Summer Sale! Get 20% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings. Use the code RUclips20 here: lrb.supportingcast.fm/close-readings Valid until 31 August 2024
Excellent as usual, but a pity that we were almost 40 minutes into the discussion before there was any substantial reference to the Puritan version of Christianity which informs so much of Dickinson's life and poetry.Mark is tantalisingly on the right track when he speaks of her poems as "conjugations of interiority;"and Susan M. Gilbert's "wayward nun" even richer in interpretative potential.For me,Dickinson is primarily - like the great German poet Friedrich Holderlin - a religious poet, however unconventional and rejecting of the stifling narrowness of Protestantism in whatever guise.It is surely in her interiorised monasticism, that "Banquet of abstemiousness" - where lies the clues not only to so much of the subject matter of the poetry, but also to her attitudes to publication.
Summer Sale!
Get 20% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings.
Use the code RUclips20 here: lrb.supportingcast.fm/close-readings
Valid until 31 August 2024
Excellent as usual, but a pity that we were almost 40 minutes into the discussion before there was any substantial reference to the Puritan version of Christianity which informs so much of Dickinson's life and poetry.Mark is tantalisingly on the right track when he speaks of her poems as "conjugations of interiority;"and Susan M. Gilbert's "wayward nun" even richer in interpretative potential.For me,Dickinson is primarily - like the great German poet Friedrich Holderlin - a religious poet, however unconventional and rejecting of the stifling narrowness of Protestantism in whatever guise.It is surely in her interiorised monasticism, that "Banquet of abstemiousness" - where lies the clues not only to so much of the subject matter of the poetry, but also to her attitudes to publication.