One of my favorite essays on Emily Dickinson is Chapter 13 of Gregory Orr's book, Poetry as Survival. The essay was first published in the May/June 2002 issue of The American Poetry Review.
With Emily Dickinson, it might seem as if we were talking about the poetry of survival--a restabilizing of self through poetic ordering. But subjectivity is so rampant and intense for Dickinson that the truest thing we might risk saying is that subjectivity itself could be said to constitute her trauma. Her emotional life was so excruciatingly volatile and her solitude so deep that simple conscious existence represented a potential shattering of self. And she responds to this curious threat with an equally powerful ordering self, a self created in and through the poems.
It seems that for both Dickinson and Orr, "the language in poetry [can be] 'magical,' unlike language in fiction: ... it could create or transform reality rather than simply describe it."
I wonder how applicable this quotation is for other artists and writers who suffered from mental illnesses. Van Gogh comes to mind. Was he in part attempting to formulate a self and world through his art?
Posted by: Annie | December 24, 2010 at 04:50 PM