The Poet is the Poetry: Emily Dickinson and the Deficiencies of the Fixed Center

"The Poet is the Poetry": Emily Dickinson and the Deficiencies of the Fixed Center

"Miss Dickinson was a recluse; but her poetry is rich with a profound and varied experience. Where did she get it?

There is none of whom it is truer to say that the poet is the poetry."

-Allen Tate "Emily Dickinson" from Collected Essays 1932

Emily Dickinson and her work are a perfect example of the deficiencies present in traditional western thinking, which revolves around the idea of a fixed center, or unifying element. Nearly all critical analysis of Emily Dickinson focuses more on her life (the supposed "center/unifier" for her works) than on her works, trying to "explain" the poems through Dickinson's life experiences. Critic Robert Weisbuch in "Prisming Dickinson; or Gathering Paradise by Letting Go" terms this phenomena the "biographical fallacy." Tate's statement in the epigraph, is the perfect example of this misguided way of thinking, stating "the poet is the poetry" (Tate 19). A poet is no more her poetry than a mathematician is his discovered equations, or a scientist her experiment. This paper will briefly explore the reasons for the "biographical fallacy" and attempt to show the benefits of reading the text more closely. The great irony of Dickinson's poetry is that the poems actually express that Dickinson's life is not meant to be used as a means of interpreting them, but that the poems are designed to create multiple meanings, and provoke reader introspection; discovery of these meanings can be achieved by critical approaches such as deconstruction, focusing narrowly on the text, rather on the broad, and highly guessed at life of Dickinson.