A couple snippets of verse

Found these small poems in a Flavorwire article listing several poems that can be easily memorized.  In other words, very brief.

In other words, good examples of the ways poetry can condense language.

Though Millay and Frost are delivering different perspectives in different styles, each manages to maintain beautiful brevity.

Plus, returning to Edna St. Vincent Millay every here and then is always refreshing for me; a nice reminder of one of the poets to whom I can attribute my poetry beginnings.

“First Fig,” Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

“Devotion,” Robert Frost

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean –
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.

Blowing steam: I want my short hair, haters

What I’m, hopefully, about to do tomorrow will be my way of saying “fuck you” to the world.  A pixie cut isn’t even that big of a deal for crying out loud; they’re relatively in vogue right now.  My mom is opposed to it, but she’s embracing it since I’ve made up my mind: “Let me cut it off tonight before you get it trimmed and styled tomorrow so I can save it!”

Ever since…forever, long hair on a female human being has been a commodity of sorts.  It’s one of the many body parts that has been stylized and sexualized.  This is a traditional image in the historical notion of the “beautiful but innocent and helpless woman.”  Remember the pre-Raphaelite artists, the ones who painted in a way that makes you think of a Hallmark card?  The long hair, the forlorn faces, the helplessness.  See how she contemplates the rigors of life caged in her feminine cell.  A couple centuries earlier, Milton’s famous epic Paradise Lost introduces the character of Eve in Book IV as such:

Her unadorned golden tresses wore [ 305 ]
Disheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav’d
As the Vine curles her tendrils, which impli’d
Subjection, but requir’d with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receivd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, [ 310 ]
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.

It both stylizes us and victimizes us.  It’s beautiful, but contains a lineage of values that represses what a woman is first and foremost, a human being.

Now, I’m not saying that long hair is a bad thing.  Girls can have long hair, that’s perfectly fine.  Just because long hair was once a thing that acted as a sexualized commodity, doesn’t mean it has to now.  Be a strong, fair, yet gentle human being no matter what the length of your hair is.  I’m merely ranting about where society gets it’s implicit opposition from.  Basically, this isn’t a well thought-out blog post; this a diary entry/blowing off steam.  This is me being one human being recognizing my own values apart from anyone else.  But in the end, this is really me just getting a haircut for the sake of getting a haircut.

Cross-Cultural Displacement; or, new relatives from PI

A week ago, three more relatives of mine have come to live and stay here in America.  I only just got home last night for spring break, though I have yet to see my cousin Ruston.  I don’t think his mom, my aunt, Tita Sonja is as comfortable with English yet, so we haven’t said much (not that that’s saying much anyway since I don’t speak too much with my relatives to begin with).  I feel bad for Ruston since he seems to stay in my uncle’s room all day long.  But, that’s what I did many times during my stay in the Philippines.  I know that feeling, that cross-cultural lostness.  Of course, it differs from culture to culture, but generally speaking walls of silence are easily built.  That wall was kinda my home as a kid.  Anyway, putting aside any potentially exciting sociological investigations into the Filipino-American identity, all I mean to say is I feel for him.  Even though I feel bad, I don’t know what to do.  He’s 16 (I think?).. that or 17.  At that age, such a big change must be pretty difficult.  There’s not much I feel I can do, especially because I’m only home for less than a week.  I’d like to turn this blog post more into an intellectually ambitious rant concerning more particular feelings that weigh into this dynamic as well as the significance of language as embodying the whole of a cultural thinking…  but I’ve wasted enough time not doing homework.  So much to do!  

A brief case: hipsters.

Hipster: secret identity goal for ambitious (but not ambitious) youth, or derogatory stereotype?

Need I say more?  This is a tiresome subject, but there’s so much confusion over this term.  It’s both a positive and a negative thing.  It’s both a stereotype for artists and a non-artistic  label.  I’ve heard of/seen people trying to aspire to mainstream-alternative (?) tropes and trends, and it’s getting silly.  I had more to say on this subject, but it’s all lost to me now.  Perhaps later I’ll do a follow-up.

Emerson’s Poetic Metaphysics

            The curious matter of Emerson’s philosophy becomes dismissed in its dappled literary quality.  His essays seem inclined to metaphorical descriptions, yet they also have philosophy as a center point, a topic which is systemic and opposed to the open-endedness of literary writing.  Reading Emerson’s writing becomes a struggle to redeem or extract the philosophy while allowing him the artistic license to do so.  His passionate yearning for nature seems Romantically hopeless to traditional philosophy.  It is another angle at which one may easily dismiss his works: all passion and little substance.  “[A] reform in philosophy, the bringing poetry back to Nature,—to the marrying of Nature and mind, undoing the old divorce in which poetry had been famished and false, and Nature had been suspected and pagan” (“Poetry and Imagination” 316).  Here, Emerson acknowledges that he knows the past conceptions of poetry.  It is unnecessary.  It is obscure enough to render it a lie.  Perhaps, Plato’s accusation towards poets can be thanked as one of the origins of this misrepresentation of the nature of poetry.  How can it be, then, that someone not only finds poetry significant, but also philosophically necessary?  What position does poetry inhabit in the fundamental workings of a human reality?  Emerson believed in poetry as a path to an ideal, spiritual truth that relies both on the divine aspects of all of Nature as well as a human being’s soul as divine potential.

In the critical essay, “Emerson’s philosophy of Aesthetics,” Percy Brown suggests three broad points or categories that Emerson’s philosophy falls into.  First, the soul is divine (Brown 350).  Second, Emerson’s conception of “Nature” is generally the entirety of the material world, although evidence in his essays shows he means to talk of an environment which human beings are not responsible for (e.g. forests) (“Poetry and Imagination” 299).  Lastly, that every human being has access to god by means of his or her soul.  The rest of his philosophy is difficult to pin down due to his flair for literary prose and intellectual mysticism, but also perhaps due to the topic itself as difficult to pin down in all its fluidity and process concepts.  However, though Emerson seems to hold an affinity for process philosophy, the framework in which such processes are contained and built upon is one of fixed concepts and essences.  Emerson doesn’t define his god agent or how the soul relates to the god agent, but posits that they simply are.  It would something of a misrepresentation to link back Emerson’s god agent and soul conception to Christianity since he had rejected the fixed thinking that goes into dogma, tradition, and convention.  The most one can say about these two ideas are that they are of a true and absolute reality.  It would appear, then, that his philosophy attempts to synthesize concepts of being and becoming, the fixed and the fluid, the divine and the human.

An important figure to understanding Emerson is the Swedish philosopher, Swedenborg, specifically his Doctrine of Correspondences.  This doctrine helped Emerson conceive of his three-part reality: “The ends of all things are in the Divine Mind, the causes of all things in the spiritual world, and their effects in the natural world” (Brown 350).  Such a three-part reality as posited by Swedenborg isn’t an exact reflection of Emerson’s own conception.  For Emerson, there is god, Nature, and then human beings.  Emerson’s deity causes the material world to exist as it does.  The cause of Nature is the divine. It is key to note that human beings are a part of god’s creation just as Nature.  Although, the difference between humans and Nature are that humans have souls, which in effect can be thought of as pieces of god, while Nature does not contain souls.  Nature is divine because it stands as a reflection, or “shadow” as Brown says, of the divine mind (351).  “In short, the physical world is purely symbolical of the spiritual world” (351).

The interaction between human beings and Nature becomes an interesting point to expound upon, which Emerson does though not the systematic manner of academic philosophy.  The souls in human beings are a kind of exactitude of god in miniature; in other words, people contain the essence of the divine deity.  Initially, this point may seem impossible to reconcile with Emerson’s position on human beings’ individualism as discussed in his essay “Self-Reliance”, and even Emerson himself does not seem to explicitly address this.  Despite this, one can assume that a soul’s melded identity with a physical, organic body which knows its world through the empirical senses can be highlighted as a response to the problem.  Not only is the physical body, its brain activity and senses, an answer to the individualism of human beings’, but it seems necessary in order for the soul to reach toward and understand the divine deity of the spiritual realm.

Poetry’s position in this metaphysics acts as process between human beings and the divine.  The soul has an ideal to be realized, or rather, a divine rationale to understand.  It acts as a bridge which continually must be added onto with each new poem to lay out a path to God, a path which perhaps can never be completed.  Figurative language is proper creation of this path to allow human beings to come into contact with the divine, even if just a miniscule aspect of it.  It is a spiritual complexity, a multidimensional process that requires a human agent.  In the essay “Poetry and Imagination,” Emerson provides a multiplicity of contentions of what poetry is: “Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it exist,” “[P]oetry is faith,” “Poetry is the consolation of mortal men,” “[P]oetry is science,” “[P]oetry is organic,” and so on (“Poetry and Imagination” 300-309).  The relations poetry has to other aspects of reality are many, and it seems human beings cannot hope to transcend toward god without it.

On a fundamental level that one can be certain of, poetry is a conscious human projection.  It takes the physical world and it into a figurative expression of some kind.  Before a poetic projection can occur, a human agent must observe and understand the physical world in some way before he or she can express it.  In understanding the physical world, one is actually understanding a subconscious projection.  “The mind, penetrated with its sentiment or its thought, projects it outward on whatever it beholds” (298).  The thoughts, cares, emotions, and ideas of a human being are projected onto the physical world, coloring the world in light of a single mind.  “Nature lends itself to the thoughts of man, the aptness with which a river, a flower, a bird, fire, day or night can express his fortunes, is as if the world were only a disguised man” (298).  Again, a point of ambiguity in Emerson’s philosophy surfaces which may or may not be reconciled with some gymnastic reading.  How can the world be representational of a human being’s mind if it’s also a representation of the complex spirituality of the deity?  A way to reconcile this would be to think of the physical world and Nature, as it exists in itself, as representational of some divine rationale; the projection of a human agent, however, has nothing to do with natural entities as they are.  It is in this correspondence of mind and matter that the human being is responsible for, in which discovering the divine is possible.  Not every correspondence leads to truthful divinity.   Thus, the poetic path helps human beings in making the correct correspondences between mind and matter, making the revelation of the divine more possible than before.

The act of writing and reading poetry is made significant to piecing together one’s understanding toward an ideal realization of the divine by the component of one’s imagination.  Emerson defines the imagination as “the reader of forms,” such forms which are embodied in the physical world of Nature (299).   A helpful way to comprehend what Emerson means by “forms” would be to think of platonic Forms.  Plato’s Forms were immaterial concepts which served as essences for defining entities in the physical world.  This is similar to Emerson’s conception, except that the forms, or divine essences, in Nature are attributed to his god agent.  They exist by means of the god agent’s rationale in having created the physical world.  By using the word “imagination” as his term for the feature in a human being which allows a correspondence with some divine aspect or idea, it would seem that Emerson is implying that a creative and intuitive mind is apt to perceive and comprehend these divine forms in Nature.  Thus, a creative and intuitive expression is in order.

The figurative expressions found in poetry suffice as the best vehicle for one’s comprehension of the divine.  As Brown’s third point of Emerson’s philosophy suggests, Nature is symbolic of the spiritual world.  Thinking of the world in terms of simile, metaphor, and metonymy come closest to a spiritual truth.  Emerson, too, claims that “[a]ll thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy” (299).  If the way one understands a form of divinity is by understanding the physicality which embodies it, then it would follow that expressing this spiritual fact requires the use of the physical entities to which such a truth is connected.  Using the literary device of metonymy as the apt vehicle for expression does seem to reflect Emerson’s message that some piece of aspect of the divine is contained within an object or entity of Nature.  Metonymy necessarily implies a part to a whole, which fits right into his metaphysics.  “This metonymy, or seeing the same sense in things so diverse, gives a pure pleasure” (302).  When having found a universal truth, a transcendent fact of the divine, one’s self moves closer to the ideal.

Metaphor, on the other hand, is representative of processes on the side of human beings.  Just as metonymy aptly serves in describing how Emerson’s metaphysics work apart from human beings, so does metaphor explain the interaction between human beings’ and such a metaphysics.  In his essay “Nature,” Emerson states in the “Language” section that “[a] man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss” (“Nature” 22).  The metaphor as a literary device is an attempt to describe Nature in terms of symbolism, a symbolism which can be judged in terms of right or wrong to some extent.  Typically, the metaphor can be used in any way a poet wants to use it, but Emerson seems to be claiming that the metaphor can properly and rightly symbolize an entity towards a particular truth.  Language is something which has a proper direction, which is toward the divine, and if it is asserted wrongly then the human being who has employed must also be corrupt in his understanding of the truth in his object of choice (22).

The rightness or wrongness in perceiving a value or meaning in a material entity is also expressed through Emerson’s affinity to naturalism.  Natural law and scientific fact were things Emerson saw as reflective of spiritual law and fact (“The Poet” 248).  He saw a spiritual value in studies of physics, chemistry, and astronomy: “But the astronomy is in the mind: the senses affirm that the earth stands still and the sun moves.  The senses collect the surface facts of matter.  The intellect acts on these brute reports, and obtains from them results which are the essence of intellectual form of the experiences” (“Poetry and Imagination” 302).  It is not the facts of empirical observes that tell one something of significance, but rather the impression of the facts to a human mind which gives rise to a true meaning (Brown 352).  That science owes itself partly to the imagination is a kind of step towards the higher, spiritual activity of poetry.

Emerson views poets as the ones who are best able to read the meaning of the fact, rather than just the brute fact itself.  He has specific definition of the poet, the true poet, which is contradictory to a commonplace position.  For most people, poetry is an art and literary aesthetic; for Emerson, it brings forth necessary truths.  “For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or if industry and skill in metre, but of the true poet” (“The Poet” 245).  No matter how creatively one employs metaphor, meter, or rhyme, there must be a truth that the poet is conveying to make true his or her poetry.  Emerson’s true poet is not only one who can properly express what her or her imagination has perceived in Nature, but one who has an all-around sharp mind that can make connections between ideas, see past the emptiness of certain past ideas or dogmas, while anticipating the fluidity of forms in the natural world or the constant shifting of the natural world itself in relation to forms.  “[T]he poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.  For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis” (252).  If the confusing flux of physical world in relation to our own physical bodies and senses were to be stripped away, one would see the underlying divine essences.  The perfected poetry is a kind which ideally shows the world as transparent, that one may see the spiritual essences of the deity in Nature.

In this three-part conception of god agent, Nature, and human beings, poetry is the transcending of the soul towards its ideal, allowing one to realize the divine aspects and essences that can be found in the physical world.  It is a creative activity of epistemic value.  Although poetry is an art as well, Emerson had little to say on art as a whole; he was concerned with abstracts and how poetry fit into his abstract frameworks (Brown 350).  Emerson was intriguied by the empathetic qualities of poetry and its poignant originality.  For him, the act of reading and writing poetry developed a character of empathy or relational awareness of the forms in which divine truth takes.  If any soul is to transcend to heightened state of awareness, it would seem that poetry is necessarily at the center of such a process.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Brown, Percy W.  “Emerson’s Philosophy of Aesthetics.”  The Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism.  15.3  (1957): 350-354.  Jstor.  Web.  5 Oct. 2011.

 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  “Poetry and Imagination.”  Emerson’s Prose and Poetry.  Ed. Joel Porte

and Saundra Morris.  New York: Norton, 2001.  Print.

 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  “The Poet.”  The Portable Emerson.  Ed. Carl Bode.  New York:

Penguin Books, 1981.  Print.

Final Writing Project–Rough Draft

The curious matter of Emerson’s philosophy becomes dismissed in its dappled literary quality.  His essays not along seem inclined to metaphor, but they even argue for the necessary importance of poetry in a metaphysical conception.  The passionate yearning for nature seems Romantically hopeless to traditional philosophy.  It is another angle at which one may easily dismiss his works: all passion and no substance.  “[A] reform in philosophy, the bringing poetry back to Nature,—to the marrying of Nature and mind, undoing the old divorce in which poetry had been famished and false, and Nature had been suspected and pagan” (“Poetry and Imagination” 316).  Here, Emerson acknowledges that he knows the past conceptions of poetry.  It is unnecessary.  It is obscure enough to render it a lie.  Perhaps, Plato’s accusation towards poets can be thanked as one of the origins of this misrepresentation of the nature of poetry.  How can it be, then, that someone finds poetry as significant, but also philosophically necessary?  What position does poetry inhabit in the fundamental workings of a human reality?

For Emerson, it seems poetry is the human reach towards the divine.  It acts as a bridge which continually must be added onto with each new poem to lay out a path to God, a path which perhaps can never be completed.  Figurative language is proper creation of this path to allow human beings to come into contact with the divine, even if just a miniscule aspect of it.  It is a spiritual complexity, a multidimensional process that requires a human agent.  In the essay “Poetry and Imagination,” Emerson provides a multiplicity of contentions of what poetry is: “Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it exist,” “[P]oetry is faith,” “Poetry is the consolation of mortal men,” “[P]oetry is science,” “[P]oetry is organic,” and so on.  The relations poetry has to other aspects of reality are many, and it seems human beings cannot hope to transcend without it.

It is difficult to pin down Emerson’s metaphysics using only one essay.  His essays work in conjunction with one another.  The perspective which his essays create feels more complete when at least two or three of them come together.  Arguably, “Nature” may be further well-rounded, perhaps, if the technical term (loosely a technical term) “imagination” had been added to the essay.  The workings of language are not complete unless “The Poet” is read alongside “Nature.”  As such, any new reader of Emerson ought to be forewarned not to be initially dismissive of his work, especially after only one essay.

Perhaps, the term “metaphysics” is not completely accurate in its connotations of a universal ontology apart from human beings, yet there is a divine presence in Emerson’s philosophy which comes into contact with human beings through a process which relies on a human mind.  It doesn’t seem that the god agent is active in any of the processes described by Emerson; rather, it is human experience alone which makes leaps and bounds in divine directions.  Having considered this, it would seem reasonable to suggest that there is a kind of phenomenological ontology at work alongside a more traditional metaphysics.

In order to build the poetic world of Emerson, one must first build his natural world.  Nature is integral to his overall philosophy, yet, like most Emersonian terms, it is not explicitly defined.  However, any reader of Emerson will find that piecing together a definition from his writings isn’t difficult.  When referring to anything of natural or poetic interest, he always uses imagery and examples that are completely absent of human civilization.  There is discussion over birds and trees as opposed to buildings and sidewalks; still, birds and trees are found in towns as well.  The reason one can know that Emerson is referring to an environment of complete immersion of trees and birds with no buildings in sight is by reading the beginning of the essay “Nature”: “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society”  (“Nature” 9).  Neither society nor one’s own house suffices for a solitude that a contemplative human being seeks.  “But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.  The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches.  One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime” (9).  Nature is not only divine, but it is teleological.  The word choice of “divine” supports this, but proof of this argument lies elsewhere.  “As the bird alights on the bough, then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form” (“Poetry and Imagination” 299).  Natural entities may have been created by a god agent, but they also contain the thoughts of this god as well.  Natural beings do not stand apart from their creator, but they exist because of god’s rational.  Emerson’s nature adheres to a teleological explanation of the physical world.  God’s thoughtful presence resides in everything, sensibly organizing the science of this material realm.

Final Writing Project Proposal (step 2)

My final writing project will coincide with my thesis, and therefore I’ll be shedding light upon Emerson in terms of Heidegger.  Of course, I don’t aim to pin down Emerson’s philosophical dealings with a more explicit analytic, but rather to show a broad thread of thought which runs in both of these thinkers as something which can potentially run deeper.  Much of Emerson’s philosophy is made in tandem with literary dealing, specifically poetry.  His view of poetics and philosophy is one, I feel, that is intertwined.  The thesis of my paper follows as such: Emerson, as both a literary figure and philosopher, reflects and illustrates the notion that Heidegger’s philosophy can be applied to a literary theory of poetics.  The texts I’ll be using will be, as of now, the following: Emerson’s “The Poet,” “Poetry and Imagination,” “Nature,” and “Experience” as well as Heidegger’s Being and Time along with a couple critical sources.

In the essay “Thinking of Emerson,” Stanley Cavell illustrates Emerson as a philosophical figure.  He makes parallel certain ideas or key passages and phrases to thinkers such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.  Cavell applies Emerson’s interest in “moods” in “Experience” to a certain conception of epistemology.  This empirical outlook is different from past thinkers.  Though Cavell uses this idea to discuss similarities with Kant, I found a similarity with Heidegger just as striking.  Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is, in a not-so-accurate but easy description, a kind of self-psychology.  He is well-aware that “inevitably does the universe wear our color” (“Experience”).  This shared idea that a human being’s world is one that is self-projected (not in the complete sense as to make this solipsistic) isn’t one that is shared hand-in-hand for every detail; the conceptions vary for Emerson and Heidegger, yet there is a main thread of thought that dominates both.

Cavell brings up Emerson’s notion of Man Thinking from “The American Scholar” in order to illustrate that this phrase partakes in and calls for a certain kind of philosophy.  Not only do I view Emerson’s Man Thinking as parallel to Heidegger’s notion of Authenticity, but I view this call for Authentic Man to largely participate in a call for art.  Of course, the art I am interested is that of poetry.  For me, art is a certain kind of manipulation.  It rejects that which is embedded in the preformed complexes of the “They” (in Heidegger’s terms) or of those things which society delegates value (in more Emersonian terms) to act as proper expression of the individual human self.  There is value in participating in society, I believe, but there is also value in temporarily ebbing away from society by means of art.

At this point in time, I still need to read a couple other secondary critical sources as well as re-read some passages and/or essays by Emerson.  I’m actually questioning how much I’ll use Being and Time for this paper since I haven’t read as much of it as I would have liked (though this is partially due to the fact that I’m not sure what parts of the book are appropriate for me to skip around in light of the aim of my thesis).  When I take this paper up for my thesis, it’ll definitely be added onto after it’s submitted as a Transcendentalism Writing Project.

Final Writing Project Proposal

As I return to Emerson for my Final Writing Project, I’d like to focus closer on his philosophy in reference to Heideggerian thought.  My hopes are to lay a foundation for my second thesis chapter, though I’ll need a specific thesis for this project.  For that, I plan on illustrating his philosophy with emphasis on poetics.  I’m interested in the interaction between his Nature conception and poetry in light of a phenomenological ontology.  This will bring me back to a couple of the essays we read in class, “Nature” and “The Poet,” though I will also be delving into “Poetry and Imagination.”  I will also most likely be drawing some points from “Being and Time” by Heidegger. 

As far as key words are concerned, I still have yet to re-visit “Nature” and dig a little deeper into such words as “reason” and “understanding.”  A key moment for me was in “Poetry and Imagination”: “As the bird alights on the bough, then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form…. The imagination is the reader of these forms.”  Though Emerson’s process philosophy between the mind and the external world seems similar to Heidegger, a god conception is involved which makes his metaphysical conception distinct yet more traditional.  What one perceives in Nature isn’t the mind at work in its own creation of existential meaning, but rather it is the active perception of a small piece of fleeting divinity, something which the human self did not create.  Despite this, I like this notion of the imagination as a reader, a mental feature which reads divine thoughts contained in the everyday. 

Two of the critical sources I found are by Stanley Cavell, which were both published in the past few decades so they’re kind of recent.  One is an essay called “Thinking of Emerson” and the other is “Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche.”  Though both of these sources might not speak of poetics, I don’t see this as an issue since having a secondary perspective on a specific kind of thought is what I’m after.  Another essay I found, “The Philosophy of Emerson” looks to be helpful, though it was published in 1901, which precedes more recent thought put into Emerson in the past few decades; nonetheless , it looks like a supportive text.  I probably won’t delve into this essay for this writing project, but I have an essay called “‘The Being of Language and the Language of Being’: Heidegger and Modern Poetics. 

My argument for the kind of thinking that goes into philosophy, and consequently poetics, is that human reach for truth is closer to home than one thinks.  Most people maintain that art is a useless endeavor, or at the least not as practical as other endeavors.  I would argue that art comes closer to a true sense of reality as opposed to science, god, or politics.  Certainly politics seems important, but such an importance presupposes that the systems we live in are good or right in some way.  The individual human perspective is a delicate sight that should be the basis for the rest of our endeavors rather than the fixed thinking of traditional Western philosophy. 

Emily Dickinson: the Possibilities of Who We Can Become on the Page (Writing Project 3)

The name Emily Dickinson has come to represent an overly hyped persona that has been perpetuated by early critics.  She is both praised and dismissed for being the “sinister spinster” of our imaginations.  Howe retorts, “Who is this Spider-Artist?  Not my Emily Dickinson.  This is poetry not life, and certainly not sewing” (14).  It’s key to note that this book is called My Emily Dickinson.  In other words, this is Howe’s Emily Dickinson.  The absence of much biographical detail doesn’t allow us to know who the actual person Emily Dickinson was.  This is not a woman or a woman’s poetics upon whom many of us agree upon.  The lack of biographical material seems to call for an individual’s interpretation of a persona, not a real person.

The separation between a poet’s persona on the page and the actual real life poet is a basic poetry 101 fact, so it’s a bit of a mystery why many people are attracted to the idea of a biography.  One suggestion may be that she is not of our time, and therefore has become a subject more so for scholars than artists.  Inevitably, this retrospect perspective would cultivate an interest in a historical person.  Another suggestion would be, in conjunction with the former, the desire to understand an aesthetic which sets itself apart from the norm in a way that intrigued people back during Dickinson’s time as well as our time.  Dickinson’s voice was one that grew out of a unique mind contained in a unique environment.

Dickinson’s poetic voice may not attempt to represent a speaker living actively in a particular historical and cultural moment.   Such a stance may clash with one of today’s modern sensibilities surrounding art.  Emerson himself voiced such a sensibility when he said, “For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet” (Emerson 245).  Emily Dickinson as a historical person was, for the most part, isolated from her time and culture.  She does not voice the confession of her age, its sentiments and issues and passions.  Rather, her poetics, in a way, voice that which is timeless in all human beings.  A human being in frequent solitude is understood as someone who engages readily in introspection, and therefore, someone who grapples with heavy questions that usually go unheard when one is living a busy and noisy lifestyle.

Though Dickinson’s on-page persona is characterized by a woman who broods over the subject of death, poem 657 (using the Johnson numbering) is one which represents another large yet not-so-dark aspect of Dickinson poetics.  The imagery of a house and nature are key images in Dickinson’s poetics.  Just like death, they work to build a landscape of fascination.  “I dwell in Possibility—” certainly seems like the opposite attitude that Dickinson normally holds (Dickinson 327).  Many readers become accustomed to the notion that there is an evitable end looming in the tonalities of the compressed language she uses, yet death seems repeated because there is fascination, and thus, perhaps a sentiment of possibility.  This is especially true for the nature poems.  However, prior to nature, one reside in a house: “A fairer House than Prose— / More numerous of Windows— / Superior for Doors—” (327).  Immediately what comes to mind is the prospect that this poem may be an ars poetica.  Possibility is a place which one dwells, yet it is “[a] fairer House than Prose”; yet, this is not prose that she is writing, it is poetry (327).  Arguably, Dickinson’s “House” is a metaphor for the possibilities one can uncover in the art of poetry.  Windows and doors are different ways of seeing the world through the inner sanctum of the house.  To elaborate with the metaphor, the windows and doors then become the possible perspectives with which a poet creates through the manipulation of language, yet poetry contains more windows and doors than a literal house.  For my Dickinson, poetry is how one sees the world.

The second stanza continues on the same notion of ways one figuratively views an entity and enters into it, though now the house has become nature.  “Of Chambers as the Cedars— / Impregnable of Eye—” illustrates that not only do houses have chambers, but the trees as well.  Though it is uncertain how much the actual Dickinson explored natural terrains, though it is evident that, on the page, Dickinson finds nature fit to dwell in just as much as the chamber in her own house.  Furthermore, the dwelling place of nature then becomes, perhaps, closer in similarity to poetry instead of the house as poetry.  She did say, after all, that poetry had doors more numerous than prose, and nature is certainly vast, if not a kind of infinitude.  The next line seems to affirm this: “And for an Everlasting Roof / The Gambrels of the Sky—” (327).  Dickinson’s persona dwells in the entirety of the natural world.  She went from the image of a house to an image of an ever-expanding sky.  At these beautiful and thought-provoking sights, Dickinson really does to dwell in possibility.

The poem’s third and final stanza brings the reader to a sense of closure.  What is the point of possibility?  Why does it make one feel both elated and awe-struck?  Dickinson delivers herself over to the spiritual aspect of the act of writing poetry.  “Of visitors—the Fairest”, she says, and it doesn’t take long in delving through Dickinson’s poetry to see that the bird of one of her main tropes (327).  Any reader may imagine that these fair visitors are most likely birds, the free and somehow never overused muse of many poets throughout history.  Of course, Dickinson is right in supposing that these birds, or poets rather, are frequent and fair visitors of nature, the home and creation of poetry.  She, just like all poets, visit not only because it is a natural dwelling place, but also because the process of writing poetry is a kind of spiritual creation.  Dickinson sees the power of “spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise—” (327).  Her hands are the claiming power over an immaterial place.  Dickinson writes her way into new worlds, new perspectives.

Even though, one of our modern day sensibilities of art is to think of it as an expression of a human being in a delicate and particular historical and cultural context, I don’t think Dickinson’s poetics can be easily dismissed on such a basis.  Rather, the status of her poetics as art retains itself once we shed off the yearnings for a biography and accept that most of what anyone will ever have of Dickinson is a persona understood only on the page.  My Dickinson is a persona who single-handedly dealt with existential and spiritual questions through her experimental art.  My Dickinson does not reject aesthetics or assert itself in any kind of bold manner.  Her poetry was pieced together through the tidbits of understanding she gained from a limited exposure to the literature of her day.  It is both birdsong and dirge, both confessional and philosophical.  It is a particular experimental art that deals with a persona who asks many questions about worlds and how people or things exist in them.  Emily Dickinson is not a biographical person to any reader.  She is purely an artistic persona, and the perfect illustration of why artists and scholars today must remember to maintain the delicate separation of artist as person and artist as a voiced persona on the crafted page.

 

Works Cited

Dickinson, Emily. “I dwell in Possibility…,” or poem 657.  The Complete Poems of Emily

Dickinson.  Ed. Thomas H. Johnson.  Little, Brown and Company: New York, 1961.

327.  Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  “The Poet.”  The Portable Emerson.  Ed. Carl Bode.  New York:

Penguin Books, 1981.

Howe, Susan.  My Emily Dickson.  New Directions: New York, 2007.

 

 

Dickinson’s Poetics: Never the Artist, but Always the Voice

 

In Susan Howe’s biography of the poet figure and poetics of Emily Dickinson, Eliot Weinberger prefaces Howe’s critical work by bringing to light the many early criticisms that Dickinson’s poetry endured.  Her verse was accused of being informally educated, coming up short of being a true intellectual substance.  The criticism also heavily drew upon her notorious persona, or lack thereof, by concentrating on “neurosis, repression, [and] rejection” (x). 

Considering all the hype that had happened around this name, it seems Emily Dickinson is more a name than a person.  She was hardly a person known to many people; rather, only a handful of people knew her as a person.  Today, her name has come to represent an overly hyped persona that has been perpetuated by early critics.  She is both praised and dismissed for being the “sinister spinster” of our imaginations.  Howe retorts, “Who is this Spider-Artist?  Not my Emily Dickinson.  This is poetry not life, and certainly not sewing” (14).  I think it’s key to note that this book is called My Emily Dickinson; in other words, this is not a woman or a woman’s poetics upon whom many of us agree upon.  The lack of biographical material as well as the lack of a conventional life seems to call for an individual’s interpretation of a persona, not a real person. 

The separation between a poet’s persona on the page and the actual real life poet is a basic poetry 101 fact, so it’s a bit of a mystery why many people are attracted to the idea of a biography.  One suggestion may be that she is not of our time, and therefore has become a subject more so for scholars than artists.  Inevitably, this retrospect perspective would cultivate an interest in a historical person.  Another suggestion would be, in conjunction with the former conjecture, the desire to understand an aesthetic which sets itself apart from the norm in a way that intrigued people back during Dickinson’s time as well as our time.  Dickinson’s voice was one that grew out of a unique mind contained in a unique environment. 

Dickinson’s poetic voice may not attempt to represent a speaker living actively in a particular historical and cultural moment, which clashes a bit with one of today’s modern sensibilities surrounding art.  Emerson himself voiced such a sensibility when he said, “For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet” (“The Poet”).  Emily Dickinson as a person was, for the most part, isolated from her time and culture.  She does not voice the confession of her age, its sentiments and issues and passions.  Rather, her poetics, in a way, voice that which is timeless in all human beings.  It is a commonplace notion to understand a human being in frequent solitude as someone who engages readily in introspection, and therefore, someone who grapples with heavy questions that usually go unheard when one is living a busy and noisy lifestyle. 

Even though, one of our modern day sensibilities of art is to think of it as an expression of a human being in a delicate and particular historical and cultural context, I don’t think Dickinson’s poetics can be easily dismissed on such a basis.  Rather, the status of her poetics as art retains itself once we shed off the yearnings for a biography and accept that most of what anyone will ever have of Dickinson is a persona understood only on the page.  My Dickinson is a persona who single-handedly dealt with existential questions through her experimental art.  My Dickinson does not reject aesthetics or assert itself in any kind of bold manner.  Her poetry was pieced together through the tidbits of understanding she gained from a limited exposure to the literature of her day.  It is both birdsong and dirge, both confessional and philosophical.  It is a particular experimental art that deals with a persona who asks many questions about worlds and how people or things exist in them.  Emily Dickinson is not a biographical person to me.  She is purely an artistic persona, and the perfect illustration of why artists and scholars today must remember to maintain the delicate separation of artist as person and artist as a voiced persona on the crafted page.