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It has been difficult for critics to recognize Emily Dickinson as a great poet. Emily Dickinson made it difficult. She shared her poems with only a few others, paid little attention to the criticism she received, and never prepared her work for publication. She used devices that her contemporaries considered marks of ineptitude, such as suspended rhymes and catalectic lines (lines which, according to the dominant meter, lack a final syllable). She indulged herself as only a non-publishing writer could—sometimes with sentimentality, sometimes with obscurity, and always with her startling punctuation. Her lean, flexible syntax, so intrinsic to her style, led editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson to call her work "spasmodic" and "uncontrolled."^[1] It is this unfamiliar use of language, however—what many call her "eccentricity"—that makes Emily Dickinson one of the greatest poets of the English language.

The delight of reading Dickinson is in her startling use of words and images. She grants us a sudden agility; we find ourselves performing mental somersaults and imaginative leaps we would be incapable of alone. In the poem "You've seen Balloons set—Haven't you?", Dickinson compares released balloons to rising swans: "It is as Swans—discarded you, / For Duties Diamond—" (ll. 3-4). The word diamond has little to do with duty, balloons, or swans; it is never used as a modifier except to describe a piece of jewelry. Yet we sense what Dickinson means: the balloons rise to pursue some pure, superior, beautiful pastime. Dickinson expands our understanding of the word diamond, and the line is both surprising and communicative.

Such utterly original phrases appear everywhere in the Dickinson canon:

I never hear the word "escape"
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude!

In the unlikely pairing of two words—"flying attitude"—Dickinson captures the sudden sense of uplift and motion that one associates with the word escape. Archibald MacLeish makes an astute observation about Dickinson lines such as these: she treats abstractions as solid objects, "abstractions presented for the eye to see and the ear to hear and the hand to touch."^[2] This is the key to some of Dickinson's most striking lines. This is the sweet surprise of "Duties Diamond" and "flying attitude." Duty and attitude are both abstract concepts, yet they are described visually. Most poets solidify abstractions through metaphor or simile, comparing an idea to a tangible image and then describing it. Dickinson boldly attaches "flying" to "attitude" without comparing "attitude" to anything that flies. She surprises the reader by attaching concrete modifiers to abstract nouns.

This device is probably responsible for the popularity of one of her most famous poems, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers—". The main ideas of the poem are simple and dangerously sweet: hope lives forever; it is "sweetest" in times of trouble (l. 5); it "[keeps] so many warm" (l. 8) during all but the worst storms; and it asks nothing in return for its comfort. These are Hallmark card sentiments; they elicit stock responses. The poem's saving grace is in the first line: "Hope is the thing with feathers—". The metaphor of hope as a songbird is appropriate but unremarkable. The key is that Dickinson does not immediately state that hope is a bird. She preserves its abstraction by referring to it as "the thing," and then modifies it concretely: "the thing with feathers." Once again, the combination of abstract and concrete is pleasing. Had Dickinson defined the metaphor immediately, the poem would have been ordinary verse.

Dickinson's imaginative agility is most obvious in her poems about animals, flowers, and natural phenomena. Critics who, like Conrad Aiken, consider Dickinson's nature poetry "superficial, a mere affectionate playing with the smaller things that give her delight"^[3] deny the range of Dickinson's talent and the careful artistry of her work. It is true that scores of her poems contain nothing more than a fresh look at the sunrise, a new angle on the robin; but some of her most striking imagery is found in such poems. There is mastery in such lines as "Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music—/ Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—". Sheer originality can justify a poem.

"A narrow fellow in the grass," for example, is an inimitable description of a snake and one's reaction to seeing it. "His notice sudden is" (l. 4), writes Dickinson; the word "sudden" appears quite suddenly, before we expect it. The poem ends, "[I] never met this fellow, / Attended or alone, / Without a tighter breathing, / And zero at the bone" (ll. 24). The last line is characteristically startling and lucid. The "tighter breathing" establishes anxiety, so there is instant recognition of "zero at the bone" as piercing fear, before one can wonder exactly what "zero" means (perhaps it refers to temperature). "Zero at the bone" is one of those lines that carry Dickinson's "superficial" poems. The quiet gravity of "I heard a fly buzz—when I died—" impresses academics. A lighter subject requires a lighter approach, a playfulness that allows a writer to address a snake on its own terms instead of turning it into a metaphor for some grander subject.

Yet is there really a difference between Dickinson's "superficial" and "profound" poems that justifies the division upon which critics insist? The poem "A Clock stopped—" describes death in almost the same playful way, yet the tone never sounds inappropriate. It compares the heart of one just dead to a clock that has just stopped working (ll. 6-9):

An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched, with pain—
Then quivered out of Decimals—
Into Degreeless Noon—

Because of the context, we know that "Decimals" represents life and "Degreeless Noon" refers to death, but these are strange metaphors. They seem unrelated to life, death, and each other. A close reading, however, reveals the dichotomy of life and death in these lines. "Decimals" are a sort of progression; numbers increase or decrease by ones, tens, hundreds, thousands; by shifting a decimal point, one can make a number larger or smaller. The word degree refers to a step in a progression. The sun ascends and descends by degrees. At "Degreeless Noon," the sun is poised at its zenith, neither rising nor setting. In a "Degreeless" state, there is no progression, just as in death we stop growing, learning, aging. Dickinson has pushed these words (and, perhaps, her readers) to their limit, making each word carry far more than its usual meaning. To "[quiver] out of Decimals—/ Into Degreeless Noon" is to stop changing and remain forever suspended in death.

In the two words, "Degreeless Noon," Dickinson condenses the bleak monotony stretching eternally before the dead, using a surprising image of daylight. The same terseness appears in all her work, from "flying attitude" to "zero at the bone" to "I know that he exists. / Somewhere—in Silence—", the second line suggesting in three words all the remoteness and invisibility of God. The aesthetic that unifies all of Dickinson's work is clear in the two poems printed below, one of them solemn as the grave, the other "a mere affectionate playing with the smaller things that gave her delight" (in this case, the hummingbird):

A throe upon the features— A hurry in the breath— An ecstasy of parting Denominated "Death,"— An anguish at the mention Which when to patience grown, I've known permission given To rejoin its own.

A Route of Evanescence With a revolving Wheel— A Resonance of Emerald— A Rush of Cochineal— And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts its tumbled Head— The mail from Tunis, probably, An easy Morning's Ride—

Each poem describes its subject by listing a few carefully chosen details. The result is concise, impressionistic, and as solid and brilliant as a gem. "Each word [is] a picture,"^[4] Higginson wrote of "A Route of Evanescence." Dickinson's infinitely suggestive words pack meaning and atmosphere into her short poems.

Dickinson's poetic philosophy was perhaps best stated by Dickinson herself:

Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.

Dickinson tries to grasp "the undeveloped Freight" of every word and to use each word to its full capacity. She uses words in startling combinations, in functions that would never be found in the dictionary. This delights the reader, but it accomplishes more: it allows Dickinson to be concise. The poet who, in her last years, shared her presence sparingly and wore only white, lived an aesthetic of economy—economy with people and economy with words. Each word was a picture, a web of associations, a world of meaning. Each word pulled the lines of the poem together into a tight, dense, and exquisite whole.

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