Re Emily Dickinson, I certainly didn't want to revive the old rectitude of
correcting (or "corrupting") Emily Dickinson -- that argument is well over,
and I agree that she presents a more complicated case than Clare's
"unlettered" texts left ready to be normalised by the publisher/printer.
Her relationship to publication must be different, as she tenatively
approached it and ran screaming whereas to Clare of course it was a normal
and proper thing.
But I would say that it left us with texts which are in a sense not for
reading, not for transmission but turned back onto the author's psyche in a
floating, gerundive suspension, through which we can perceive the normative
text which the poem might have been under different conditions, or if they
were by someone else. Which makes her a late 20th Century poet of course,
which she wasn't.
I was thinking of Susan Howe's work, which is most worthy and very
fascinating, though political as Billy said, and I thought she was unfair
to her precursors right through. ED's corpus of poetry wouldn't EXIST
without the work of Todd, Johnson etc. they were factors in an historical
process to which there was no alternative.
The trouble is that we stress singularity more and more and more in modern
poetry until we end up with the totally opaque instance. Type is in the
public world as it stands, and if we insist on ED's poems as texts of
personal mystique, sacral in miniscule detail, type is not really
appropriate to them at all. The next step after Susan Howe's work on ED
is that there is no alternative to holding the original manuscript
fascicles in your hands; all typographical representation falsifies.
"like him (Cézanne) she was ignored and misunderstood by her own
generation, because of the radical nature of her work."
Always we know better don't we -- WE wouldn't have done that., WE would
have rushed her unpunctuated and idiosyncratic texts into print
immediately--? Would we? No, of course we wouldn't. We would have been
puzzled out of our minds. And we still are, but since then we have been
persuaded to accept the non-transmissiveas a poetical mode, and to "read"
differently. Well such as the orthodoxy, though I have my doubts.
Dickinson is one of the most important of poets to me, which is why I don't
want to see her work imprisoned in this one case, this modernist enclave,
and I don't want the potential of the poetry we write in her wake to be
clouded over by these anti-transmissive doctrines which are now so orthodox
that they are commonplace among academic manuscript scholars. We can have
that, it is true to the case and it engenders a vibrant field. But we can
also see behind ED's texts the normative poems they might have been had
they inhabited the public world. It wouldn't necessarily be to "reduce" or
"corrupt" them, to attempt to recapture that as an alternative reading to
the documents so scrupulously preserved for us by Dickinson scholars. It
might be the opposite of that. Actually I thought Conrad Aiken did a
pretty good job in his selection.
/PR
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