Emily Dickinson,Grief After A Death/Mother of American Poetry per Poet J.D. McClatchy

"She has the true Emily Dickinson spirit except that she gets fed up occasionally." - New Yorker cartoon by James Thurber


"A little Madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King." -Emily Dickinson

Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday, March 22-23, 2014, REVIEW section, BOOKS, Five Best:  A Personal Choice, Page C10:

Per Poet J.D. McClatchy, Emily Dickinson is the mother of American poetry.  One of his Five Best American poetry books is "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" by Emily Dickinson (1998).  He writes, "Not until the 1950s was Dickinson paid much attention, and not until 1998, with the publication of Ralph Franklin's authoritative, three-volume edition, were all of her 1,789 poems brought together.  During her own lifetime a handful of her poems were published, and decades later she was still thought of as a spinster hermit who wrote about daffodils and bumblebees.  But over the past half-century, the world has come to realize that Dickinson's - while occasionally fey - was a powerful imagination.  Never a believer, she sought to take on the universe with her own doughty, diminished soul, and she did so in a most unorthodox manner.  Her style - short lines, odd punctuation and rhythms, eccentric capitalizations, slant rhymes - was for years 'corrected' by short-sighted editors.  It is the lurching pace of her work that gives it force.

Her poem about the GRIEF after a DEATH ends this way:  'This is the Hour of Lead - / Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow - / First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go.' Death was never far from her mind, and Immortality hovered like a delusion.  But she was, at times, so in touch with the nature of things that no reader can forget her:  'Inebriate of air - am I - / And Debauchee of Dew - / Reeling - thro' endless summer days - / From inns of molten Blue.'  Walt Whitman and Dickinson are the father and mother of American poetry."