By Mary Karr
Sunday, May 18, 2008

It pains me to say it, but I used to hate Emily Dickinson. Her voice once struck me as cutesy and coy: "I'm Nobody! who are you?/Are you nobody too?" Her meek posture reflected what the Victorian age demanded of women, and I couldn't get past it. (Plus, you can sing most of her opening lines to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Try it: "Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for meeee!")

How do you know if your antipathy to a poet is deafness to difficult but rewarding work? Listen to the poet's fans. If they invariably talk about the poet's ideas or historical role, they are steering away from the page, perhaps toward some ideology. Celebrating such a writer may make you feel smart or morally righteous or roguishly avant garde, but chances are, it's work you can skip.

By contrast, Dickinson devotees always seem to reach for a book of her poems. So I listened, learning that Dickinson's prolific, experimental oeuvre results in a low batting average: a few solid thwacks among many pinging mis-hits. Yet in the 1970s, every Dickinson poem seemed to get hallelujahed by the feminist critics then in ascendancy. Bless them for prying open the canon to Dickinson's genius, but they did praise some of her most tiresome noises.

There is constriction in Dickinson's work. Women in her day were corseted to live extra-small. Her finest poems force the reader to a crawl, creating a cramped, psychological space best traversed slowly. As you're trying to figure out what she means, the poem works its emotional alchemy. Here she creates the void of love lost through death or disaffection:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

For the Nerves to "sit ceremonious like Tombs" blends three ideas in one puzzling phrase. Then from that stasis comes a mechanical move from Earth to open space to "Ought" (ought also suggesting what one should do). This freefall is countered by a heaviness "like a stone" echoing the Tombs of the first stanza.

This is the Hour of Lead --

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --

First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

The final line is broken into a stumbling step -- two beats, then three beats, then five. The beloved is wrenched away through paralyzing cold, for which the poem is warming balm.

("I'm Nobody!," as reprinted in "The Life of Emily Dickinson," by Richard B. Sewall. Harvard Univ. Press, 1974. Copyright 1974 by Richard B. Sewall. "After Great Pain" is reprinted in "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry," edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair. Copyright 2003 Norton. )

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."