Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Emily Dickinson

Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O’Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson-her dashes, death instinct and obliquity.
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
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[@Andrew87394]

Excellent as usual, but a pity that we were almost 40 minutes into the discussion before there was any substantial reference to the Puritan version of Christianity which informs so much of Dickinson's life and poetry.Mark is tantalisingly on the right track when he speaks of her poems as "conjugations of interiority;"and Susan M. Gilbert's "wayward nun" even richer in interpretative potential.For me,Dickinson is primarily - like the great German poet Friedrich Holderlin - a religious poet, however unconventional and rejecting of the stifling narrowness of Protestantism in whatever guise.It is surely in her interiorised monasticism, that "Banquet of abstemiousness" - where lies the clues not only to so much of the subject matter of the poetry, but also to her attitudes to publication.

[@patowen2616]

25 January 2025 - This discussion is fascinating and enlightening. Emily Dickinson is my favourite poet, Shakespeare wrote my favourite prose. But some analysis quoted here of Emily’s writing is infuriating. Like Shakespeare, she wrote from her heart in her own inimitable way. Yet someone described her as a ‘spiteful spinster’, and her punctuation dashes as ‘arrogance’. Duh? Whoever said or wrote those words reveals their own extreme ignorance.