The Maenad of Amherst
WELLS, HENRY W.
The Maenad of Amherst Emily Dickinson's Poetry. By Charles R. Anderson. Holt, Rinehart. Winston. 334 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Henry W. Wells Author, "Poetic Imagery,' "Where Poetry Stands Now" FEW...
...This orientation frees Anderson from embarrassing obfuscations besetting a number of books about Emily Dickinson, although conceivably denying us some stimulating psychological observations...
...But one suspects a tendency here to excess...
...There is remarkably little detail from which to dissent...
...Anderson becomes the immovable pole about which the maenad of Amherst dances...
...Too frequently Anderson's writing explains what the reader of average competence has already observed...
...Interestingly enough, the praise is less questionable than the dissent...
...Her stature, if possible, is increased, without the pedantic reservations besetting several critics unable to place her extraordinary work conveniently within their own peculiar preciosity of judgment...
...The terms are as a rule, though not always, self-explanatory...
...Most of the criticism is exposition of what Anderson regards in the poems as more or less difficult and...
...Anderson's interpretation leaves in comparative obscurity the contrast between certain of the high and low areas of her accomplishment...
...But on the whole the book gives as much relief from earlier misconceptions as it affords sound views that are...
...the poet's sensitivity for nature: "forms...
...The criticism is both intellectually sound and poetically inspired...
...The book's significance further extends well beyond the elucidation of its important subject...
...in short, that he had had more faith in himself and less in his distinguished contemporaries...
...Though the subject has been reduced to a certain orderliness, the question arises as to the wisdom of this particular economy and we are presumably deprived of illuminating observations concerning general literature and the poet's character which a less seminarish method, handled by a writer of Anderson's high ability, might achieve...
...To define a few of them somewhat curtly, "circumference" signifies an impersonal breadth of vision: "center...
...It should be valued not only for its comments on her mind and art but for its exemplification of certain fairly recent trends in critical method, whose assets and liabilities are subject to most convenient appraisal on the basis of so forthright an example...
...essentially, the "New Criticism" at its best, whose general merits and defects one is accordingly induced to explore...
...Even if there is no economy of abundance, there is assuredly an abundance of merit...
...to say the very least, more or less new...
...perception, forms, evanescence, process: ecstasy, despair: death and immortality...
...He commonly associates seriousness in emotional expression with merit, conceding only a secondary value to pure wit or bald statement...
...Insofar as the summary interpretation and appraisal of Emily Dickinson is concerned, the book's achievement is in almost every respect to the good...
...At times in view of this criticism it may seem that poetn is to be recognized by succinctness and criticism by prolixity...
...Much of the book's strength stems from an almost pedantic reiteration that whatever may be the concerns of the good critic, they are neither personal nor biographical...
...She is depicted as more intellectual than as a rule hitherto supposed and as creating a personal "religion" out of her inconclusiveness...
...her ability to shape nature into art...
...One wishes...
...And since the poem is the unit for discussion, his reader discovers on a page or more the most widely assorted comments on many phases of a single poem, its form and content, its historical setting, meaning, allusions, and whatever seems most important in the critic's eves...
...That this is a revealing and even a pre-eminent book not only in its field but in its kind admits of no serious doubt...
...Furthermore, the principles of his new orthodoxy are too often held complacently and virtually without examination...
...The theme is here the devious irony with which the poet habitually balances opposites...
...Though some of the exposition is fairly obvious, it never degenerates into banality and at times even rises to brilliance...
...The method of the printed page should not be the more leisurely one of the classroom...
...Some comments are frankly evaluative...
...His preferences in themselves are usually convincing, though some readers will probably find them at times urged over-dras-tically...
...The dozen themes are succinctly designated as wit, words, circumference, center...
...In a word, the book is an explication of Emily's text...
...the special focus of a personal insight: "perception...
...In freeing himself from a tendency of recent biographers to contrast Emily's mature asceticism with her girlish effusiveness...
...The general ordering is further controlled by chapters on a dozen themes, themselves assembled under four comprehensive headings, signifying in turn the poet's formal technique, her imaginative assimilation of the sensuous world, her emotional life in itself, and her spiritual life as focused on the poles of death and immortality...
...The chapter entitled "Process," especially its second half, reaches exceptional heights...
...Not only does Anderson have a good knowledge of previous scholarship and an excellent command of reference to 19th-century literature: he possesses imagination as a writer and sensitivity as a reader, together with a gift for the precise and effective phrase...
...Since in his eyes the poem's the thing, his book is shaped as a series of commentaries on approximately a hundred of her finer poems...
...It is refreshing to find that, with the exception of his notes, he refrains from naming any previous writer on his subject...
...Only on such lines as these, however, can reservations be urged...
...while remaining herself uncommitted...
...It is...
...There is thus a lack of flexibility, a want of the very irony and wit for which Emily Dickinson herself is so justly celebrated...
...Anderson is especially industrious in ground-clearing...
...The pieces examined are among the finest in American poetry, begetting some of the most discerning pages of criticism to be written in a long time...
...Although certainly forceful, the critic himself fails to emerge as an individual...
...A sound critique of a poet's page may conceivably extend to many pages...
...as a rule, valuable perceptions...
...Reviewed by Henry W. Wells Author, "Poetic Imagery,' "Where Poetry Stands Now" FEW BOOKS DEVOTED to criticism of American literature show as much insight and discrimination as Charles R. Anderson's interpretative study of Emily Dickinson's poetry...
...He virtually personifies a school, within whose regimen his conduct remains unimpeachable, so that the poet is portrayed against a prescribed and somewhat cramped background of ideas...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 44
