Emily Dickinson, war poet

there wasn't a thread called "Emily Dickinson, amazing brilliant awesome poet" so I'm reviving this one

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

-

So here is a random Dickinson question: how much sympathy do people have for the view (which is an apparent invention of Lyndall Gordon, who wrote an occasionally trashy but not trashy enough to be fantastic bio of Dickinson, which is in Virago) that her sickness and her reason for confinement was: epilepsy. Lyndall has a whole theory here - and note that it was definitely in the family - and then starts looking at a whole bunch of poems in a very different light. I'm not entirely convinced but I think it's interesting; I can certainly believe that there was something that caused physical pain, even seizures. I don't think it then requires literalizing every reference to pain in the poetry. But I do think it lets us read the metaphorizin' in a different and interesting way. Obv. this is part of my choice of pome here.

anyway, if you skip to 2.37 here there is Bill Murray reading J657 aka "I dwell in Possibility - "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj_LYsvGF0E&feature=player_embedded

The Gordon bio is the best Dickinson I've read (just like her Woolf and Wharton bios came close to being the best of their kind) but I wasn't swayed by her thesis.

ohh, she wrote a Woolf bio? I'm tempted, I think. She doesn't make Woolf a special unique snowflake, does she?

NO. The Wharton bio from 2007 might be my favorite of the three though. She makes Franzen's recent scribblings in The New Yorker look especially slovenly.

that is good news -- the wharton one will probably take me longer to get around to, though; my last attempt to read wharton broke me

Might chase that bio and have a skim sometime. What a poet, at the moment I'm just reading in these bursts on Sunday nights.

I have the Complete... but are there any selections that people round here like? Or do we all lug everything about?

I like her and I spent two hours reading her the other day; but I'm not always sure I understand exactly or am on the same page as her. I think perhaps a lot of her underlying presumptions, about god and so on, might be very different from mine. So the sense of occasionally understanding her or connecting with her might be over-optimistic or slightly mistaken.

This is a very entertaining bk that touches on the 'Dickinson industry' -

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/aug/11/biography.emilydickinson

I saw a terrific doc made by the BBC on Hofmann and I don't remember that partic forgery mentioned. Concentrated on the Mormon stuff.

The Tint I cannot take -- is best --
The Color too remote
That I could show it in Bazaar --
A Guinea at a sight --

The fine -- impalpable Array --
That swaggers on the eye
Like Cleopatra's Company --
Repeated -- in the sky --

The Moments of Dominion
That happen on the Soul
And leave it with a Discontent
Too exquisite -- to tell --

The eager look -- on Landscapes --
As if they just repressed
Some Secret -- that was pushing
Like Chariots -- in the Vest --

The Pleading of the Summer --
That other Prank -- of Snow --
That Cushions Mystery with Tulle,
For fear the Squirrels -- know.

Their Graspless manners -- mock us --
Until the Cheated Eye
Shuts arrogantly -- in the Grave --
Another way -- to see --

These letters..

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/when-emily-dickinson-mailed-it-in