Emily Dickinson

Dickinson’s Dying Tiger

August 7, 2018 by William Eaton

A discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Dying Tiger” which includes sensuality, mortality and even, perhaps, vulgarity, but no sex, no consummation and no communion either. The poem’s two bodies, and two selves, never even touch, and it is this distance that kills the male and condemns the female to waste away (though she lives on with her poetry and regrets).

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: desire, Emily Dickinson, Freud, incest, men, parents, poetry, sex, women

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Dickinson — Sex, Spanish, Stew

February 11, 2016 by William Eaton

Emily, in not so foreign tongues The first law of American literature: Somewhere, somehow, in God only knows what language, you are always going to come across one more, intriguing—if not indeed great—Emily Dickinson poem. A poem that you have previously overlooked, or not even heard of. And yet, there it is, ready to reward your attention. A rider: The poem might be about sex. Not sex like Henry Miller with his beloved Germaine du Café de l’Éléphant, soaping […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Barcelona, dogs, Emily Dickinson, fairy tales, Henry Miller, poetry, sex, Spanish

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What might poetry give us?

September 3, 2015 by William Eaton

. . . re-embracing one of lyric poetry’s most traditional themes: the hopes and dismay of intimate, romantic relationships. . . . the LANGUAGES OF SELLING AND POLITICS never stop invading all of us and putting the same emptinesses on all of our tongues. Writing poetry today, I am tempted to say, is as difficult as learning to live by oneself.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Emily Dickinson, language, love, philosophy of language, poetry, relationships, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein

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At least — ’tis Mutual — Risk —

July 13, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] With marriage women and men had to—or have to—adjust to life with a person who is, in essence, a member of an alien group? My interest in Emily Dickinson has led me to another classic academic paper, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century,” originally published in the journal Signs in 1975. Reproduced below are two of the concluding paragraphs of the piece, which is based on the correspondence and diaries of women and men […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Emily Dickinson, marriage, nineteenth century, sexual difference, sexuality, twentieth century

Arabian Red Fox, photograph by Jem Babbington, appears on Birds of Saudi Arabia website

Translating Dickinson

June 11, 2014 by William Eaton

By William Eaton A discussion of four Emily Dickinson poems in the context of Françoise Delphy’s French translations appearing in Poésies complètes : Edition bilingue français-anglais by Emily Dickinson and Françoise Delphy (Flammarion, 2009). I. The Articulate Inarticulate An early reader of Emily Dickinson’s poems used this phrase—“the articulate inarticulate”—to describe her, and for me it provides a way into “translating” or seeking means of understanding one of my favorites among her poems, here quoted in its entirety: […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Emily Dickinson, French, poetry, translation

How to get published after you’re dead?

April 20, 2014 by William Eaton

In a footnote on page 609 of Alfred Habegger’s My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, I find: In 1903, traveling in Europe with Sue [Emily’s sister-in-law], Martha [one of Emily’s nieces] married Captain Alexander E. Bianchi, supposedly of the Imperial Horse Guard of St. Petersburg. The captain accompanied his bride to America, ran through her money, cooled his heels in a New York jail, and vanished. After this costly misadventure, Martha took a keen […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Kant, Marx, poetry