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ception and extraordinary phrasing may be succeeded by some make–
shift notation or excruciating rhyme:
Day knocked, and we must part.
Neither was strongest now,
He strove, and I strove too.
We didn't do it though!
Writing like this may be explained by the fact that Emily Dickinson
did not write for publication; and we have every reason to suppose
that the author of some of these poems would not have permitted many
of the others to be printed. And midway between her successes and
her failures are the poems she might have attempted to rewrite, of
which the following stanza is representative:
Power is a familiar growth,
Not foreign, not to be,
Beside us like a bland abyss
In every company;
where the second line is incoherent and must be construed by uncertain
guesswork.
However, Emily Dickinson's virtues and defects, though they issue
in originality, are not unique, and much in her work illustrates the
peculiar fate of the author in America. Like Emerson, she never quite
mastered poetic form, and her successes in versification resemble fine
weather, and good luck. Like Melville and like Hart Crane, she was
intoxicated with language, and abused it as well as used it with genius.
Like Hawthorne, she lived in a self-imposed exile, . laboring with private
obsessions which are certainly in back of the impenetrability of some of
her poems. And it is the special preoccupation with vocabulary, the
words used to express an intuition with perfect economy and the mis–
used words, which should remind the reader of how often American
literature has been the playground of half-educated inspired human
beings when it has not been dominated by genteel, pedantic and correct
mediocrities. Emily Dickinson was half-educated in a way which differs
a good deal from the kind of half-education Hart Crane received. Her
one effort to connect herself with a living literary tradition was greeted
with condescension and little understanding, while Crane might be said
to have had, in the abstract at least, a greater opportunity to relate
himself to a disciplined literary tradition. But the result in poetry is
very much the same.
The fact, (which has not, so far as I know, been noted) that much
of the surface of her writing, and especially the quality of her wit, re–
sembles the prose of Alice James (who admired her poems when they
first appeared) suggests some common basis in New England life. And
we may make out the boundary lines of this common basis when we
remember how often in Emily Dickinson's poems renunciation is the
motive which is celebrated and the motive which diminishes all others.
