via Pharyngula

my daughter and I were talking about emos.  (I know someone who strikes me this way, although he is far from him teen years. That’s what brought up the topic.) My daughter (her brother calls her a prairie goth) says her favourite emo poem is

Roses are red

violets are blue

I hate my parents

and I hate you too.

I have no idea of its provenance, but I find it effective emotionally – I have been giggling about it for hours. So whomever you are/were that wrote the ditty….thanks.

There are a variety of possible emotional reactions to text. I’ve been thinking about that and what the contents of those various categories would say about a person.  So there are the books that make us mad, the ones that bore, the ones that make us chuckle, and downright snort with delight, but there are also the ones that obsess us and the ones that make us deeply envious.  Personally, I find those last two the most interesting.

Comparing lists might be just as illustrative as the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory. (I’m an INTP, for those who know what that means.)

I suppose the trigger for this post was the discovery (in TLS) of a poem that caused me a deep pang of OMG I wish I could write like that

This is a poem by Mick Imlah about Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery which has the first line “I’m not suggesting he was Oscar Wilde.” You can read the full text here and here.

This is the next to last stanza and the one that went through all my civilized defenses and made me want to weep with envy.

Stick to the questions. So I ran them through,
scraping my cane along the sweep of gravel:
Do you regret your ministry was not
a longer one – though so much was achieved?
– or, Was it the splits within your own party,
or the Irish crisis, more, that brought you down –
no – that we should blame the more for your
untimely exit? (“Neither. The truth is,
I had to get out sharp, I was seeing things”) –
And in retirement, what . . .
When in breezed
his amazing daughter. “How d’ye do!
I’m Peggy Crewe – You must be – Modicum . . .”
– offered her hand, and gave me such a smile
I think I said, Indeed I was – I watched
the daisies on her dress – she held her smile;
and as her hand withdrew, I was wondering
at the way this being shone in her station,
whose grace was almost natural, almost
the real thing; and, how I would be the first
to fall in behind her lead or standard –

As is well known, Emily Dickinson read Browne.  He defines a view of witchcraft and magic that has a bit of a twist. In effect, it enables the positive use of “extra-curricula” powers and sites magic and its practitioners in the world with us. In fact, Browne makes some of our greatest claims to fame (our inventions, our science) a “power” of this sort, or at least it gives the human versions of it (philosophy, etc.) a transcendental pedigree.

Given that, and given that Emily’s view of witchcraft was likely shaped in some part by Browne, what does that do to how we interpret the poems I have copied below?

Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici

I conceive there is a traditional magick, not learned immediately from the devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having once the secret betrayed, are able and do empirically practise without his advice; they both proceeding upon the principles of nature; where actives, aptly conjoined to disposed passives, will, under any master, produce their effects. Thus, I think, at first, a great part of philosophy was witchcraft; which, being afterward derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed no more than the honest effects of nature:–what invented by us, is philosophy; learned from him, is magick.

Emily Dickinson
in Johnson, poem 1158 (1870) / In Franklin, poem 1158 (1869)

Best Witchcraft is Geometry
To the magician’s mind -
His ordinary acts are feats
To thinking of mankind -

in Johnson, poem 1583 (1883) / In Franklin, poem 1612 (1883)

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, Every Day -

in Johnson, poem 1708 (unknown date) / in Franklin, poem 1712 (unknown date)

Witchcraft has not a pedigree
‘Tis early as our Breath
And mourners meet it going out
The moment of our death -

I have a little book about poetry and thinking that I return to over and over. It is called Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. I have read, over the years, a number of books about poetry but it remains my favourite.

When I first opened the book, it was to the first essay. By Dennis Lee, it is called “Body Music: Notes on Rhythm in Poetry.” The first bit of the title is OK but the second?  Bland. But then…

What makes a poem cohere? How does it mean what it means?

It starts where the poem does: in the preverbal flex and coherence the words arise from. A poem tries to enact that wordless tumble and surge in its own medium – in line breaks and pauses, syntax and sound, the ripple and clarion strut of sense on the page. It tries to recreate the cadence of how things are, through the nitty gritty of craft.

I was hooked.

Because, I suppose, of my sensory oddities, I completely understood what he meant by “the preverbal flex and coherence.” The craft bit, well…that’s work.

The next bit of the essay – “But how do you get a handle on that? How can you understand technique as more than just a bag of tricks? As witness, and cosmology, and desire?”

What follows are moments like these:

– It starts with rhythm, that much I know.
– A poem thinks by the way it moves.
– What the poem mimes is not a static structure, but an active cohering. Kinetic rhythms of being. A cosmophony, more than a cosmology.
– Free prosody says, the world is coherent – but its coherence emerges in the interplay of variable systems of order. There is no absolute measure which antedates the poem. Coherence is local, provisional, contingent in the flux.
– For you are not just a self-contained subject /observer – you’re embedded in kinaesthetic space.

And that’s just the first essay.

Another theme in Tate’s essay, having outlined the conceptual context of Dickinson’s place as a poet, is his understanding of her cognitive processes as they pertain to achieving an accurate understanding of her poetry as a reader.  He says of her, “She lacks almost radically the power to seize upon and understand abstractions for their own sake; she does not separate them from the sensuous illuminations that she is so marvelously adept at; like Donne, she perceives abstraction and thinks sensation.

Stars! What a phrase – “perceives abstraction and thinks sensation”.

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I’ve been thinking about the Tate essay all day. It’s not so much what he says but the implications of his essay and how these implications fit with other pieces of knowledge that I have acquired elsewhere.  What he does is simple really. He places Dickinson in her conceptual context. He outlines the cognitive transition that occurs as a consequence of the end of the Puritan theocracy and the rise of industrial life.

Where the old-fashioned puritans got together on a rigid doctrine, and could thus be individualists in manners, the nineteenth-century New Englander, lacking a genuine religious center, began to be a social conformist. The common idea of the Redemption, for example, was replaced by the conformist idea of respectability among neighbors whose spiritual disorder, not very evident at the surface, was becoming acute. A great idea was breaking up, and society was moving toward external uniformity, which is usually the measure of the spiritual sterility inside.

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Written in 1932 Allan Tate said “We lack a tradition of criticism. There are no points of critical reference passed on to us from a preceding generation. I am not upholding here the so-called dead hand of tradition, but rather a rational insight into the meaning of the present in terms of some imaginable past implicit in our own lives: we need a body of ideas that can bear upon the course of the spirit and yet remain coherent as a rational  instrument. We ignore the present, which is momently translated into the past, and derive our standards from imaginative constructions of the future. The hard contingency of fact invariably breaks these standards down, leaving us in the intellectual chaos which is the sore distress of American criticism. Marxian criticism has become the lastest disguise of this heresy.”

Oh yes. What a pleasure to read. The hard contingency of fact… Imaginative constructions of the future…

Like all those theories of Emily’s imagined lover, no real evidence, just a disbelief that her passion wasn’t aimed at a specific man or woman.

And like Frank Kermode who, wonderful critic that he is, saw this narrative need of ours to live in the apocalyptic story, to define ourselves by something that isn’t amenable to reason or evidence.

There is so much more in that essay. As I process what he had to say, I will post.

Emily Dickinson was a fairly uncritical reader in that she liked all manner of sentimental and silly books as well as more salubrious literature. I don’t think this a criticism so much as an explanation of what motivated Emily to read. She read for herself, for what the books (texts that she thought of as conversational and educational friends) could add to her life. She wrote for the same reason I think; she read and wrote as a friend listens to another, to take part in the conversation that marks a social being. (Read Richard B Sewall about this. He has a wonderful little essay called “Emily Dickinson’s Books and Reading.” It was rereading this that prompted this little post.)

She was also a magical thinker.  She believed in the literal truth of incarnation, but not just of the Christian version that has Jesus as an incarnation of a simultaneously equal and greater god. She believed in the Platonic-like magic that is an eternal idea born as temporal matter.
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