The Difficulty of Dickinson

In class last Thursday, Prof. Oerlemans mentioned how Emily Dickinson has a reputation for being really difficult. I think there is definitely truth to this. For a long time I didn't care at all for her poetry, and I think the main reason was just that I didn't understand a lot of it. I developed a better appreciation for her last semester in Poetry and Poetics, and after close reading a lot of her poems this past weekend, I can now say I thoroughly enjoy her work. But what is it that makes her poetry initially so confusing? In my opinion, I think it is because of a combination of vagueness and intellectual complexity that gives her such a reputation.

Vagueness definitely pervades her poetry; she seems to capitalize on all possibilities of ambiguity and obscurity. An important idiosyncrasy in her work is the lack of titles. This may seem like a silly way to analyze poetry, but it's definitely true that a piece's title will reveal some crucial aspect of it, whether its major theme, an important image, or a central character/speaker ("Song of Myself" and "the Raven," the other two poems we've read in class, cover the first and third examples respectively). But Emily Dickinson's poems do not have titles, and therefore we as readers must dive into her complex streams of words and dashes without any indication of what to expect. She also achieves vagueness through a reliance on pronoun ambiguity. Poem 225 displays this nicely, in lines 9 and 10, she sets up a dichotomy between "This being comfort - then / That other kind - was pain"; however, to me it's not clear what exactly "this" or "that" is. Poem 348 also shows pronoun ambiguity in its repetitive use of the word "one." Upon first reading (an even now, though I have developed a few hypotheses) I was not exactly sure what the "one"'s were referring to.  Idiosyncratic descriptions cause a lot of obscurity as well. Poem 124's use of the word "safe," which was pointed out in class today, is a wonderful example: are the dead safe because they no longer have to experience the changing of the world, or are they safe in waiting for resurrection? If the second, is that sincere or sarcastic? There are numerous ways to read a lot of her poems, and few clarifications exist for the reader.

The intellectual complexity of her poems, coupled with this vagueness, then makes them even more difficult. I know I approach a lot of her poems as if expecting to pull some sort of abstract idea/intellectual understanding. Her didactic tone in a lot of her poems I think forces the reader to approach her work in such a way. The first two lines of Poem 112, "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed," use a didactic tone to express some sort of intellectual truth. Because her poems so often deal with themes of truth or idiosyncratic meaning, such as success vs defeat (Poem 112), life after death (Poem 124), the usefulness of faith (Poem 202), the role of women (Poem 225), the sadness of natural occurrences (Poems 320 and 347), and the purity of anguish (Poem 339),  the reader expects to be able to 'pull' these sorts of truths from her poems, but their ambiguity and vagueness stand as significant impediments to that.