Emily Dickinson

I

An outsider looking at the poetry of the United States sees mainly Walt Whitman’s beard, with the sombre mask of Edgar Allan Poe looming immediately beyond it. He will be as familiar with both of these figures as though they were Europeans, compatriots even. I believe I have seen a Dutch translation of Leaves of Grass, while decades ago all declaimers made the raven caw, often in a typical Dutch idiom resembling poetry, as was acceptable at the time. If this outsider were to visit the local public library to make further acquaintance with the literature in question and were to open a book on American literature dating from, let us say, around 1900, he would learn that alongside the great poets (such as Longfellow), there have also been many minor poets. This reader might then just happen to read patronising, if appreciative, words about one minor woman poet, Emily Dickinson. Unless he were to undertake some research of his own, he would not realise that he was dealing with something unusual, something previous generations had undeservedly lumped together with the rest.

It is to this Emily Dickinson that I am asking the reader to pay some attention, even though the relative lack of appreciation of her may well make this a hopeless case. It appears at a certain moment that here is a full and flagrant case of neglect. Although she is relatively undervalued, there exist a number of laudatory assessments that allocate her a position, thus relieving the reader of the responsibility of having to make judgements and revise prevailing opinion. Nothing particularly unjust has been written about Emily Dickinson, but she has hardly been afforded the place she deserves, a place among the great originals of world literature, who can still have some significance for us. What do the more modern critics say about her? She certainly makes no bad impression in Untermeyer’s anthology. Rйgis Michaud says pertinent things about her art (although he mentions her in the same breath as Moody, whom he suggests elsewhere was an epigone of Shelley's, while Fischer, in his new Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, talks of her as having ‘hohe Bedeutung’ for contemporary poetry. What perhaps makes this all sound so unconvincing is the tendency of such concise guides