In Rough Country Read Online Free PDF

Higginson’s remarriage, and by his obvious reluctance to visit her, yet, admirably, as so admirably Dickinson weathered any number of personal blows, in some fusion of female stoicism and pragmatism she seems to have re-channeled her attentionupon the elderly widower Judge Otis Lord, a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom she wrote letters of unfettered longing:
    My lovely Salem smiles at me. I seek his Face so often—but I have done with guises.
    I confess that I love him—I rejoice that I love him—I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth—that gave him me to love—the exultation floods me. I cannot find my channel—the Creek turns Sea—at the thought of thee—
    At the same time, Dickinson continued to write to her “Master” Higginson in elevated, occasionally elegiac terms, as in this final poem sent to Higginson shortly before her death in 1886:
    Of glory not a Beam is left
    But her Eternal House—
    The Asterisk is for the Dead,
    The Living, for the Stars—
    (1647)
    The concluding chapters of Wineapple’s White Heat are a detailed scrutiny of Dickinson’s posthumous career—“posthumous” being the only career possible for one of such startlingly original gifts, as if, in the midst of the revered Hudson Valley landscape painting of the nineteenth century there might have appeared the unsettling canvases of Cézanne. Howdoes one see what is so radically new, still more how does one draw meaning from it? Leaving 1775 poems of varying degrees of legibility and completion, often in teasingly variant forms, Emily Dickinson presented a considerable puzzle for scholars of her work through the decades, and particularly for her first, at times overwhelmed editors Higginson and the indefatigable Mabel Todd, who could not resist correcting Dickinson’s punctuation and other seeming flaws in her verse. It may even be—this would constitute another radical strangeness in Dickinson, amid the staid formality of her era—that “her poems were always in progress, meant to be revised, reevaluated, and reconceived, especially when dispatched to different readers.” As Richard Howard suggests, finishing poems may not have interested Dickinson: “her true Flaubert was Penelope, to invert a famous allusion, forever unraveling what she had figured on the loom the day before.” It seems like a simple query, why a poem must be singular and not rather plural , as musical compositions in the mode of John Cage are not fixed and finite but ever-improvised. Perhaps it’s only a convention, that the gravitas of print seems to insist upon permanence, and it’s the “route of evanescence” so magically embodied by Dickinson’s poems that is the truest nature of poetry.
    Though critical responses were inevitably mixed, with British critics the most roused to contempt, the first edition of Dickinson’s Poems sold out rapidly through eleven printings in 1891 and the second, “swathed in white, like its author,” was another best seller later in the same year. Tireless Mabel Todd, thrilled by her new mission of bringing a New England poetess of genius to the attention of the public, set on the road as a sort of precursor of Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst , giving lectures and readings throughout New En gland.
    Benfey concludes A Summer of Hummingbirds with a lyric epilogue titled “Toward the Blue Peninsula” in which, as in a cinematic flash-forward, he breaks the nineteenth-century frame of his gossamer narrative to bring us to Joseph Cornell who, in the mid-1950s, so brilliantly incorporated images from Dickinson’s poetry—birds and flowers and jewels and planets—in his box-sculptures “with a ghostly majesty and strangeness.” Appropriately, Benfey’s ending isn’t a critical summing-up or a statement of fact but an evocative poetry: “The window is open. The perch is