Learning from Emily Dickinson After 9/11

The Boston Review has an extensive story rereading Dickinson's poetry after 9/11.

From the story...

One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock. Here Dickinson’s ceaseless instinct for negation, distinction, refinement, annihilation, seems wholly relevant, when things are

most like Chaos—Stopless—cool—
Without a Chance, or Spar—
Or even a Report of Land—
To justify—Despair.
(#510)

Her lines can seem uncannily, New Englandly, to anticipate some of the more controversial responses to 9/11. For example, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s infamous (and, when read in full, complex) meditation on the destruction of that day as infernal art, aesthetic cataclysm:

’Tis so appalling—it exhilarates—
So over Horror, it half Captivates—
(#281)

Or Susan Sontag’s dissenting remarks published in The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001—

The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

—remarks that launched—as Faludi reminds us—an ecstasy of righteous denunciation. Per Dickinson:

Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightaway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—
(#435)

So, too, the politics of memorializing Ground Zero might be chastened by Dickinson’s astringency:

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the Place
Agony enacted there
Motionless as Peace
(#1147)