The New Lifetime Reading Plan

There is still a third Ibsen, and that is Ibsen the poet, whom in translation we can only dimly glimpse. To Norwegians his early Peer Gynt, written in verse, is, though not at ali national- istic, a kind of epic, an ironic-fantastic rйsumй of the Norwegian character. It is possible that the so-called social plays, such as A DolVs House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler, will soon be forgotten; and that the more difficult, imaginative, symbolic dramas (Peer Gynt, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken) will eventually be ranked among the dramatic masterpieces of the last two centuries.

The plays here recommended are arranged in their order of composition. To my mind the finest are Peer Gynt and The Wild Duck, but there is no absolute agreement on Ibsen's best work. At any rate try Peer Gynt, A DolVs House, Ghosts, An

Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, 27ie Master Builder, and W/ien We Dead Atvaken.

C.F.

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EMILY DICKINSON

1830-1886 Collected Poems

What has long fascinated readers of Emily Dickinson is the seeming discrepancy between the uneventfulness of her life and the depth of her insight into the human condition. She once wrote "The Soul selects her own society—/Then—shuts the door—and again, "This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me—The door has opened, the letter has been answered, and this solitary has now become part of the canon of the workTs major poets.

Emily Dickinson came of good family, was educated at Amherst Academy and Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary until the age of eighteen. She never married and from her late thirties to her death she did not stir from her familys house and her beloved garden. From her early forties she dressed only in white. While her letters reveal certain romantic attachments, her erotic energy seems to have displayed itself only in her poetry.

She wrote some 1775 poems, of which only a tiny handful were published in her lifetime. Thus, in a sense, her work is a series of terse soliloquies, ali untitled. Even today her tem- perament and her way—willful—with the language are so orig­inal that we can't fit her in. She is the despair of critics. What can they do with lines such as these?

And then, in Sovereign Barns to dwell— And dream the Days away, The Grass so little has to do I wish I were a Hay—

When reading Dickinson, it's best not to expect immediate comprehensibility. Sometimes the thought is so dense or so odd as to confound most of us. Sometimes the syntax itself is off-putting. Try at first merely to submit yourself to the pitch and tone of her voice. Read twenty or thirty poems, no more, at one go, and get what you can. However, not ali of us will be satisfied with this impressionistic reading experience. For those who wish help in decoding Dickmson's odd metaphors and eccentrically slanted approach to such major themes as love and religion, I would suggest recourse to such works as Cynthia Griffin Wolff s Emily Dickinson (Knopf, 1986).

On occasion the poet reflects the sturdy individualism of Thoreau [80] and Emerson [69] and is often characterized as a transcendentalist:

I wonder how the Rich—may feel— An Indiaman—An Earl— I deem that I—with but a Crumb— Am Sovereign of them ali—

One collection of her poems published in 1945 was titled Bolts of Melody. The phrase is hers, and illuminates the Cre­ative ebullition she felt when writing verse. One of her trade- marks, the dash (see preceding quotation), does not prove that she was ignorant of punctuation. It is more probable that the dash expresses the physical excitement accompanying compo- sition, the quick inhalations and exhalations as ideas and words crowd in upon her mind.

For human society Emily Dickinson substituted her gar- den. Flowers, bees, the oriole and spider, the dandelion, the twig, the leaf, the Caterpillar worms—these, to the recluse, are her constant companions, her social circle. Out of these she made the metaphors that expressed her sense of her own life. She capitalized on its seeming restriction. She writes "A Prison gets to be a friend—

Emily Dickinson wanted an audience, but in the end wrote only for herself. It took many years to become clear that she wrote also for us.

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LEWIS CARROLL

1832-1898

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass