Poets From Massachusetts

"For they the mind of Christ discern Who lean, like John, upon His breast."

"Strike! Thou the Master, we Thy keys, The anthem of the destinies! The minor of Thy loftier strain, Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain — "Thy will be done!""

"Somehow not only for Christmas But all the long year through, The joy that you give to others Is the joy that comes back to you. And the more you spend in blessing The poor and lonely and sad, The more of your heart's possessing Returns to make you glad."

"I met some time ago during the American war an eminent citizen of the State of Massachusetts, who told me that he thought that there was no man in the United States whose writings at the time and for some years before the war had had so great influence upon public opinion in that country as the writings of John Greenleaf Whittier. And no doubt that arose partly from this—that he wrote strongly on the subject of freedom, and strongly against the system of slavery which was about to involve that great country in a great civil war ... Whittier himself when he attacks the question of negro slavery and the horror and the curse of it, writes in a manner which must have roused the indignation and excited the animosity of the people for whom he wrote against that enormous evil."

"If God gives a real poet to a people like that, at a time like that, and puts into his heart those sentiments, and into his mouth those words, does he not verily speak to that people and ask them to return to the ways of mercy and righteousness?"

"In the poem of 'Snow-Bound' there are lines on the death of the poet's sister which have nothing superior to them in beauty and pathos in our language. I have read them often with always increasing admiration. I have suffered from the loss of those near and dear to me, and I can apply the lines to my own case and feel as if they were written for me. 'The Eternal Goodness' is another poem which is worth a crowd of sermons which are spoken from the pulpits of our sects and churches, which I do not wish to undervalue. It is a great gift to mankind when a poet is raised up among us who devotes his great powers to the sublime purpose of spreading among men principles of mercy and justice and freedom. This our friend Whittier has done in a degree unsurpassed by any other poet who has spoken to the world in our noble tongue. I feel it a great honor that my bust should stand in your hall near the portrait of your great poet."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it...Opposition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abolitionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent from Spain."

"I have in my hand a poem which our own beloved poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote almost fifty years ago, in the darkest hour of the midnight which brooded over our country. You are most of you, perhaps all, familiar with it. It is addressed to Mr. Garrison. Shall I read a single stanza? I do it to illustrate a point strongly put by our brother who has just taken his seat; that is, the power of a single soul, alone, of a single soul touched with sacred fire, a soul all of whose powers are enlisted the thought, the feeling, the susceptibility, the emotion, the indomitable will, the conscience that never shrinks, and always points to duty-I say, the power which God has lodged in the human mind, enabling to do and to dare and to suffer everything, and thank God for the privilege of doing it. To show also how, when one soul is thus stirred in its innermost and to its uttermost, it is irresistible; that wherever there are souls, here and there, and thick and fast, too, not merely one, and another, and another, of the great mass, but multitudes of souls are ready to receive the truth and welcome it, to incorporate it into their thought and feeling, to live and die for it. That was the effect of Garrison upon the soul of Whittier. He here gives us his testimony. The date of this is 1833-almost fifty years ago. He says in the third stanza: "I love thee with a brother's love,/I feel my pulses thrill/To mark thy spirit soar above/The cloud of human ill./My heart hath leaped to answer thine,/And echo back thy words,/As leaps the warrior's at the shine/And flash of kindred swords!""

"The belief has been constantly expressed in England that in the United States, which has produced William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, James Russell Lowell, John G. Whittier and Abraham Lincoln there must be those of their descendants who would take hold of the work of inaugurating an era of law and order. The colored people of this country who have been loyal to the flag believe the same, and strong in that belief have begun this crusade."

"Some Days retired from the rest In soft distinction lie, The Day that a companion came— Or was obliged to die."

"Emily Dickinson, whose unappeasable thirst for fame was itself unknown for years after her death, had to fight through her family — "Vesuvius at home" — until a miserable lawsuit and the theft of a manure pile interrupted the posthumous publication of her work, and postponed for forty-nine years what may be her finest book."

"Emily Dickinson's strictness, sometimes almost a slang of strictness, speaks with an intellectually active, stimulated quick music."

"She was always stirred by the existences of women like George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett, who possessed strength of mind, articulateness, and energy. (She once characterized Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale as "holy" — one suspects she merely meant, "great.")"

"Emily Dickinson — viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological — has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices."

"I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed. It was, moreover, no hermetic retreat, but a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence. Her sister Vinnie said, "Emily is always looking for the rewarding person." And she found, at various periods, both women and men: her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Amherst visitors and family friends such as Benjamin Newton, Charles Wadsworth, Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, and his wife; her friends Kate Anthon and Helen Hunt Jackson, the distant but significant figures of Elizabeth Barrett, the Brontës, George Eliot. But she carefully selected her society and controlled the disposal of her time. Not only the "gentlewomen in plush" of Amherst were excluded; Emerson visited next door but she did not go to meet him; she did not travel or receive routine visits; she avoided strangers. Given her vocation, she was neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economies."

"Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering."

"Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadmomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth."

"Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry...There is much anger in Emily Dickinson, lightly disguised as mockery. "The Bible is an antique volume / Written by faded men," she proclaims."

"When I visited Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, a lively plump robin was sitting on her step, right under the second-story window she would have stared out of."

"Emily Dickinson is nearly infinite in her expression. She wrote seventeen hundred and seventy-five poems, and they constitute a very rich literature certainly. And she was, God knows, highly imaginative, highly intelligent, highly perceptive, and she had a kind of regard for language that a great writer must have. It was a mystery, a miracle to her. I learned a little something about the mystery and miracle of language by reading her..."

"Her poetry is the diary or autobiography — though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth — of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute."

"My mother was the first songwriter I knew; Emily Dickinson was the first poet and my grandmother the first storyteller...From Emily I learned that the immense silences I found within me were navigable by words and metaphor."

"There’s no higher entitlement than thinking that you should live forever, when part of the beauty of nature is that even the stars die. That's what Emily Dickinson said: 'That it will never come again/is what makes life so sweet.' I believe that."

"The complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, and moorings, catches, straps, and whalebone stays, sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness."

"I'm from the Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor school of writing, where you write about your Amherst backyard or about a farm in Milledgevilk, and then you're actually writing about everything it means to be human."

"No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson...Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood."

"Friends dislike being apart. Separation, says Emily Dickinson, is all the Hell we need. Each shared moment is precious. And the only ones who can remember the hour of loneliness are those who survive it."

"There is another thing about my childhood that is interesting now, in the light of later happenings. I might have said, with Emily Dickinson: "I never saw a moor,/I never saw the sea;/Yet know I how the heather looks,/And what a wave must be." For I never saw the ocean until I went from college to the marine laboratories at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. Yet as a child I was fascinated by the thought of it. I dreamed about it and wondered what it would look like."

"Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day."

"One who, as a child, knew Emily Dickinson well and loved her much recollects her most vividly as a white, ethereal vision, stepping from her cloistral solitude on to the verandah, daintily unrolling a great length of carpet before her with her foot, strolling down to where the carpet ended among her flowers, then turning back and shutting herself out of the world."

"(What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?) Her use of language, certainly. Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny. She isn't solemn."

"In English, you know who I love, and have translated? Emily Dickinson...I translated Dickinson. It came out in the Nuevo Diario a long time ago, in the beginning of the 1980s. I love her very much."

"Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon."

"Wild nights - Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury!Futile - the winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart!Rowing in Eden - Ah - the Sea! Might I but moor - tonight - In thee!"

"Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. God's residence is next to mine, His furniture is love."

"Who has not found the Heaven – below – Will fail of it above – For Angels rent the House next ours, Wherever we remove –"

"What Soft – Cherubic Creatures – These Gentlewomen are – One would as soon assault a Plush – Or violate a Star –Such Dimity Convictions – A Horror so refined Of freckled Human Nature – Of Deity – ashamed –"

"We outgrow love, like other things And put it in the Drawer – Till it an Antique fashion shows – Like Costumes Grandsires wore."

"Upon the gallows hung a wretch, Too sullied for the hell To which the law entitled him. As nature’s curtain fell The one who bore him tottered in, For this was woman’s son. "'Twas all I had," she stricken gasped; Oh, what a livid boon!"

"Truth – is as old as God – His Twin identity And will endure as long as He A Co-Eternity –And perish on the Day Himself is borne away From Mansion of the Universe A lifeless Deity."

"To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights, What must the Midnights – be!"

"This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies And lads and girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls."

"This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me – The simple News that Nature told – With tender Majesty Her Message is committed To Hands I cannot see – For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen – Judge tenderly – of Me"

"They shut me up in Prose - As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet - Because they liked me "still" -Still! Could themself have peeped - And seen my Brain - go round - They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason - in the Pound -"

"There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons - That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes -Heavenly Hurt, it gives us - We can find no scar, But internal difference - Where the Meanings, are -"

"There is a word Which bears a sword Can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables,— At once is mute again. But where it fell The saved will tell On patriotic day, Some epauletted brother Gave his breath away.Wherever runs the breathless sun, Wherever roams the day, There is its noiseless onset, There is its victory! Behold the keenest marksman! The most accomplished shot! Time's sublimest target Is a soul "forgot"!"

"There is a solitude of space, A solitude of sea, A solitude of death, but these Society shall be, Compared with that profounder site, That polar privacy, A Soul admitted to Itself: Finite Infinity."

"The sweets of Pillage can be known To no one but the Thief, Compassion for Integrity Is his divinest Grief."

"I've known her – from an ample nation – Choose One – Then – close the Valves of her attention – Like Stone –"