A Life with Emily Dickinson: Surprise and Memory

This essay explores my long relationship with Emily Dickinson—as student, scholar, and reader. Reading through her poems from the vantage point of my present life as retired Professor, I note two important aspects of this relationship: surprise and memory. Surprise, linked to the audacity of her language, is at the essence of a Dickinson poem. I identify four categories of surprise: short phrases that suddenly upset the reader's thought and reading; a sequence of words that one cannot really understand at all; "new poems: poems that one has never seen before or familiar poems suddenly understood in a new way; and "overlapping" poems in which more than one subject becomes possible to identify, so that the whole poem is a continual surprise. Some poems evoke a response other than surprise: memories that alter my sense of the poem itself, so that what I think of as "the poem" becomes an event composed of both the words and my experiences with them. In my discussion I concentrate on Dickinson as the poet-in-the-poem and on her language as the source and conduit of our continuing interaction.