Emily Dickinson, One of America\'s Greatest Poets,

Emily Dickinson, one of America's greatest poets, is known for the musical simplicity and taut, unrelieved expression of emotional truth in poems that are stark, austere, compact and often small -- even though her body of work is immense. Many of her poems probe the source of spiritual despair -- and find within it a restorative, if stubborn, faith. In the poem, "I Never lost as much but twice" she stands before God and addresses Him as an individual who has lost everything, and "stood a beggar/Before the door of God!" And yet, apparently, it was God who brought her both happiness and sorrow, fulfillment and loss: his "Angels -- twice descending/Reimbursed my store," and yet she is lost again. With a certain ironic and rebellious humor that is one of Dickinson's stylistic hallmarks, she addresses God as both "Burglar! Banker!" He is the source of her wealth and her bankruptcy. Now she comes to Him asking for spiritual renewal and replenishment for, "I am poor once more!"

In "Success is counted sweetest" Dickinson suggest that those who never succeed are those who can most fully taste the nectar of imagined success; that those in need are the most attuned to that which they do not have. This poem is a stark and beautiful expression of anguish, without false comfort, but with a strange and vibrant energy that seems released from despair. This poem illustrates what Keats called "negative capability" -- a profound imaginative act that has at its source despair. "To comprehend a nectar/Requires sorest need," says Dickinson. Nobody who has been truly successful can even define Victory, but "he defeated -- dying/On whose forbidden ear/The distant strains of triumph/Burst agonized and clear!" In an odd way, grief is a form of faith, and not an annihilating event. Loss, lack, need and sorrow allow one to taste the sweetest nectar, the strains of triumph. The juxtaposition of "agonized and clear" is, in a microcosm, a clue to Dickinson's style: its absolute, crystalline, clipped clarity, and yet its potent, often agonized despair and even ecstasy. The two states seem to clash and yet merge in Dickinson's almost haiku-like intensity.

In "The difference between Despair" is the most remarkable of this set of three poems. For here one enters a kind of emptiness that is beyond the pain and joy of Dickinson's poem -- almost as if the rain of emotions has washed away everything and left a landscape clean, purified and featureless -- blind and yet seeing. Fear is the instant of a Wreck, despair is after "the Wreck has been." After the wreck, "The Mind is smooth-No Motion/Contented as the Eye/Upon the Forehead of a Bust/That knows -- it cannot see." This image of the bust recalls the ancient Greek and Roman statues that, headless and sometimes eyeless, still seem redolent of an earlier time of beauty and grace. This eye is the inner eye, the eye of the spirit, and though it cannot see, it also can see -- it is contented, smooth, and without motion. Undistracted and unmoving, it is the eternal eye of grace.