Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

“Given her vocation, she was neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economies.”

Through appeals to logos, or logical reasoning, Rich deconstructs popular caricatures of Emily Dickinson. Rich demystifies the poet’s secluded life to argue that Dickinson’s isolation was a necessary tactic in pursuing her passion and honing her craft.

“It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry.”

Rich uses hyperbole to demonstrate how Dickinson’s inner thoughts and feelings emerged, or “exploded,” in her writing; this expression of the subconscious is key to Rich’s conceptualization of The Relationship Between Poet and Poem. Rich’s use of the pronoun “us” also hints at the similarities Rich shares with Dickinson as a woman poet who wrote about her most personal experiences, further establishing the connection between them.

“We will understand Dickinson better, read her poetry more perceptively, when the Freudian imputation of scandal and aberrance in women’s love for women has been supplanted by a more informed, less misogynistic attitude toward women’s experiences with each other.”

Rich alludes to Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, dismissing his outdated characterization of lesbian orientation as an illness. As this relates to Dickinson, Rich argues that many people are overly focused on accusation and “scandal” in place of actually examining how Dickinson’s relationships with women influenced her poetry.

“Much energy has been invested in trying to identify a concrete, flesh-and-blood male lover whom Dickinson is supposed to have renounced, and to the loss of whom can be traced the secret of her seclusion and the vein of much of her poetry. But the real question, given that the art of poetry is an art of transformation, is how this woman’s mind and imagination may have used the masculine element in the world at large, or those elements personified as masculine—including the men she knew; how her relationship to this reveals itself in her images and language.”

Rich makes the case for why her feminist perspective on Emily Dickinson is uniquely insightful: It departs from the traditional quest to determine the supposed “male lover” who may have served as Dickinson’s source of inspiration and instead focuses on available evidence—Dickson’s writing—and the relationship between the poet and the poem.

“In writing at all—particularly an unorthodox and original poetry like Dickinson’s—women have often felt in danger of losing their status as women. And this status has always been defined in terms of relationship to men—as daughter, sister, bridge, wife, mother, mistress, Muse […] To recognize and acknowledge our own interior power has always been a path mined with risks for women, to acknowledge that power and commit oneself to it as Emily Dickinson did was an immense decision.”

In this passage, Rich uses contextualization to demonstrate how patriarchy has historically oppressed women writers by urging women to play passive and supportive roles rather than active and creative ones. Rich’s metaphor comparing the creative pursuit for women to a “path mined with risks” emphasizes how courageous Dickinson was to pursue poetry as a woman in the 19th century.

“More than any other poet, Emily Dickinson seemed to tell that intense inner event, the personal and psychological, was inseparable from the universal; that there was a range for psychological poetry beyond mere self-expression.”

As Rich previously mentions, she believes that the poet reveals their subconscious thoughts and feelings through poetry. In this quote, Rich describes how Dickinson’s poetry reflected her psychological state. Rich also foreshadows a conclusion she will come to at the end of the essay: that the poet’s “self-expression” also serves the greater purpose of speaking for those who do not have the power to voice their inner experiences.

“I suggest that a woman’s poetry about her relationship to her daemon—her own active, creative power—has in patriarchal culture used the language of heterosexual love or patriarchal theology.”

Rich presents her core argument against mainstream interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry: that the recurring “daemon” figure in Dickinson’s poetry is not a stand-in for a lover or for God but a personification of Dickinson’s inner calling to write. Rich returns to contextualization to support her argument, recalling the influence of patriarchy and theology in 19th-century literature.

“What, in fact, did she allow to ‘put a Belt around her Life’—what did wholly occupy her mature years and possess her? For ‘Whom’ did she decline the invitations of other lives? The writing of poetry.”

Rich uses both allusion and hypophora to emphasize her argument against mainstream interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry. Rich alludes to Dickinson’s poem “He put the Belt around my life—,” which earlier in the essay she interprets as a poem about the poet’s relationship to her own power. Rich’s questioning mirrors the structure of a classroom lecture, which engages the reader in her argument rather than treating them as a passive listener.

“It seems likely that the nineteenth-century woman poet, especially, felt the medium of poetry as dangerous, in ways that the woman novelist did not feel the medium of fiction to be.”

Rich contrasts the vocation of the 19th-century woman poet and the woman novelist to demonstrate the especially vulnerable position Dickinson put herself in to pursue her passion. As opposed to fiction, Rich argues, poetry is inherently personal, which meant Dickinson could not hide her thoughts and feelings under the guise of fictional characters.

“Poetry is too much rooted in the unconscious; it presses too close against the barriers of repression; and the nineteenth-century woman had much to repress.”

Rich employs imagery, describing how poetry is “rooted” in the unconscious and “presses against” the “barriers” of repression, to emphasize her belief that poetry originates from deep within the psyche and as the product of repressed thoughts/feelings. This is what makes poetry a particularly dangerous medium for Women in Patriarchal Society, Rich suggests; patriarchal society demands that women constantly subordinate their own needs and desires, all of which poetry threatens to expose.

“It is an extremely painful and dangerous way to live—split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also as possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.”

This quote thematically develops the woman poet’s inner life versus her public persona. Rich argues that Dickson felt split between the powerful, creative self who wrote and reflected on the human condition, and the mask she presented in her daily life to conform to patriarchal standards.

“Dickinson is the American poet whose work consisted in exploring states of psychic extremity […] Dickinson was a great psychologist, and like every great psychologist, she began with the material she had at hand: herself. She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.”

Rich employs a matter-of-fact tone to emphasize her certainty that Emily Dickinson is unique and definitive among American writers in her extensive exploration of heightened psychological states. Rich also reaffirms Dickinson’s unique courage by noting that the norm (particularly in the 19th century, but also in the 20th) is to suppress one’s psychological struggles.

“But there is a more ancient concept of the poet, which is that she is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who—for whatever reasons—are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.”

Rich alludes to an “ancient concept” of the poet as a kind of oracle who speaks for those who do not have the power or gift to do so. Poetry therefore has an innately public dimension even as it is intensely personal, further complicating the relationship between The Poet’s Private Versus Public Personas.