Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)

When giving her Craft Lecture at Squaw Valley Poetry Conference (July 1989), Sharon Olds talked about reading an anthology of American Poetry as a child. "The oval portraits of those poets on the cover were all men, with the exception of Emily Dickinson," she said, "I imagined those ovals were the portholes of a ship. I wanted to climb aboard that ship and hoped that Emily would make me her friend." I too wish to be Emily's friend. Her simplicity of style appealed to me, especially those insights that sound like a Zen satori experience. In her letter to T. W. Higginson, Emily wrote "Perhaps you smile at me. / I could not stop for that— / My Business is / Circumference—" I see Emily and Einstein having tea together, each enlightening the other on the expanding universe— she riding on a bee, he on a butterfly, both travelling at the speed of light! Emily seems in tune with nature in Poem #111, communing with the Bee & Butterfly as well as the Brooks & the Breezes. She would have gotten along well with Saint Francis calling Brother Sun and Sister Moon. When Emily says in Poem #1129 that "The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—", she's probably thinking of Semele, the mortal wife of Zeus, who insisted on seeing the Olympian God in all his glory, and was reduced instantly to ashes. Hence, the first line "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—". In Poem #1212, Emily has an insight about completed works of art that lives on after the artist put the finishing touches to his labor. Tolstoy says in What Is Art? that the finished painting interacts with the viewer and becomes enlivened in the process. Maxine Kumin takes Emily's Poem #1755 To Make a Prairie as the title of her 1980 book of essays on poets, poetry, and country living. I like especially Emily's vision of how things that are minute (one clover and a bee) could make something so grandiose and monumental (prairie). But if these are lacking, try revery— for there is nothing grander than our imagination. This is why I love Emily Dickinson's poems so much. (Peter Y. Chou)

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