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Helen Vendler's new commentary on Emily Dickinson, reviewed by Michael Dirda
By Michael Dirda
By Helen Vendler
Harvard Univ. 535 pp. $35
Any good bookstore is likely to offer a half-dozen different editions of Emily D
ickinson's poetry. But the reason to consider buying "Dickinson: Selected Poems
and Commentaries" lies, of course, in the commentator, Helen Vendler.
Vendler -- A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard -- is widely regar
ded as our finest living critic and champion of contemporary poetry. Many would
say of poetry, period, since she has produced important studies of half the West
ern canon, from Shakespeare's sonnets and George Herbert's metaphysical verse to
the work of Keats, Whitman, Yeats, Stevens, Plath, Heaney and Ashbery. Vendler'
s sheer appetite for poetry and her explicatory power are phenomenal.
She is, however, a thoroughly serious, academic critic. Now, some professors are
fun to read: Think of the cool Olympian clarity of Northrop Frye, the astonishi
ng encyclopedism of Hugh Kenner, the delicious precisions of Guy Davenport, the
Empsonian dash and brilliance of Christopher Ricks. Vendler's strength, meanwhil
e, lies in clearly, patiently explaining what's happening in a poem. But -- and
it's a big but -- you really do need to pay attention. As Vendler writes in her
introduction to "Dickinson," hers isn't so much a book to read through as "a boo
k to be browsed in, as the reader becomes interested in one or another of the po
ems commented on here."
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) left nearly 1,800 poems. "In some passionate years,"
notes Vendler, "she wrote almost a poem a day." Dickinson never married -- "Mys
elf the only Kangaroo among the Beauty" -- and to all appearances seemed just a
shy, reclusive spinster, a good Christian woman residing quietly in Amherst, Mas
s. But her inner life was quite different, hardly Christian and not at all conve
ntional. In the view of eminent critic Harold Bloom, Dickinson's was simply "the
best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries."
Yet, aside from the handful of poems that appeared anonymously in local newspape
rs, she never published her work. Most of it survives either in manuscripts or f
rom transcriptions in letters, mainly to her family. When first brought out in b
ook form, her generally short, gnomic verses were often regularized. Words were
altered when their meaning was deemed puzzling or sacrilegious, and Dickinson's
beloved dashes, her preferred form of punctuation, were frequently changed to co
mmas or periods. Only in 1955 did Thomas Johnson produce a scholarly edition tha
t printed the earliest fair copy of what Dickinson actually wrote. His were the
standard texts until Ralph Franklin's 1998 "Variorum Edition," which chose Dicki
nson's last revised versions as its copy-texts but also included the manuscript
variants.
Such bibliographic details matter because, like Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden, D
ickinson frequently fiddled with and reworked her seemingly finished poems. Vend
ler relies on Franklin for her texts, but notes that sometimes the poet's reject
ed first versions, found in Johnson, display a raw power all their own. For inst
ance, the line "And this brief Tragedy of Flesh" was slightly altered in meaning
and distinctly weakened to "this brief Drama in the flesh." The first sounds gr
andly Shakespearean, the second merely descriptive.
Dickinson's poetry, summarizes Vendler, is "epigrammatic, terse, abrupt, surpris
ing, unsettling, flirtatious, savage, winsome, metaphysical, provocative, blasph

emous, tragic, funny." As many readers know, her opening lines are especially st
artling:
"One need not be a Chamber -- to be Haunted -- "
"Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!"
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes -- "
"Because I could not stop for Death--/He kindly stopped for me"
"My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- "
"Crumbling is not an instant's Act"
"Tell all the truth but tell it slant -- "
Dickinson famously called one of her poems "my letter to the World/That never wr
ote to Me," and occasionally she sounds as personal as a diary, but more often s
he pares her lines until they are as ambiguous and richly compacted as a Zen koa
n. Take this blasphemous little poem, as Vendler calls it: "In name of the Bee -/And of the Butterfly --/And of the Breeze -- Amen!" While this invocation natu
ralizes the Trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, it doesn't wholly
abandon it. Dickinson is careful that her nouns are "symbolic as well as 'real'
; the Bee (for Being), the Butterfly (Psyche, the resurrected Soul) and the Bree
ze (the Spirit) all fit that criterion."
While Vendler's readings are generally clear and persuasive, some are not. In di
scussing "A Clock Stopped," she spends a confusing paragraph on the movement of
a clock's hour hand, positing a "circle" of 120 "Degrees" and a clock face marke
d out in increments of 10 spaces. This isn't any kind of timepiece I have ever s
een. In another poem she explains Dickinson's use of the noun "Ought" as her "cu
stomary spelling of 'Aught,' meaning 'Anything.' " Okay. But in a poem that begi
ns "The Zeros taught," it does seem possible that "Ought" might actually mean ze
ro, as in the phrase "nineteen ought two."
Vendler also has a tendency to connect Dickinson's language to that of earlier (
and later) poets or to the Bible, sometimes without adequate evidence and purpos
e. Take the poem "It's easy to invent a Life": Here the word "thrifty" leads her
to cite Hamlet's phrase "Thrift, thrift, Horatio" -- for no reason I can discer
n -- while the poem's reference to "Perished Patterns" somehow calls up the phra
se "so various, so beautiful, so new" from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." This,
in its turn, is followed by a nod to Gerard Manley Hopkins's use of the word "h
aecceitas," referring to an entity's individual "thisness," which, Vendler remin
ds us, he borrowed from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. All this quote-mon
gering seems to be little more than the kind of free association that all great
readers -- and many classroom teachers -- are prone to.
For Vendler really is a great reader and teacher. Consider her superb analysis - too long to reproduce -- of "Essential Oils -- are wrung." Or look at her disc
ussion of the famous poem about heaven "I never saw a Moor": She points out that
its last lines ("Yet certain am I of the spot/As if the Checks were given -- ")
refer to train tickets, thus making Paradise nearby, just a few stops down the
line from Amherst. Older editors had emended "checks" to "chart," thus losing th
e homely simile. Again, in her glossing of "To make a prairie it takes a clover
and one bee," Vendler neatly picks apart Dickinson's verbal games with the artic
le "a" and the number "one."
Emily Dickinson is certainly never going to be an easy poet to understand, but h
er dense, poignant lyrics are now a lot more accessible to ordinary readers than

ks to Vendler's unravelings. If you're going to read Dickinson, this "selected p

oems and commentary" is the place to start.
Visit Dirda's online book discussion at http://washingtonpost.com/readingroom.