Whitman and Dickinson

This is Unit Ten of American Literature, part two of two: four more Dickinson poems, the editors who smoothed her, and two procedures. Part one ended with a carriage ride to a house that is a swelling in the ground, and with the observation that its politeness is what makes it frightening. That is the unit's governing idea arriving at its payoff. Dickinson's compression works by putting one ordinary concrete scene against one enormous abstraction and letting the gap do the work, which is why her poems are short and why they resist paraphrase. This part gives four more of them: a deathbed where a fly arrives instead of the promised vision, a life described as a loaded gun and ending on a logical impossibility, a soul shutting a door against emperors, and a poem arguing that the defeated understand victory best. Then the editorial history, which matters because the first readers met her in smoothed texts with titles she never gave. Then a procedure for telling her from Whitman in seconds, and a four-move procedure for reading her at all. By the end you will be able to read the fly poem. To describe the loaded gun and its unstable ending. To place the soul-selects poem and her habit of reversal. To explain the editorial history. And to separate the two poets and read a Dickinson poem in four moves.

Five entries: four poems that show her method at full strength, and the editorial history that decided how the world first read them.

A fly, where a vision was expected.

AML 0919 "I heard a Fly buzz — when I died"

The speaker narrates her own deathbed, with the watchers waiting for the last onset and for the king to be witnessed, and then a fly interposes with a blue uncertain stumbling buzz and the windows fail. The promised revelation is displaced by an insect, and that interruption is the poem's whole argument.

A life, described as a weapon.

AML 0920 "My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun"

The speaker is a loaded gun carried off by an owner, speaking for him and guarding his head at night, and the poem ends on a riddle: she may live longer than he, but he must live longer than she. Readings of it differ sharply, and the final stanza's logic is deliberately unstable.

A door shut against emperors.

AML 0921 "The Soul selects her own Society"

The soul chooses her own company, shuts the door, and is unmoved by chariots and by emperors at her gate. The poem ends with the valves of her attention closing like stone. It is Dickinson's clearest statement of a chosen and guarded solitude, and the choosing in it is active rather than a retreat.

The defeated hear victory best.

AML 0922 "Success is counted sweetest" and the Paradox Poems

Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed, and the dying man on the field hears the distant triumph better than the victors do. Dickinson's habitual move is this reversal: the one who lacks a thing understands it best, and the poem proves the claim with a single scene. The reversal is her recurring structure.

Smoothed first, restored later.

AML 0923 Dickinson's Editors and the Restored Texts

Early editors gave the poems titles, regularized the dashes, smoothed the slant rhymes and sometimes changed words, which is how the first readers met her. Twentieth-century scholarship went back to the manuscripts, and the poems now read as she left them, numbered rather than titled. Anthology texts still vary between the two versions.

Three entries to close: one procedure that separates the two poets, one for reading her compression, and the unit's capstone.

Long and outward, or short and inward.

AML 0924 Telling Whitman From Dickinson on Sight

No two American poets are easier to separate, and three features settle it in seconds. The line: Whitman's run long, often past the width of the page, unrhymed, built from parallel grammar and repeated openings, while Dickinson's are short, usually four-line stanzas alternating eight and six syllables. The punctuation: Whitman uses commas and semicolons to keep a catalogue moving, while Dickinson uses dashes that break the line open and capitals in the middle of sentences. The scale of address: Whitman speaks outward to a nation, a crowd, a reader he claims as part of himself, while Dickinson speaks inward from a single consciousness, often about one moment and often about death. If the poem lists, it is Whitman; if it stops, it is Dickinson. One trap: his "O Captain! My Captain!" is rhymed and regular, so a rhymed Civil War poem in stanzas is not automatically someone else's. Check the scale of address before the shape.

Scene, abstraction, turn, rhyme.

AML 0925 Reading a Dickinson Poem in Four Moves

Dickinson's compression rewards a fixed procedure. One: find the situation, which is usually a single concrete scene stated in the first two lines, a carriage, a deathbed, a door, a gun. Two: identify the abstraction the scene stands for, since she almost always pairs one concrete image with one large idea, and the poem's work is the pairing itself. Three: locate the turn, which in her poems is often the final stanza and often reverses what the earlier stanzas implied, so a poem that has been calm becomes frightening or a poem about defeat becomes a poem about knowledge. Four: check the rhyme at the end, because a poem closing on a slant rhyme is refusing the resolution its grammar seems to offer, and the exam's questions about tone are usually decided there. Do not paraphrase the abstraction back into the scene. A carriage ride is not a statement about carriages.

Expansion and compression, one question.

AML 0926 Two Answers to the Same Question

Whitman and Dickinson were born nine years apart, never met, and between them invented the two possibilities American poetry has worked with ever since. Both were answering a question the Transcendentalists had put and not solved: if the individual self is the instrument that reaches truth, what does a poem made from that self look like? Whitman's answer is expansion. He abandons meter and rhyme for a line measured by breath and phrase, holds it together with parallel grammar and repeated openings, and fills it with catalogues of trades, bodies, cities and weathers until the accumulation argues that nothing is to be excluded. He publishes the book himself with a preface claiming the United States are themselves the greatest poem, opens the long poem by celebrating himself and insisting the reader is included, and admits the body into American poetry at a cost to his reputation and his employment. The war quiets the voice, and the Lincoln elegy mourns a president it never names, through a lilac, a fallen star and a thrush. Dickinson's answer is compression. She takes the commonest form in her culture, the hymn stanza of eight and six, and detonates it from inside with dashes, mid-sentence capitals and rhymes that refuse to close, so a frame everyone recognized carries a mind nobody had heard. She writes death from inside it, lets a fly interrupt the promised revelation, describes a life as a loaded gun, and says plainly that truth must be told slant or it blinds. One poet made the line longer than it had ever been, and one made it shorter.

That closes the two poets, and with them the exam's second period. You can read the deathbed poem in which watchers wait for a king to be witnessed and a fly arrives instead with a blue uncertain stumbling buzz, and say that the interruption is the argument. You can describe the loaded gun that speaks for its owner and ends on a riddle nobody has settled. You can place the soul shutting her door on emperors, and the reversal that runs through her work, where the defeated hear the triumph best. You can explain how editors gave her titles, smoothed her dashes and changed words, and how scholars later restored the manuscripts, so that anthology texts still vary. You can separate the two poets in seconds by line, punctuation and scale of address, remembering that one rhymed Civil War poem is his. And you can read any Dickinson poem by finding the scene, the abstraction, the turn and the closing rhyme, without paraphrasing the abstraction back into the carriage.