From: LouisFors <LouisFors@aol.com>
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Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 11:04:25 EST
To: emweb@fmgmt.mgmt.utoronto.ca
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Subject: Re: ED's withdrawal
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In a message dated 98-03-24 00:08:02 EST, Ben Friedlander wrote:

<snip>

> I hardly endorse John Cody's dated "diagnosis" of ED's "psychiatric
>  problems," but he makes a point early on in _After Great Pain_ that is
>  well worth mulling over, especially by those of us who have come to
>  appreciate the deeply ideological nature of the various treatments of ED's
>  manuscripts:
>  
>  	   At one time it was the impulse of editors and publishers
>  	to "improve" and regularize Emily Dickinson's poetry. By 
>  	removing what were then considered blemishes and crudities 
>  	due to technical incompetence and carelessness [sic!!],
>  	they hoped to make the "inspired" elements of the poems
>  	more accessible and easier to appreciate. Today, in
>  	deference to Emily Dickinson's now unquestioned poetic
>  	stature, her every spelling, syntactical, and punctuational
>  	eccentricity has been rendered sacrosanct. But the same 
>  	impulse to normalize and harmonize still operates, now,
>  	however, in relation to the poet's life.
>  
>  Though Susan Howe, Martha Nell Smith and a few others have related the
>  treatment of ED's manuscripts with the treatment of her biography, there
>  is an undertow of formalism in ED criticism which tends to posit a
>  hyper-rational poetic genius who indulged in indeterminacies and
>  fragmentation as conscious, aesthetic effects, a woman whose apparent
>  psychic distress--attested to by several hundred poems in which her pain,
>  terror and despair were described in minute detail--was actually a
>  strategy for pursuing her art in peace.
<snip>
Ben:  Your last comment, above, makes great sense to me.  I'm sure I attribute
to ED that quality of being "a hyper-rational poetic genius."  And I think
it's clear to me where my thoughts spring from (insofar as I can know that):
I strive on an intellectual level (as well as on a intuitive level) to unlock
many of ED's poems.  So, I probably say to myself:  here is one hyper-smart
writer, which is doubtless true.  And that may lead me to accept Shattuck's
assertion that she made a conscious decision to pursue her art in an
abstemious way.  And that leads me to accept as well your comment below.

>  It may be that our explanations of ED's behavior reveal more about us than
>  they do about her. The truth of ED's inner life may never be known, but
>  the truth of our own critical practice slowly comes into focus! 
<snip>
  
Louis Forsdale

>  
>