Christopher E. G. Benfey - Emily Dickinson and the problem of others
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Dickinson, Emily,--1830-1886--Philosophy, Skepticism in literature.
publication date
:
1984
lcc
:
PS1541.Z5B43 1984eb
ddc
:
811/.4
subject
:
Dickinson, Emily,--1830-1886--Philosophy, Skepticism in literature.
Page iii
Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others
Christopher E. G. Benfey
The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 1984
Page iv
Copyright 1984 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 84-2520 ISBN 0-87023-437-4
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
Publication of this book was assisted by the American Council of Learned Societies under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint material under copyright: From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Copyright 1914, 1929, 1935 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; copyright renewed 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; copyright renewed 1957, 1963 by Mary L. Hampson. By permission of Little, Brown and Company.
From The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.
Excerpts from "Ellen West" from The Book of the Body by Frank Bidart. Copyright 1974, 1975, 1977 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
"The Moods" from Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956). Reprinted by permission of Michael Yeats and Macmillan (London) Ltd.
"The Deviation" and "Sacred Objects" appear in ''Dedication to Hunger'' copyright 1980 by Louise Gluck. From Descending Figure by Louise Gluck (New York: The Ecco Press, 1980). Reprinted by permission.
Page v
To my parents, Rachel and Ted Benfey
Page vii
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
1
1 Dickinson and Skepticism
9
2 Poetry and Privacy
29
3 Nearness and Neighbors
63
4 Other Bodies, Other Minds
81
5 Facing and Effacing
109
Notes
119
Index of First Lines
129
Page ix
Acknowledgments
The Youngest Son in the fairy tale could never accomplish his task without helpers. Friends have made this book a better book, and I wish to name some of them here. Warner Berthoff, in whose company I first gave serious attention to Dickinson's poetry, read and helpfully commented on my manuscript at every stage of the writing. The major concepts in the five chapters owe much to the work and guidance of Stanley Cavell, and especially to his readings of Emerson and Thoreau. I borrowed the phrase "the problem of others" from the fourth section of Cavell's The Claim of Reason, a book from whose arguments I have tried to learn as much as I could. Shaun O'Connell offered good advice at a later stage of rethinking and revision. My indebtedness to earlier Dickinson critics should be evident in these pages.
I would also like to thank the following mentors and friends, whose help at particular junctures made this piece of writing possible: Dorrit Cohn, Claudio Guilln, Susan Halpert, Alex Morgan, Richard Sieburth, and my wife, Mickey Rathbun.
The kind offices of the Danforth Foundation provided support for five pleasant years at Harvard, when many of the ideas in this book took form. A further Danforth grant secured the valuable services of my typist, Robert Humphreville.
Page 1
Introduction
This Study was conceived when two questions began to appear to me as parts of one and the same investigation. I had been interested, first, in ways lyric poetry engages or fails to engage a world of other people. Randall Jarrell's criticism, with which I was occupied at the time, regularly praises and blames poets according to their openness to and interest in other people. Jarrell claimed, for example, that William Carlos Williams's poetry "is more remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects than any poetry except Rilke's." Jarrell's use of "muscular" in this context impliesand the implication will interest us laterthat identification is partly a function of the body, and has recourse to physiognomy and gesture. "One believes in and remembers the people in Williams's poems," Jarrell continues, "though they usually remain behavioristic, sharply observed, sympathetic and empathetic sketches, and one cannot get from these sketches the knowledge of character that one gets from some of Frost's early dramatic monologues and narratives... or from Williams's detailed and conclusive treatment of the most interesting character in the poems, himself."1 Anyone familiar with Jarrell's own poetry will recognize the bias, and the moralizing polemic, in these remarks. Of his own work he once commented, ''Ordinarily the poems are dramatic or have implied narratives; few are pure lyrics.'' Modern poetry on the other hand was, he felt, "essentially lyric: the rare narrative or expository poem is a half-fortuitous collo-
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