily was experiencing when she wrote them.

It feels like Emily Dickinson’s thought is just so much more complex than any of her critic’s (at least of those I have read so far); that they touch her meaning only in the way a mayfly touches time.

But still I can’t stop reading. I have ordered Allen Tate’s book Six American Poets from my library and will probably try and get the Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.

What I want is not to prove that I understand her poetry but to feel as if I do. That experience of enlarging, that sense I have of me being a nest made out of the stuff of the world that grows just because I live – that’s what I am looking for here. I want to feel that sense that I have grown bigger, the ecstatic sense that I have come to encompass more of the world than I did before. Will the critics prove a springboard? Don’t know. I do know that many of the times I have grown before happened because I learnt something, some small detail about how the world works that has split me open and allowed me to spill out of my previous bounds.

The problem is that I have a pretty strong belief that knowledge is the best way to an accurate understanding. So although what I am striving for is a feeling, that feeling, to be authentic and generative of further understanding, must be realistic…that is, based on fact.  So, for now, I’ll keep reading.