meta this and meta that

I've been reading Lyndall Gordon's "Lives Like Loaded Guns," a biography of Emily Dickinson, and came across this quote (pg. 110):Biography is not exactly irrelevant, but bound to be misleading with poems that throw the onus of introspection back into the lap of the reader: they compel us to recognized how our cherished emotion of love--even (or especially) deathless love--is largely imagined, a fictitious vessel for our tastes and dreams.

Who or what is the Sea in “Wild Nights Wild Nights?”  Where is the “I” longing to moor? Did those nights exist only in Possibility? Doesn’t the Reader want a wild night too? I know I do.

With Dickinson, her storied life of seclusion (with Bronte sisters, George Eliot, EB Browning … ) is cultivated by her, her family and friends, and is well known by readers.

You could argue that all poetry, all reading, (perhaps any conversation at all) compels us to imagine. In Dickinson’s poetry we notice how far our imagination takes us.

More from Gordon (pg 111): With strong-willed imaginations it's vital to stress the gains that accompany the pains of denial and longing. During these extraordinary years [in her early 30s from 1860 to 1863] the poet is distilling theorems of experience from her life: desire, parting, death-in-life, spiritual awakening, the creative charge and creative detachment just short of freezing. I want to propose that her poems work when a theorem is applied to a reader's life. It's a mistake to spot Dickinson in all her poems; the real challenge is to find our selves. She demands a reciprocal response, a complementary act of introspection.

I resist the discussion in #ModPo on meta this and meta that. I'm not going to argue that some poets (poems) are not completely meta but those are ones I like (or respond to) least. Too clever (and exclusively clever -- no other idea, no other emotion) for my taste.

In Wild Nights, Wild Nights --  With "Rowing" I get the sense more of treading water (along with "Futile"), not making much progress into the "Wind", or not using the wind like a sailing vessel would. And then "Eden." I read Eden as prelasparian--so innocent. The Sea is opposed to Eden. Dickinson wants to moor in the Sea not in the harbor, not in Eden. Mooring there would be not really moored at all. Best case, she and her imagined lover, would be cold, wet and, entwined, bouncing around a bit.

I don't like a meta reading, that "thee" is the reader, and she is mooring tonight in us.