Gordon argues Dickinson had epilepsy

In "Lives Like Loaded Guns?" Gordon lays out her theory that Dickinson had epilepsy. I haven't finished the book, but it is interesting and the diagnosis seems to fit several facts. It triggers a different reading to words in her poems like "fit" and "throe" which makes it something worth considering. I guess there is nothing definitive available ... and even we had some doctor's explicit notes, we'd still question it perhaps, because the standards for diagnosis varied.

Illness neither deters nor attributes to genius. But one thing it might do, Gordon theorizes, is give Dickinson space and time--a doctor's encouragement to live a reclusive lifestyle.  It would have been consistent with treatments at the time ... acceptable to work late through the night where lamp light was softer than sun ... to avoid social situations, stress ... and even sex, Gordon reports, which was thought to risk a seizure.

Here's an example: I like a look of agony.

PS. One google trick I learned from a fellow #ModPo student was how to search a word in Dickinson's poems: google "throe site:edickinson.org"

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.

On Emily Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed --" (214)

I agree with the conventional wisdom that the poem is celebrating nature and the inexplicable source of poetic inspiration. I take the “I” literally to be Dickinson, and that she, like the bee, is inebriated by air, dew and the nectar of the “molten blue” Foxglove. In this pub crawl from one blossom (“inn”) to the next, she persists even when her peers, the Butterflies, have quenched their thirst and “renounce their ‘drams.’” She continuously drinks even if she needs a lamppost, “the – Sun!” to stay upright.

The line that is hardest for me to understand is “Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats --.“ Many critiques skip over the difficulty of this line, taking “Seraphs” literally--if that is even possible. (The snowy Hats would be halos), This reading sets up an opposition between religion and nature--the human space where Dickinson operates. This is in the poem--I don’t disagree--but my gut tells me there is more.

Some read “snowy Hats” as snow-tipped and “Seraphs” as trees, and that Dickinson persists past summer, into fall and winter when the blooms have fallen, still “reeling” in nature. I also don’t mind that reading. I agree that her inebriation, her poetic inspiration, is everlasting. But interpreting Seraphs as trees is a stretch. The Seraphs are positioned in opposition to nature, they are watching the “little Tippler” at the flowers, so, for me, trees don’t fit. (Nor would clouds, pollen, a white flower.)

The temperance movement was strong at the time, as was the Second Awakening of puritanism. Many were railing against drunkenness and other scandalous behavior. The word "renounce" triggers in my mind a feeling of prudish zeal. Succumbing to peer pressure, perhaps, some Butterflies give up drinking. The white bonnet (picture a Pilgrim woman’s bonnet or a nun’s habit) “swings” as she shakes her head disapprovingly. (See this photo of Lucretia Mott wearing a white bonnet.) If male, he wags his powdered wig. “Seraphs” and “Saints” form a zealous Society. More narrowly for Dickinson, Literary Society condemned (or fixed) her poems which used unconventional grammar and lacked charming rhymes (“pearl does not rhyme with alcohol”*).

Another difficulty with the line is “Till.” Until when? Dickinson “tastes,” she reels, and will “but drink the more” until the Seraphs and Saints see her “Leaning against the -- Sun!” Society, protesting, can't but help "to windows run" and see who or what is making all that racket outside on the street. Dickinson, unrepentant, will keep drinking, keep writing poem after poem in which her liberated art shines as bright as the Sun. I can’t decide whether I think Dickinson is playfully teasing Seraphs and Saints, or if she is furious with them.

Dickinson’s creativity, her intellect (as expressed in her poetry) is “never brewed.” There isn’t an editor or publisher she trusts to oversee the poems’ aesthetic or potency. Inebriation is liberation from convention. She may have cared that Seraphs and Saints misunderstood her genius, but she wasn’t going to let them stop her. If her lamppost is the sun (which she can’t literally lean on) then she is relying on herself, her own artistic sensibility. If she leans against the Sun, then there is implied equality of scale between her and the Sun. And let’s not forget fire (Seraphs**, molten, Sun!) Her creative energy burns, renews; her urge to speak is unslakable.