Word: dickinson
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...process of reevaluation of common American cultural forms occurs throughout Cultures and Contexts. Amidst representations of the Civil War, society matrons, industrial culture, bric-a-brac, the American flag and landscapes, Emily Dickinson's childhood sewing sampler attracts attention. The poet's infant stitches are paired with a work by contemporary text artist Jenny Holzer entitled, "Don't Talk Down to Me..." Holzer's sampler-inspired ultimatum for respect, spoken presumably by a woman, inspires comparisons to the changing role of women in American culture. Dickinson's deceptively archaic sampler, fading with age, reminds us of all that...
Bloom does not really expect his Common Readers to master 850 or so writers. He wants them to pay close attention to the 26 discussed in the bulk of his book: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. This grouping, Bloom's elite among the elite, holds few surprises: an obligatory academic obscurity (Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa), four women and a majority of D.W.E.M.s. (Bloom gives canonical status to Homer and the major Greek dramatists and philosophers...
...Virgil in their sights when they embarked upon The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. But Bloom cannot prove, on aesthetic or any other grounds, that all the writers he deems great shared the motives he ascribes to them. By the time he gets to a discussion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, he has grown so vexed at the absence of hard evidence for his theory that he simply elevates the anxiety of influence into a universal truth: "Agon is the iron law of literature...
...also advised to forget about picking up literature for enjoyment: "The text is there to give not pleasure but the high unpleasure or more difficult pleasure that a lesser text will not provide." (Among many personal asides scattered throughout the book, Bloom notes that teaching the poems of Emily Dickinson left him with "fierce headaches.") What finally, then, is the point of this whole painful business? "All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality...
Some people think poetry is dead, but it's not; it's just underground, disguised as songwriting. Once, a reclusive Emily Dickinson could spin out her feathery verses and send them next door to her sister-in-law, content to preserve her New England obscurity. Today a would-be Dickinson is more likely to grab a guitar, put together a backup band and hit the road. That was precisely the path taken by Nanci Griffith, a wide-eyed Texas waif who may just be one of America's best poets -- and for sure is one of its best songwriters...