Gaining Loss

Abstract

“Even to write against something,” including whenever “something” turns out to be one’s very own position, “is to take one’s bearings from it.” As an example of this variation on Denis Donoghue’s useful insight into creativity (see his Third Voice 18), the difference between Emily Dickinson’s poetry of experience (recall part I) and the “post-experiential perspective” of her poems of “aftermath” (for thorough discussion of this canon-within-the-canon, see Pollak Anxiety 202ff.) is one of degree. Yes, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (Fr372, line 1) goes from trauma to feigned emotion, but does this line as well as the poem of which it serves as title also suggest the re-formation, the salutary disciplining, of the however-much-traumatized senses? Does the line hint of something positive not so much in hardwired as in deep-structured-by-life emotion, hence “a formal feeling,” as distinct from merely going through the motions of emotion, hence a “formal feeling”? Some cockeyed optimist might, just might, catch here the whisper of pretraumatic feeling now refined or revised and extended as though happy days were here again, as though Post-Experience, personified, could somehow, as in paradoxically, renew The Promise of Experience Past.