Beyond the Doric Mode

...Not only do we now have all the Dickinson poems in a single volume, but we have all of each...

...Restoration of truncated poems and of omitted lines and stanzas had been accomplished in scattered poems of earlier collections and in articles in scholarly periodicals, but only here is it all together...

...But nothing underwent such close examination as her own experiences, responses, visions—even of her own death...

...But unlike them, I do not think her stature gains from selection...

...Her nature poetry, with Marianne Moore's, is as discriminating and precise in its descriptions as any in the language...

...Like Camus' The Stranger in his cell, every scrap of existence took on enormous significance and vitality, had to be explored in all its exact being...

...Precision thus became for her a kind of moral imperative to which she was willing to sacrifice all the lesser gods of poetic form and syntactical regularity...

...Beyond the Doric Mode By Paul Lauter Contributor, "New Republic," "Nation" Two RECENT BOOKS will do more than any heretofore to destroy with the general reading public the sugary version of Emily Dickinson as "Our Emily" and to establish widely and permanently the complex, profound and often terrifying image of one of the English language's great poets...

...Not that there is no repetitive, excessively cramped, obscure, even banal poetry, and even, after much reading, a sense of sameness in form and manner...

...In her life she links the oppression and terror of the Puritan world with the anxieties and doubts of the modern...

...but in the present work Leyda does not depend upon material passed through the lenses of imagination...

...A familiarity with previous Dickinson studies like those of Johnson, George F. Whicher and Richard Chase will help in putting together the materials with which the Years and Hours presents us, but once a reader is fairly launched with some sense of direction into these two volumes, he is in for an adventure worthy of Luigi Pirandello: Tonight We Biographize...

...The principle of selection is that explained in his introduction to the variorum edition, but the problem was not especially acute in those volumes inasmuch as a reader had all texts from which to make his own critical choice should he desire...

...The Body—borrows a Revolver— He bolls the Door— O'erlooking a superior spectre— Or More— What is particularly striking about this book—as much as its variorum predecessor—is its completeness...

...10.00) is based on his three-volume edition of 1955, which was primarily directed to scholars, providing as it did all variant readings and the usual scholarly apparatus, and restoring Miss Dickinson's original typography...

...Her self-limited method is perhaps itself the best correlative to her insight into her situation...

...This is not a victory won or sustained with ease (as poems like "If you were coming in the Fall" show)—nothing in her world is easy...

...And it is this honesty in the face of convulsive terror that makes Emily Dickinson's poetry so fine and so compelling...

...The present volume, equally immaculate in its scholarship and faithful to the original texts, selects that version of each of the 1,775 poems which in the earlier work Johnson had judged to be the one most nearly finished...

...The very volume of Miss Dickinson's work is enormously impressive...

...In the Log one was often frustrated by tantalizing fragments—of letters or journal entries—elsewhere all but unavailable...

...Here, with only one version of each poem presented in almost all cases, one feels no sense of loss over the displacement of what had become familiar readings, as, for example, in the last stanza of "One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—": The prudent carries a revolver, He bolts the door, O'erlooking a superior spectre More near...

...From this point of view, come full circle, death can be seen as the moment of supreme transcendence, as the movement from a world of distance and frustrated aspiration to a world of attainment and union...

...Jay Leyda's two volumes of The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, published by Yale University ($25.00), present perhaps the best available background against which to view the poet's courage and her artistic achievement...

...Like Hardy (with whose work there are many interesting analogies), Swinburne and other late 19th-century poets, she produced a great mass of short, lyrical poems...

...The books are modelled on Leyda's Melville Log, but they seem to me more successful than the earlier volumes...

...As she was driven into an ever more intense scrutiny of reality, however, she was also driven from communion with it—by her frustration in all attempts to move decisively beyond her limited Amherst circle and by the very isolation her introspective method compelled...

...like the existentialist, her awareness of life was deepened and intensified by the terrible knowledge of her own death...

...So narrowly limited in her life, her triumphs could come only in the endurance of a spirit unreconciled to failure, only in the vision of possible success seen by him who has failed...

...I have not noted such problems here and they probably will not arise now that the Dickinson canon is largely published...

...Her love poems in particular develop the peculiar paradoxes of self-denial: the farther away the lover is, the fuller she can come into a sense of his nature and of the possibility of love...

...And in her poems she made, and got, the best of both those worlds...

...What we have is a collection of detail, some of it minutiae, none of it very grand, but all of which accumulates to provide an overwhelming sense of "thereness," of 19th-century Amherst, of the Dickinson households, of Emily's daily surroundings...

...It seems about as close to the last word in such a volume as one could ask...

...And none of the fabulous romantic images of Emily which have haunted the poet's reputation until recently will match in fascination the intense, rich life forever in view in these pages, yet forever eluding our formulations...

...Enigmatic to the last, Emily Dickinson draws us into a poetic web which spans the 200 years between Edward Taylor and T. S. Eliot...

...There is nothing, I think, very startling in what Leyda has presented, but our sense of first-hand participation in life is quite unique...

...Thomas Johnson's The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown...

...Forced further and further down into herself, she emerges frequently in a gnarled, cryptic, all-but-private language (especially in the letters...

...But once we are attuned to her apparently Doric mode, we recognize the triumph she accomplishes within, or more properly through, the limitations she enforces on her art...

...Johnson also deserves plaudits for his solution of which version of a poem to present...

...In the Log one might doubt the advisability of using fragments of Typee, for example, as if they were accurate reproductions of Melville's adventures...

...Death, the ultimate failure and limitation, becomes central to her perception of life...

...Thus isolated, she made a virtue of distance in creating an unmatched poetry of deprivation, yearning, endurance, asceticism...

...Thus, for almost all purposes, it combines the virtues of a scholarly edition—completeness, accuracy, chronology—with those of a popular edition—ease in reading, subject and title indexes to locate favorites, fine bookmaking...