Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Tag: Albert J. Gelpi

Moment of Craft Fridays: Think Like a Dickinson

EmileI just finished reading The Editing of Emily Dickinson, A Reconsideration by R. W. Franklin and Emily Dickinson, The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi. Franklin's book turned out to be interesting in detailing the problems in publishing a complete edition of Emily Dickinson poems: she created so many different variations of many of her poems, scraps left unfinished and alternate word choices expressed on many of her original papers. Defining a final "author's intent" proved impossible.

Gelpi's book attempted to place Dickinson's mindset and evolving philosophies in the context of her struggles with Puritanism and the major thought-leaders of the day, New England's writers Emerson and Thoreau. But Gelpi also had interesting things to say about how a poet-creator self-defines and he included a laundry list of craft-techniques he felt made Dickinson unique.

Gelpi believed a poet could identify as one of three kinds of a creator:

  • a passive see-er
  • an assertive genius
  • a skilled craftsman

Gelpi's list of Dickinsonian craft, I feel, is useful to any poet who reads Dickinson or wants to add a flair of Emily to their work:

  • Use unique, fresh language
  • Use New England colloquialisms (or your local alternative)
  • Drop the S from the third-person singular of the present tense
  • Emphasize nouns by striking the articles
  • Use singular nouns where plurals are expected
  • Make parts of speech perform unorthodox functions
  • Coin words
  • Write in hymn stanzas (quatrains of short lines with 3-4 beats)
  • Use dots and dashes as breathing points
  • Use slant rhymes
  • Use mostly monosyllable words

Gelphi also surmised that Dickinson liked to exist in a constantly yearning state, never to have her desires fulfilled because, as Gelphi said, "Fulfillment is static; desire is a process."

Interesting food for thought.

Old Books About Emily Dickinson

EditingI was at the Highlands University Library this morning in Las Vegas, New Mexico, trying to track down a 1933 thesis written by J. W. Wilferth called "An Economic History of Harding County, New Mexico" for a story I'm researching. I had to sit down and read the thing in one sitting but it turned out to be what I would call an amazing document of mid-depression, pre-Dust Bowl community-denial about dry land farming.

But in any case, I was also looking for the novel The Hi Lo Country  by Max Evans, also written about the high plains of northeastern New Mexico. To get to that book, my husband inadvertently lured me through the library's section of literary criticism. Heaven help me. It pained me not to have time to look through all the old biographies and tomes of dusty literary thought.

I did sneak out these two books which look promising: Mind

  • Emily Dickinson, The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi from 1965: Gelpi says in the introduction his attempt is to bring together biography with textual analysis. Sounds fun!
  • The Editing of Emily Dickinson, A Reconsideration by R. W. Franklin from 1967: It seems Franklin will take me through every edit ever made to every edition of Dickinson's poems. Except the photos of her original manuscript, I'm reconsidering reading it.

Check out the Daily Dickinson

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