In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development
  • Joanne Feit Diehl (bio)
Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development, by Aliki Barnstone. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006. 187 pp. $45.00.

No American poet has received more critical scrutiny than Emily Dickinson. Since Thomas H. Johnson’s variorum edition of her poems (1955), scholars, editors, and poets have variously addressed this edition, analyzing Dickinson’s poetics, biography, and relationship with nineteenth-century New England culture. More recently, feminist critics [End Page 376] have interpreted Dickinson’s poems through the lens of gender. Current discussions swirl around the status of her manuscripts and, most provocatively, the ways in which our reading practices are inflected by categorizing the poems as “lyrics.”1 In Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development, Aliki Barnstone, a poet, translator, and scholar, returns us to an unresolved yet central issue in Dickinson studies: can we discern a developmental arc in Dickinson’s work, and, if so, what are the dynamics that inform such evolutionary changes? Now that R. W. Franklin has established a more authoritative chronology of Dickinson’s poems, questions concerning development can be addressed with greater confidence.2 Responding to earlier critics who conceptualize Dickinson’s work as static, Barnstone asserts that not only do the poems reflect imaginative shifts over time but, crucially, that this maturation is a direct result of the poet’s interactions with the “cultural, religious, and literary traditions she disputed” (p. 5). According to Barnstone, previous readers of Dickinson have been led to interpret her work as static because, ironically, “Dickinson’s poetic power to transform the materials of culture into her own voice has blinded some of her readers, even sympathetic ones, to her sources and influences” (p. 5). Through close analysis of individual poems, Barnstone animates her controlling theory that Dickinson moves through four stages of development contextualized by her shifting stance toward Calvinism, her response to the liberating yet potentially divergent power of Emerson’s work, and her discovery of the relational possibilities of the letter-poem as a means to engage with others.

While various critics (most notably Cristanne Miller) have interpreted the stylistic role of satire in Dickinson’s poetry, Barnstone specifically identifies the satiric mode with the first stage of Dickinson’s composition as the poet’s way to “externalize her argument with Calvinism” (p. 6). In her second phase, the poems of 1863, Dickinson’s most productive year, she “internalize(s) her struggle with Calvinism” (p. 9). Barnstone makes an especially astute observation about these poems when she suggests that “Dickinson performed a kind of ritual mastery over the forces she felt could master her: religion, love, ecstatic experience” (p. 9). (One might venture that such a performative ritualization in part accounts for the sheer number of the poems more generally.) For her first analysis of a proof text, Barnstone turns to “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (F 372), going beyond conventional psychological terms to situate the poem in “its religious cultural context and the date—1863—of its composition” (p. 10). Barnstone concludes her interpretation by asserting: “The poem is a conversion narrative that ends not in the grace of redemption through Jesus Christ, but in the grace of the human poet’s Word” (p. 13).

Having challenged Calvinism, Dickinson next enters the stage Barnstone calls “the adventure of the self” (p. 13). Central as Emerson is to this new [End Page 377] phase of liberation, Barnstone astutely notes that “while Dickinson seeks out and admires ecstatic moments, she, unlike Emerson and her Calvinist contemporaries, believes that life on earth, communing with nature and loved ones, is paradise” (p. 15). This recognition is the germ of the third phase of her development in which “Dickinson embraces the subjectivity of perception and the possibility of relatedness that subjectivity creates” (p. 21). Keeping with the changes in Dickinson’s own writing habits as she melds the distinct categories of “poems” and “letters” during her fourth phase, Barnstone, with the sensitivity of the poet, returns to the manuscripts themselves to assess lineation, rhyme, and metrics. The purpose of such a painstaking analysis is to expose the textual philosophy of composition...

pdf

Share