The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

(Williams, Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, p. 169).
    Elizabeth Bishop, though she admitted that “I still hate the oh the-pain-of-it-all poems,” noted, “I admire many others” (Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 132).
    Confessional poetry, with its harsh excavations of the self’s deepest places, would not be as rich without Dickinson’s example. Robert Frost, though seldom classed as a confessional poet, wrote several poems in which exploration of his “Desert Places” leads him to a terrifying inner antagonist, a “blanker whiteness” (Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 296) that recalls both Dickinson’s customary dress color and her observations: “Pain has an element of blank” (p. 16) and “One need not be a chamber to be haunted” (p. 224). Finding depths within oneself, of course, can be cause for celebration as well as fear, a fact of which Wallace Stevens seems acutely aware in these lines from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”:
    Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
     
    I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
(Stevens, The Collected Poems, p. 65)
    Here, as often happens in Dickinson’s work, the human and the divine change places, and the mind’s capacity is found to be equal or superior to God’s.
    Several later poets, like Dickinson before them, make death a character: Anne Sexton titled one of her poems “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Death & Co.” personifies not one but two Deaths. (There are also numerous moments in the work of both poets when they imagine their own deaths.) And the popular poet Billy Collins cheerfully profanes Dickinson’s woman-in-white mystique in “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” describing how
    I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset
     
    and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
(Collins, Picnic, Lightning, p. 75)
    Adrienne Rich, in several striking poems, presents a feisty and determined Dickinson. In the fourth section of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” she portrays her
    Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.
(Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, p. 18)
    And in “The Spirit of Place,” Rich angrily describes the Emily Dickinson Industry’s invasion of her home:
    In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst
cocktails are served the scholars
gather in celebration
their pious or clinical legends
festoon the walls like imitations
of period patterns.
(Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, p. 184)
    But despite “The remnants pawed the relics / the cult assembled in the bedroom,” the scholars do not get the last word, for “you whose teeth were set on edge by churches / resist your shrine / escape.” Rich vows that her relationship to Dickinson will be a very different one in which “with the hands of a daughter I would cover you / from all intrusion even my own / saying rest to your ghost” (Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, pp. 184-185).
    Dickinson’s widespread influence can perhaps best be seen in poets who are in most ways nothing like her. e.e. cummings, as formally explosive as Dickinson was—at least superficially—conservative, begins one poem in this way:
    my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height
(e.e. cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962, p.