What’s the Import? Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice (review)

In his introduction to What’s the Import? Kerry McSweeney quotes Emily Dickinson’s ‘It sifts from Leaden Sieves’ (F 291). ‘This poem has recently received two antithetical readings,’ McSweeney writes, introducing the critical model that informs his book. One scholar (Catherine Tufariello) offers ‘a traditional literary-historical contextualization’ of Dickinson’s poem, comparing it to Emerson’s ‘The Snow-Storm.’ Hers is ‘an aesthetic model of reading.’ Another scholar (Domhnall Mitchell) offers ‘a cultural studies contextualization’ of the poem: from Mitchell’s perspective, ‘the snow is the “dullness of democracy”; its flakes are immigrants – the “thousands, or millions of small agents who, singly, amount to nothing but, collectively, threaten to overwhelm even the most powerful in society.”’

McSweeney proposes ‘to adjudicate between these readings.’ Tufariello, he says, ‘makes the poem light up’; ‘her reading wins hands down’; it helps ‘the reader to a deeper engagement with and finer appreciation of Dickinson’s sparkling poem.’ Mitchell, on the other hand, ‘obliterates it through acts of conceptual transference as surely as a snowstorm obliterates a landscape.’ (There must be other, less extreme examples of ‘cultural studies contextualization.’) ‘To compete with’ Mitchell’s reading, McSweeney adds, ‘one would have to concoct readings of Dickinson’s poems that identified Robert E. Lee rather than a snake as the subject of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” whooping cough rather than a railroad locomotive as the subject of “I like to see it lap the Miles,” and venereal disease as the coded subject of “What mystery pervades a Well.”’

McSweeney intends ‘to help restore a balance to the critical study of nineteenth-century poetry.’ His discussions of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Clare, Hardy, Hopkins, both Rossettis, and the Brownings, among others, ‘propose and exemplify an aesthetic model’ of reading. For all that, I have not managed to pin down his ‘aesthetic model,’ nor do I grasp how it differs from ‘interpretive and cultural studies models.’ How does McSweeney’s approach to, say, Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ complement Geoffrey Hartman’s aesthetic criticism? Hartman’s influential reading of ‘The Solitary Reaper’ is cited, very many critics are cited, some more relevant than others. In essence, What’s the Import? comprises ten chapters on selected nineteenth-century lyrics and their critics. I would have welcomed a solid introductory chapter on the history of aesthetic criticism.

‘It makes considerable difference which text is used,’ McSweeney remarks, alluding to Whitman’s ‘The Sleepers.’ Having opened this review with ‘It sifts from Leaden Sieves,’ I turn to Dickinson’s text, whose penultimate line in R.W. Franklin’s definitive three-volume edition reads, ‘Then stills it’s Artisans – like Ghosts’ (F 291, version A). Anyone who cares about the integrity of Dickinson’s poems knows that the possessive it’s takes an apostrophe in Franklin’s and in Thomas Johnson’s three-volume editions, as it does in the poet’s manuscript (H 155); yet McSweeney has ‘silently’ deleted her apostrophes (here and elsewhere) and ‘silently’ regularized her spelling. His note reads, ‘The text for all quotations from Dickinson’s poems is Franklin’s three-volume edition. But I have silently changed it’s to its, opon to upon, Guage to Gauge, and wo to woe.’ Have all Dickinson’s editors lived in vain?

As well, I have discovered misprints and errors of transcription in at least five of the lyrics quoted in the chapter on Dickinson’s ‘grief poems.’ For example, Franklin’s two versions of Poem 1268 begin as follows: ‘A Word dropped careless on a Page / May stimulate an Eye’; and, ‘A word left careless on a page / May consecrate an eye.’ McSweeney has (silently) combined the two; his own version reads, ‘A word dropped careless on a Page / May stimulate an eye.’ As he observes in passing, ‘The key word is “careless.”’

It is indeed. After quoting all ten stanzas of Dickinson’s ‘I measure every Grief I meet...