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Fall, 2009 |
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My Words Chill and Burn Me
The Amazing Sense of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry
Selected and Commentary by Bob Scher
“...But her chief truthfulness lay in her insistence on discovering the facts of her inner experience. She was a Linnaeus to the phenomena of her own consciousness, describing and distinguishing the states and motions of her soul. The results of this “psychic reconnaissance,” as Professor Whicher called it, were several. For one thing, it made her articulate about inward matters which poetry had never so sharply defined... “ Richard Wilbur, from Sumptuous Destituition*
This selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, by its direct contact and sly implication, articulates the sharply defined islands in Dickinson’s inner world. Her poetry conveys, without any pretension or puffery, the wisdom of a life fully lived in her own way. Although many of her celebrated works are included, a number of the poems in this selection are not well-known and have never found their way into general poetry anthologies.
Scher’s commentary helps a reader realize that these poems are “openly secret” maps, portraying what was essential in her life, the conditions and actions of her inner engagements. For Emily Dickinson, poetry was only the blossoming. The seriousness and unflinching acceptance of her life enables us to say that she was the root, the stem, and the blossom. She knew that the care of the root and the unfolding of the “plant” was her essential task.
...To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility --
This book addresses all of this primarily through the poetry itself. Brief excerpts are included from her letters, which not only complement the poetry, but surprise us with bolts of delicious irony and pungent humor. (“They say that God is everywhere, yet we always think of him as some kind of recluse.” or “Not to send John Alden on errands is one of the instructions of History.”)
And mainly, for those of us who may have just an inkling of the nature of her interior efforts, her openings and closings, “failures” and “successes,” despairs, sorrows, joys, and ecstasies, these poems are not only deeply moving and rife with wisdom, they are for all their subtlety a stunning revelation, for ourselves.
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