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Monday, November 2, 2015

Freedom, Constraint & Emily Dickinson

Merely because poet and modern society are in conflict does not mean art necessarily gains by freedom. It is a sentimental error to think Emily Dickinson the victim of male obstructionism. Without her struggle with God and father, there would have been no poetry. There are two reasons for this. First, Romanticism's overexpanded self requires artificial restraints. Dickinson finds these limitations in sadomasochistic nature and reproduces them in her dual style [Wordsworthian and Sadean]. Without such a discipline, the Romantic poet cannot take a single step, for the sterile vastness of modern freedom is like gravity-free outer space, in which one cannot walk or run. Second, women do not rise to supreme achievement unless they are under powerful internal compulsion. Dickinson was a woman of abnormal will. Her poetry profits from the enormous disparity between that will and the feminine social persona to which she fell heir at birth. But her sadism is not anger, the a posteriori response to social injustice. It is hostility, an a priori Achillean intolerance for the existence of the female version of Romantic solipsism. - Camille Paglia

1 comment:

  1. Well said, Camille Paglia. Could describe your own writings and struggles against the intellectual status quo of women in modernity.

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