David Porter on the Modern Idiom

In writing about Emily Dickinson as a nineteenth-century precursor to modern American poetry, David Porter slowly constructs a definition of modernism that deserves to be judged apart from its relation to Dickinson. In many ways, Porter's modernism is a series of losses; coherence, meaning, unity, teleology, order, and similitude are all lost. But Porter conceives of two strains of modernism that respond to these losses. Different as they are, Stevens and Frost counteract these losses by providing some sort of organizational principle, Stevens through the constructions of the imagination and Frost through the "inner mood" of the poet and his connection to society.

According to Porter, Dickinson replaces none of these losses. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, representing the second strain of modernism as Porter sees it, make the same refusal (at least during parts of their careers).

Porter provides some great readings of individual Dickinson poems, but his ultimate understanding of Dickinson seems uncharitable at best. He spends his entire book discussing what Dickinson does to language and consciousness, but then denies her a poetic project, a "life-centering angle of vision" (144). For such a sensitive reader, Porter seems incredibly short-sighted to complain that "this Dickinsonian idiom speaks fear without understanding, force without purpose, art without redemptive intention" (261).

I would argue that Dickinson explores the ineffible divergence of the opposed terms in each of these binaries rather than offering the former without the latter. She understands one's longing for the second term from within the first. But they must be separate. If she was to offer understanding, then she would be unable to create the experience of fear. Rather than refusing to replace what is lost, she presents the tangibility of loss. To me, the value of poems like Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" emerges from this same sort of tangibility.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

Recognizing the inevitable failure of communication is its own gain; the loss of connection presents its own materiality. Desire itself is a material absence, and Dickinson's exploration of extreme desire -- extreme separation -- is a substantial poetic project, indeed.