The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Lecture One) (Patreon)

Emily Dickinson is a difficult, yet incredibly rewarding poet - the Poetess of Despair, or the "Empress of Cavalry" in her own words.

Let's meet her and start learning how to appreciate her endless gifts. 

We're talking about finding meaning on the periphery and in pain, thinking in metaphor, Dickinson's strikingly original style, and ideas of light and darkness, mortality and posterity, and telling all the truth but telling it Slant.

On a personal note, this was the most challenging yet most fulfilling lecture I have done to date. So I hope you enjoy it and please let me know any of your responses to Emily Dickinson.

In the topic timestamps below, I have bolded the names of the poems we read and analyse (17 in total, all masterpieces in varying degrees), and I have put three asterisks (***) to signify my personal favourites from this selection.

Lecture timestamps:

• 0:00 why I felt dread before this lecture
• 2:00 expansive consciousness and meaning on the periphery
• 2:40 Emily Dickinson’s originality and difficulty
• 5:20 the Poetess of Despair, the “Empress of Calvary”
• 5:40 reclusive, unpublished, and prolific
• 6:00 Dickinson, like Nietzsche, was posthumous, not timely
• 6:30 Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s influence
• 9:00 on Dickinson’s posthumous publication
• 9:30 can you tell which writers today will endure?
• 10:19 how to approach Emily Dickinson - treat her poems like houses
• 11:00 “I dwell in possibility” (466)***
• 12:17 Emily Dickinson’s Capitalisation and dashes
• 14:10 learning to think in metaphor
• 16:09 ‘They shut me up in prose’ (445)
• 16:50 Dickinson’s use of half or “slant” rhymes
• 17:35 that for which we can find words is already dead in our hearts” (Nietzsche)
• 18:08 “To tell the beauty would decrease” (124)
• 18:50 “Speech is one symptom of affection” (1681)
• 19:19 “Could mortal lip divine” (95)
• 19:35 “A word dropped careless on a page” (154)
• 20:30 Tolstoy tie-in and infection across centuries
• 21:15 Dickinson’s art of erotic despair
• 21:30 “Despair” is one of two sins that bars you from heaven
• 22:30 le mot juste and the artist’s struggle to make you see
• 23:00 how to read a poem slowly (word by word, and pretend you’re the poet)
• 23:30 “A word is dead” (1682)
• 23:40 Emily Dickinson’s balladic schemes, metrical choices, and compression
• 24:39 “The poets light but lamps” (930)***
• 25:10 Dickinson’s idea of Light and Circumference
• 25:30 posterity and being trapped/doomed to live out our mortality
• 27:10 each poem is a response to the poems that came before
• 27:20 Keats, Shakespeare, the Bible (Dickinson’s influences)
• 27:30 who do you think will endure?
• 27:50 pain, meaning, memory
• 28:00 “Pain has an element of blank” (760)***
• 28:30 “only that which hurts incessantly is to be remembered” (Nietzsche)
• 29:00 pain grounds you and gives you access to the infinite
• 29:30 we’re depressed because we’re too comfortable (Viktor Frankl tie-in)
• 30:30 Einstein’s theory of relativity, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, futuristic torture
• 32:30 “To be alive is power” (677)
• 33:00 “Surgeons must be very careful” (156)
• 33:16 “Delight becomes pictorial” (572)
• 33:40 “Make me a picture of the sun” (188)
• 34:19 Dickinson’s break away from Wordsworth (“Daffodils” comparison)
• 35:00 “She dwelleth in the ground” (671)
• 35:30 why you want to see Emily Dickinson’s words on the page
• 36:20 the Romantic tradition that lead to the strain of literary narcissim today
• 37:20 let’s read some Emily Dickinson masterpieces
• 37:40 “Tell all the truth but tell it Slant” (1266)***
• 42:30 “There’s a certain Slant of light” (320)***
• 48:05 despair and Cowper’s ‘Castaway’
• 42:00 the inner life is richer than the external - 2020 lockdown and growth
• 50:00 “Had this one Day not been” (1253)***
• 52:00 assigned reading for the next Dickinson lecture

Happy reading - let me know your thoughts and any specific poems you might like to see in a Part Two!