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."

The World Is Not Conclusion / Emily Dickinson (Happy Birthday Today Belle of Amherst!)

This World Is Not Conclusion by Emily Dickinson this world is not conclusion a species stands beyond - invisible, as music - but positive as sound - it beckons, and it baffles philosophy - don't know - and through a riddle, at the last - sagacity must go - to guess it, puzzles scholars - to gain it, men have borne contempt of generations and crucifixion, shown - faith slips - and laughs, and rallies - blushes, if any see - plucks at a twig of evidence - and asks a vane, the way - much gesture, from the pulpit - strong hallelujahs roll - narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul - "This World Is Not Conclusion" by Emily Dickinson. Public domain. (buy now) Today is the birthday of "the Belle of Amherst": Emily Dickinson (books by this author), born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on this date (1830). She spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom in her father's house. The room contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. Her favorite author was Shakespeare. She eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems. In the year 1862 alone, she wrote 366 poems — about one per day. Most people think of Emily Dickinson as a slightly odd recluse, but she was in fact very outgoing in her younger years. As she became more passionate about writing poetry, she went out less and devoted her life to her verses. Over the years, scholars have come up with a lot of theories for her growing reclusiveness. Some believe it was because she was nursing a mysteriously broken heart, others think she was a closeted lesbian, and still others think she suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder. One biographer speculates that she may have suffered from epilepsy. Emily Dickinson said: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Thanks to Garrison Keillor at Writer's Almanac