The Passion of Emily Dickinson

By Judith Farr

Book Overview

"How tame and manageable are the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions!" complained essayist T. W. Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly in 1870. "The American poet of passion is yet to come." He was, of course, unaware of the great erotic love poems such as "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!" and "Struck was I, nor yet by Lightning" being privately written by his reclusive friend Emily Dickinson. In a profound new analysis of Dickinson's life and work, Judith Farr explores the desire, suffering, exultation, spiritual rapture, and intense dedication to art that characterize Dickinson's poems, and deciphers their many complex and witty references to texts and paintings of the day. In The Passion of Emily Dickinson the poet emerges, not as a cryptic proto-modern or a victim of female repression, but as a cultivated mid-Victorian in whom the romanticism of Emerson and the American landscape painters found bold expression. Dickinson wrote two distinct cycles of love poetry, argues Farr, one for her sister-in-law Sue and one for the mysterious "Master," here convincingly identified as Samuel Bowles, a friend of the family. For each of these intimates, Dickinson crafted personalized metaphoric codes drawn from her reading. Calling books her "Kinsmen of the Shelf," she refracted elements of Jane Eyre, Antony and Cleopatra, Tennyson's Maud, De Quincey's Confessions, and key biblical passages into her writing. And, to a previously unexplored degree, Dickinson also quoted the strategies and subject matter of popular Hudson River, Luminist, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, notably Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life and Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes. Involved in the delicate process of both expressing and disguising her passion, Dickinson incorporated these sources in an original and sophisticated manner. Farr's superb readings of the poems and letters call on neglected archival material and on magazines, books, and paintings owned by the Dickinsons. Viewed as part of a finely articulated tradition of Victorian iconography, Dickinson's interest in the fate of the soul after death, her seclusion, her fascination with landscape's mystical content, her quest for honor and immortality through art, and most of all her very human passions become less enigmatic. Farr tells the story of a poet and her time.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674656652
• ISBN13: 9780674656659
• Release Date: April 1992
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.5" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Well Worth Reading

Ours is such an unpoetic age. The prevailing view that reality is only what you see and the electro-magnetic fields on which our cell phones depend make the investigations a true poet makes seem fantasies and certainly irrelevant. What is above us, the nature of the world of which we are a part, and in which any one human is only a brief, generally painful, episode, is quite unknown to most of us, and this is the world a good poet (in my opinion) tries to communicate, and this is the world Emily Dickinson took up every day. It is a dimension only understood with both mind and feeling together, it is learned about in confrontations with love, nature, suffering and eternity. Anyway, I liked Judith Farr's book insofar as it agreed with my view of Emily Dickinson. Obviously, I love people who love Dickinson, and she clearly does. My only strong disagreement is with the idea that the Hudson River School painters could have played a very large role in the formation of her poetry, and even with the idea that there is a real similitude there. Generally speaking, Emily Dickinson is deeper than Cole, Church and the others. I like them, especially Kensett and Heade, but I've rarely felt the shock of revelation looking at one of their paintings, as I often have reading her poetry. I think probably the study of the Brontes, Brownings, Shakespeare and the Bible would reveal more of her actual source material, as would walking through fields, looking closely at flowers and listening to storms. Farr does supply a good deal of relevant literary material. It's the type of study that is very helpful in attempting to give contexts to the poems, which can be completely opaque. A poem may be the continuation of an earlier conversation, which we can only conjecture about. With Dickinson, you have to get what you can. We are surrounded by the unknown, the daily complacency is based on social convention and convenience, not on any understanding. It's a global self-deception. People who venture out into the unknown and report back are, in my view, the only really "distinguished" people. It's the only really worthwhile distinction. I think anyone who interested in Emily Dickinson will value this work highly. I would also recommend Helen Vendler's discussion of Emily Dickinson in "Poets Thinking" and Ted Hughes' excellent introduction to his collection of her poetry, which can be found in "Winter Pollen". And finally, if you like Dickinson's "telegrams from eternity" (Allen Tate), you may very well like R. H. Blyth's four volume "Haiku". Food for the soul.

Fascinating Interpretation

This is one of the better books of critical interpretation of Emily Dickinson. Most of the books about her apart from biographies are so academic they have little appeal to the general reader. This one although long, does not go into literary criticism that becomes incomprehensible. Generally, it is a sensible interpretation of the meaning of Dickinson's poems through paintings of the time. Also considered are some of the references in the poems to popular Victorian literature. Poems themselves although they are emotion, are also in some sense philosophy. So, in this book, the author's exploration of general thought on a topic and then Dickinson's way of exploring it are fascinating. Farr covers some topics that are controversial here like the extent of Dickinson's relationship with Sue Gilbert Dickinson or the mystery of the identity of ''Master''. Whatever anyone's view of these topics, reading this book just to read this author's take on them is silly. This book is worthwhile to read for many other reasons. Fifty times over, this book is worth reading.

And all my House aglow (638)

Thirty years ago, I read ED in school, a few poems chosen for high school students, scrubbed by the sensibilities of that time and rural place. My remembered impression was of a strange recluse who wrote of flowers and death. On word of friends, I came to remake her acquaintance, and found passion, unconventional explorations, and wide knowledge of her moment. That a woman so contained in space should flow out through time touches and pauses me. I should like to have known her, to have had her as my friend (by email, or chat?), and been informed of her wider, richer world distilled ever smaller until its circumference reduced me, too; a term between eternity and immortality (ED, you amaze).Judith Farr has wrought a miracle in bringing ED to me so compellingly (thank you, Judith).