It Is Yourself
a few thoughts on cultivating artistic error
The one generalization I should care to hazard as to how we should respond to literature is that when we are troubled — bored, provoked, offended — by characteristic features of a writer’s work, it is precisely those features which, if we yield to them, if we treat them as significance rather than as defect, will turn out to be that writer’s solution to his own problems of composition and utterance. The problem of Dickinson’s poetry for us is the solution to the problem of that poetry for her, as we shall see. By an agreeable coincidence, in the years Thomas Johnson was completing his edition of Dickinson’s poems, I met Jean Cocteau, who gave me some advice: “Ce que les autres vous reprochent, cultivez cela: c’est vous-meme (What other people reproach you for, cultivate: it is yourself).” As Emily Dickinson’s contemporaries Lowell and Longfellow have so drastically demonstrated, there is only one thing worse than to be reproachable as a writer — it is to be irreprochable. In literature, if not in the salon, the posture Cocteau advocated is precisely the posture to which I aspire, for it suggests the means whereby all the lions which threaten our introgression into the work of Emily Dickinson, all the problems I have raised, or at least tilted upward, become rather guides and familiars in the enterprise, which is to see her poetry as it is; become answers, solutions, explanations of a poet who said, “My need — was all I had.”
In Richard Howard’s Paper Trails: Selected Prose 1965–2003, essays mostly on literature, you’ll find one of the best treatments of Emily Dickinson. I quote my favorite part above and will return to it in a second. Dickinson has not been handled well in her reception history. She was betrayed by family members who descended into a family feud centered around an adultery creating two factions, which lead to a war between which university would own what. She was betrayed by early editors who felt the need to correct her poems because they were still seeing poetry as arithmetic and she had accidentally on purpose, let us say, moved on to quantum physics too soon for the rest of the world. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic punctuation and explosions with traditional rhyme and meter are just the beginning. And Dickinson was also betrayed, sadly, by some of her early admirers: like Allen Tate and R.P. Blackmur who each wrote major essays about her and her poetry. They should be read as insightful appraisals because Tate and Blackmur were far better critical minds than poets, though Tate has a few quite good poems. Blackmur kept to criticism.