First Approach

Abstract

Emily Dickinson’s qualities as a lyric poet, and as perhaps the greatest of women poets, have been widely recognised. Less clearly recognised, I think, is the centrally representative character of her achievement at its best — representative, that is, not of the prevailing fashions of her day, but of its real underlying currents; and centrally so because these currents can be recognised today as the true mainstream currents of Western literature in the period from her death in 1886 up to and including (with certain restrictions) the present. This does not mean that she is representative of the changing forms and preoccupations of the literature of the new age; but, rather, of their underlying consciousness — she is, above all, the poet of the consciousness of the new age. If the new literature can be seen as a consequence, or as a fragmented host of consequences, of a new consciousness that was emerging in the Western world and reaching crisis-point towards the dawn of our century, she explored and brought to conscious expression the consciousness itself; and at her best she did so with an inclusiveness and a directness and intensity of awareness combined with an understanding and control that make a study of her verse in this context particularly illuminating. (Her younger contemporary, Gerard Manley Hopkins, has the intensity and the understanding and control, but not, I think, the inclusiveness.