From: LouisFors <LouisFors@aol.com>
Message-ID: <1c99826d.35434b01@aol.com>
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 10:55:59 EDT
To: emweb@fmgmt.mgmt.utoronto.ca
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Subject: Re: ED's fun with extravagant imagery: # 414
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Friends:

In response to my posting of thoughts on # 414, Barbara Kelly wrote:

>  Regarding your 
>  recent interest in Poem #414, you might want to read Daneen Wardrop's 
>  EMILY DICKINSON'S GOTHIC: GOBLIN WITH A GAUGE (225 pp. including notes, 
>  bibliography, index, University of Iowa Press, 1996), in which she 
>  discusses the poem from which she took the title for her book.
>  
A friend told me that Wardrop had a piece in the EDIS Journal.  I've just
checked it
out (http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/index.html) and find an article in
Vol 1, No 1, titled the same as the book Barbara notes above.  Wardrop
undertakes an analysis of ED's Gothic poetry, drawing on ED's poems and
letters, and develops an argument about the nature of terror and horror,
drawing on many sources.  Anybody interested in # 414, and ED's Gothic stuff
in general, should read Wardrop's article which is so easily available online.
I shouldn't post my thoughts so early without checking out what scholars have
done. 

I hesitate to challenge one point in the article, but here it is.  Wardrop
notes that 
"...Susan Howe offers the startling information that Dickinson's 1828 Webster
lists one of the definition of 'goblin to be God'".  (Goblin is featured in #
414.)  I've just checked my CD-ROM version of Webster's 1828, and find that
God is *not* listed in the definition of goblin, but is, in fact the next
entry in the dictionary.  This is not a big deal, of course, merely a
curiosity, thus apologies to Howe and Wardrop for bringing it up.  I don't
know if mistakes were made by the people who produced the CD-ROM, or whether
it appears in the original as I've noted.  Does anybody have a way of checking
the 1828 to see whether my CD-ROM is accurate or not?  (I've discovered, while
thinking about ED's calvary poems, that "calvary" is substituted for "cavalry"
in at least two places in the CD-ROM 1828, leading me to believe that errors
*may* have been made in the transition from paper to CD-ROM.)

Enough digging for a gloomy early Sunday morning in Santa Fe.

Best wishes to all,

Louis Forsdale