Lecture leftovers: Dickinson and lyric

Sorry I didn't get to the Dickinson poems in Monday's lecture. Since Jackson's argument about un-thinking the "naturalness" of lyric emerges from her reading of Dickinson, it would have made perfect sense. (You'll be getting more of Jackson later.) We had the two examples of a piece of writing that "becomes" a poem when it is read as a lyric poem: Thoreau's "my life has been the poem," which started as a "found" manuscript fragment; and Dickinson's letter to her brother.

You'll remember our working definition of "lyric ideology": the conviction that the poem is coming directly from a single and singular voice, describing an experience that occurred during a specific moment in time but transcending time to describe a universal experience. The poem seems directed to a solitary listener/reader (as if you're eavesdropping on the private confessions of the speaker--recall Mill's definition from the 1830s).

The early poem of Dickinson's, #64 (Heart! We will forget him!) is very readily understood within those lyric assumptions. The very subject matter touches on privacy and confession--forgetting a love who must be forsworn, for reasons we're not privy to. What I wanted to point out here is the typical (for Dickinson) splitting of the lyric "I" into two "characters": "You" (the heart) and "I" (not specified--what do you think, the head? or the eye, since the task of "I" is to "forget the light")? Like Thoreau's poem, this one ends by doing the very thing the whole poem says it is trying not to do: the last line is "I remember him!" which, on its own, is the result that supposedly must be avoided. Self-splitting and contradiction: look for these in Dickinson.