Her violent abuse of prepositions
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Robin Lane Fox is the gardening correspondent for the Financial Times, as well as a lecturer in Ancient History at Exeter College, Oxford. A few days ago, he reviewed an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, Emily Dickinson's Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. He liked the exhibition (calling it "unmissable" and "an essential destination for gardeners who are caught in downtown Manhattan as the weather starts to warm"), but he makes it clear that he doesn't like what he calls Emily Dickinson's "cryptic little poems, which have become exalted as triumphs of US female writing" ("Poetic Nature", FT 5/15/2010).
In fact he seems to dislike her Americanness as much as her femaleness, but it soon develops that he finds just about everything about her annoying, including the fact that her poems don't conform to the norms that he expects of his pupils' essays.
Here's a taste of his reaction:
On first meeting her, an important visitor in her life, the Christian minister Thomas Higginson, wrote in a letter to his wife about Emily’s reddish hair, plain face and white clean clothes, worn under a blue shawl. “She came to me with two day lilies which she put into my hand and said, ‘These are my introduction.’” It sounds lovely, until you realise she was in her 40th year. He remarked that “I never was with anyone who drained my nerve-power so much.”
I have to confess to a similar difficulty. I cannot fully understand most of the poems she wrote and, even worse, I have started to blame her, not me. Most of them have had a private history, so much so that nobody ever read many of them in her lifetime and she remained largely ignored by modern taste until the 1950s. She has a maddening way of inserting dots, dashes and punctuation, across which, to my mind, one has to read in order to follow the sense. She has a typically American problem with spelling but what throws me is her dire grammar and her violent abuse of prepositions, verbs and apparently hanging subjects. Poems start fairly smoothly and then collapse into areas where I use red pencil on pupils’ modern essays. […]
Of course, great experts are of quite the opposite opinion but I am not giving up. She often cannot use language and I am not going to be as shy as she was and deny it while blaming myself. If she could visit New York’s big exhibition she would hate the public experience but she might actually learn from it. […]
This sort of intelligent linking of literature and gardens in an exhibition is much too rare in Britain. In Dickinson’s case it is extremely important because flowers or an accompanying bouquet of flowers are often missing clues to her poems. I am not recanting. I give her a D grade for use of English and will continue to watch professors of English literature doing their valiant best for her. But I am delighted to learn so much about this lady’s deep love of flowers, mud and gardens. It sustained her curious genius in a private world.
I have no problem with trans-Atlantic spelling idiosyncrasies, but Monty Python skits have permanently damaged my ability to appreciate certain kinds of British intellectual discourse. As I read things like "her dire grammar and her violent abuse of prepositions" or "I give her a D grade for use of English", voiced in my mind's ear with Lane Fox's drawling Etonian cadences, I keep expecting Graham Chapman to interrupt dressed as an army officer and announce that this has simply gotten too silly.
Catanea said,
May 20, 2010 @ 5:36 am
So, this post sent me to read the FT article. I see it has a photo, showing a card with a poem on it in the midst of some associated flowers. But the card appears to be in relatively conventional typography (I can't actually make it out). Dickinson has so many admirers; but a revelation for me was seeing a facsimile of one of her poems. How much more appropriate if the cards among the flowers bore her words in her own writing. Then disputed readings could be addressed directly by the readers. Much might be learnt.
Roger Depledge said,
May 20, 2010 @ 6:18 am
Lane Fox seems to have beaten you to the
Monty Python skit (8 minutes). I leave it to a non-Brit non-American observer to say which of the speakers are drawling.
peter said,
May 20, 2010 @ 6:22 am
Shakespeare would no doubt also fail (all those private jokes and puns in the Sonnets), and Southwell (everything said three times) and Hopkins (lines that don't scan) and Whitman (lines running on without end) and Ginsberg (ditto) and cummings (Capital Letters, for goodness sake man, and where's your Punctuation!) and Stevens (if you mean "depression" why don't you just say it, instead of all this nonsense about blackbirds) and many others. How poorer the world would be if every poet wrote so as to satisfy the non-fiction prose marking criteria of professors of ancient history!
Dan Everett said,
May 20, 2010 @ 8:08 am
The Brits are in a constant state of befuddlement as to why they still don't set standards of writing & speaking English. This small bankrupt little island with its awards like 'Member of the British Empire' or, worse, 'Commander of the British Empire, still believes it has an empire and a right to opinions about the language that it almost let die out in the 12th century (and whose vowels it destroyed after the Revolutionary War, the sonorant cadences of English saved largely through the efforts of its main former colony). Any place that still has royalty is hardly has the luxury to worry about American spelling or poetry. Worry about British arithmetic instead. California is in terrible shape with about 15 billion dollars in debt. Britain has 250 billion dollars of debt with the same size economy. Or worry about the state of British music. The days are past when they produce exports like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. These days they produce Oasis and Robbie Williams who are exclusively British superstars (an oxymoron to most). But God bless 'em, Eton still manages to huff and puff. David Lodge is their main redeeming force. And I didn't even mention the culinary disaster that is English cooking.
Mel Nicholson said,
May 20, 2010 @ 8:21 am
I wonder if this was transcribed. The punctuation and diction of this diatribe on punctuation and diction doesn't exactly comply with the orthodoxy he pines for.
Szwagier said,
May 20, 2010 @ 8:26 am
"And I didn't even mention the culinary disaster that is English cooking."
Dan, you were doing so well there in maintaining the British/English distinction until that last sentence. Were you suggesting that Scottish/Welsh/Irish cuisine is better or worse than English?
In any case, a splendid rant. I take your point about British Music, since Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga and the like are clearly such an improvement!
Szwagier said,
May 20, 2010 @ 8:38 am
Incidentally, as a result of recent viewing, here's a quick review of the British press from "Yes, Prime Minister" which some might find useful:
Prime Minister:
– The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
– The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
– The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;
– The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
– The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
– The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;
– And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?
Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big t*ts.
Uly said,
May 20, 2010 @ 9:08 am
Is he really holding poems written a hundred years ago to the same standard as essays written today? They're not the same genre at all! His students' essays will never be considered great poetry, but that doesn't mean they should all fail because, you know, it's not a poem.
language hat said,
May 20, 2010 @ 9:32 am
Why are we paying attention to the opinions of a historian/gardener about poetry? I suspect Robin Lane Fox would have harsh words for a poet who dared pronounce on the value of his histories.
[(myl) I thought it was refreshingly honest for him to confess that he doesn't understand and doesn't like her poetry. A historian is entitled to his opinions about poetry as well as gardening, it seems to me. And so I spent a few minutes reading random bits of Dickinson, trying to figure out what he meant by "violent abuse of prepositions, verbs and apparently hanging subjects", without coming to any conclusions — perhaps someone else will make more of it than I could.
The things that often make Emily Dickinson's poetry different from expository prose with unnecessary line breaks became even more common in most of the poetry of the past century and a half. So I was waiting for Lane Fox to add that in fact he doesn't understand or like most English poetry since Swinburne. But he didn't say that, so I'm left to wonder whether it's only Dickinson, or only Americans, or only female poets whose inventive morphology, fragmented syntax, and allusive semantics annoy him.
Why do I care what an expert in ancient history and gardening thinks about such things? Well, humani nihil a me alienum puto, and besides, I bet that there are lots of well-educated people who feel the same way he does, but are reluctant to say so.]
Picky said,
May 20, 2010 @ 10:22 am
There are no awards called 'Member of the British Empire' or 'Commander of the British Empire'.
Terry Collmann said,
May 20, 2010 @ 10:37 am
I keep expecting Graham Chapman to interrupt dressed as an army officer and announce that this has simply gotten too silly.
Is that a joke based on the fact that no British Army officer would ever say "gotten"?
[(myl) No, it's evidence of my careless Americanness. I'm liable to start abusing prepositions any minute now.]
David Eddyshaw said,
May 20, 2010 @ 10:38 am
Dear me – how have we offended Dan Everett? Was it the recursion?
RLF is typical of the UK in just the same sense that GWB is typical of the US.
[(myl) As Charles Dickens learned, our backs is easy ris.]
Dan T. said,
May 20, 2010 @ 10:53 am
The vowels of English have been repeatedly destroyed, by the British and by ex-colonies alike, from the Great Vowel Shift to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Somehow, the language survived (though some dialects of it have trouble telling a pin from a pen), but the correspondence of orthography to pronunciation may never recover.
pj said,
May 20, 2010 @ 10:53 am
Dan, thank you from the bottom of my befuddled British heart for your valiant and tireless work on the preservation of English's imperilled sonorant cadences. Now, have a nice sit down and a cup of tea. Surely a small, bankrupt little island is too trivial to get so worked up over.
Zwicky Arnold said,
May 20, 2010 @ 11:09 am
Re Picky's: "There are no awards called 'Member of the British Empire' or 'Commander of the British Empire'."
Picky indeed. I gather that what Picky is getting at is an extremely fine point in technical terminology. The background, from the 4th ed. of David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia:
So if you are a CBE, technically you are not "a Commander of the British Empire", but "a holder of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, of the Commander class" (not an expression that anyone uses), or something like that. I assume that even extreme pedants would allow you be be referred to as "a CBE", on the understanding that CBE is, technically, not an abbreviation for anything.
[The reason for insisting that "Commander/Officer/Member of the British Empire" are technically incorrect is, of course, that there is no longer an entity with the name "British Empire"; after decolonization, there is instead "the British Commonwealth of Nations" (truncated to "the Commonwealth of Nations" or just "the Commonwealth" in contexts where the meaning is clear), so that (for pedants) "Commander of the British Empire" cannot be an expanded version of "CBE" (for there is now no such thing as the British Empire). Alas, "Most Excellent Order of the British Empire", with its now-outdated use of "British Empire", continues to be the official name for this class of honors, and there is, so far as I know, no abbreviation (?MEOBE?) in use that would disguise the "British Empire" in the name.]
Why anyone would want to insist on this technical correctness in these matters is beyond me.
Picky said,
May 20, 2010 @ 11:22 am
The short form is normally Member of the Order of the British Empire etc. I suppose the only reason to insist on technical correctness would be that a person made MBE is a member of an order, not a member of an empire. (And if you can't be pedantic about obscure orders of chivalry, then what are the damn things for, for heaven's sake?)
As to the Commonwealth, I think Commonwealth of Nations is now its official title (ie without the British bit).
Andrew (not the same one) said,
May 20, 2010 @ 11:37 am
Arnold Zwicky: The reason why technical correctness might be thought to matter in this instance is that Dan Everett took particular exception to the expression 'Commander of the British Empire', presumably suggesting that this implies authority to command people in the Empire. It's therefore reasonable to point out that the title is a contraction, and in its full form it doesn't have than implication.
Neal Goldfarb said,
May 20, 2010 @ 11:39 am
Emily Dickinson, cognitive scientist:
Michael Wise said,
May 20, 2010 @ 11:50 am
This reminds me of one of the first episodes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" where a quiet male student comes into the library looking for a copy of Emily Dickinson (there is a long-running spoof in the series that the Slayer gang uses the library as their secret hangout because no one in the school ever goes there). Buffy is smitten with the young man, and asks Giles, her Watcher and the school's stuffy British librarian, if he has another copy of "Emily Dickens". As he checks out the book, he says:
"Emily Dickinson. She's quite a good poet, for a…"
Buffy: "For a girl?"
Giles: "For an American."
Carl said,
May 20, 2010 @ 12:05 pm
Any complaint about the violent abuse of prepositions has already gotten too silly. As far as I can tell, prepositions (in numerous languages, not just English) seem to have been made for violent abuse. Moreover, that said, I think we should consider rejecting any complaint about the poor use of English that is not written note-perfectly in the Late West Saxon literary standard of Winchester.
YM said,
May 20, 2010 @ 12:33 pm
As Barbie would say, "Poetry is sooo hard."
MattF said,
May 20, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
Oh, come on… it's bluster. Something Brits are good at, after all.
Jim said,
May 20, 2010 @ 1:27 pm
Emily Dickinson is the most like Du Fu of anone who has written in English. That alone puts her on a level above everyone else. She makes Shakespeare sound like he's doing hip-hop.
dw said,
May 20, 2010 @ 1:35 pm
I have started to blame her, not me
Shouldn't that be myself rather than me? Normally I wouldn't comment, but from someone who criticizes "dire grammar"? Glass houses … stones …
Peter Taylor said,
May 20, 2010 @ 1:37 pm
Dan Everett bemused me by writing:
Is this whole rant something you've had lying around for about a decade?
myl wrote:
In fairness, he would have been getting rather off-topic to start talking about other poets.
[(myl) In fact, he starts his review by talking about writers and flowers in general:
So a remark about The Problem With Poets Who Don't Write Clearly would have been entirely in order.]
dw said,
May 20, 2010 @ 1:37 pm
@Dan Everett:
It's the consonants (first /r/ and now /l/) that have been destroyed in England. The vowels are still surviving a bit better, in general, on that side of the pond.
Picky said,
May 20, 2010 @ 3:54 pm
RLF's comments seem strange to me. I would be surprised if he claimed to "fully" understand the work of any substantial poet – who does? (I typed "who odes?" there first). And I would have thought that although she uses the language in a fashion very much her own, its first/face meaning is usually straightforward. Am I wrong?
Bloix said,
May 20, 2010 @ 4:17 pm
"The things that often make Emily Dickinson's poetry different from expository prose with unnecessary line breaks became even more common in most of the poetry of the past century and a half."
Dickinson always scans and almost always rhymes – although she's enamored of slant rhymes that may not be obvious if you're not used to them. So her poetry is really nothing like poetry that looks like "expository prose with unnecessary line breaks."
[(myl) Indeed, but it's by the standards of expository prose that Lane Fox is judging her writing…]
"I cannot fully understand most of the poems she wrote and, even worse, I have started to blame her, not me. Most of them have had a private history."
I would think that his problem may be that he's not familiar with transcendentalist philosophy, which more than flowers or private history is what you need for Dickinson.
The really difficult hurdle to get over with Dickinson is that sometimes she's really very funny – mordant, rather, and dry – and not dramatic, or posturing, or histrionic. "Because I could not stop for Death/he kindly stopped for me" – that's a joke. If you don't feel a prim little smile coming on when you read it then you're not getting it.
I spent a fair amount of time this spring reading Dickinson with my teenaged son, who had her for high school English. He didn't have too much trouble understanding her, although he sometimes was outraged at how coolly gruesome she could be:
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true —
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe —
The Eyes glaze once — and that is Death —
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.
That image of the lilies as a calling card may be from life but it's being misused as a metaphor.
Dan T. said,
May 20, 2010 @ 9:20 pm
If the consonants and vowels both get destroyed, what would be left of the language?
marie-lucie said,
May 20, 2010 @ 9:23 pm
I FELT a cleavage in my mind As if my brain had split;I tried to match it, seam by seam, But could not make them fit.
This suggests mental breakdown, not cognitive science.
Stephen Jones said,
May 21, 2010 @ 12:54 am
You couldn't make this up. What problem does the American have with spelling apart from using American spelling and not British spelling?
Stephen Jones said,
May 21, 2010 @ 12:56 am
Not when he obviously doesn't have the least idea about it.
Szwagier said,
May 21, 2010 @ 3:32 am
@Stephen Jones
"Not when he obviously doesn't have the least idea about it."
Sorry, have to pick up that particular ball and run with it. Are you suggesting that only 'qualified personnel' are allowed to have opinions on a subject? Or only 'qualified personnel' are allowed to voice them?
Prescriptivist! Prescriptivist!
Lawrence said,
May 21, 2010 @ 6:42 am
@ Bloix, gruesome? I read that poem as downright lewd. La petite mort, and all that. But then, every time I revisit my volume of her collected poems, I convince myself even more that reports of her reclusiveness must have been exaggerated, in some areas.
However, I must note, our vastly different readings have nothing to do with her prepositions. The obfuscation this fellow objects to is happening at a totally different level. I'm sympathetic to his statements– although I enjoy the poems that speak to me, I know and care too little about religion to comprehend the vast majority of Dickenson, and still have no idea what that blasted Diadem is all about– and feel it ought to be acceptable for someone to say that they simply don't "get" a certain poem or poet even (or especially) if the poet is a "classic." To attempt to blame it on bad writing, however, strikes me as another in the vein of Obama's first-person pronouns. It's only in poetry that it's acceptable to attempt to discuss one thing by talking about something else altogether, after all.
Bloix said,
May 21, 2010 @ 8:55 am
Lawrence, my son would enjoy talking about poems with you. He did a presentation last year on The Sick Rose that freaked his teacher out just a little bit.
notrequired said,
May 21, 2010 @ 10:36 am
Methinks there's some unconscious (or conscious, but concealed?) sexism at work here.
"She's a woman so she can't possibly know how to write well!!!"
Picky said,
May 21, 2010 @ 10:44 am
Oh, notrequired, do you think so? I'd be prepared to lay a shilling on RLF being OK with Austen.
And, Stephen Jones, the stuff about Americans and spelling – do you think it may have been an attempt at a joke? Surely it can't have been meant, can it?
David L said,
May 21, 2010 @ 11:28 am
She has a typically American problem with spelling
Yes, I read that as an attempt at what is sometimes called donnish humor. 'Donnish' meaning, for the uninitiated, 'supercilious, condescending, not actually funny.'
Stephen Jones said,
May 21, 2010 @ 4:16 pm
Err, wouldn't the fact that only a dozen were published in her lifetime been somewhat more logical an explanation?
Yet another stephen said,
May 21, 2010 @ 8:22 pm
Dan T. said, "If the consonants and vowels both get destroyed, what would be left of the language?"
We could still have glottal stops, clicks and whistles. That would be an interesting language to learn.
Has anybody created an artificial language like that?
When I was a kid somebody remarked that British humor isn't meant to produce laughter. "So what do you do with it?" I naturally asked.
chris said,
May 21, 2010 @ 11:09 pm
I think the comment on the "typically American problem with spelling" was at least half serious. I tend to find that Brits are aware that Americans do things differently, but have a natural and inherited penchant for condescendingly dismissing the American differences as a failure to write and speak "properly".
Americans, for their part, when confronted by British peculiarities (or those of other dialects) seem to have an equally typical tendency to judge them as genuine errors – not out of condescension or a belief in the infallible rightness of their own way of speaking, but simply out of pure ignorance of the diversity of English beyond the borders of their own country… The evidence is, alas, to be found on comments pages all over the net (especially on youtube).
HelenB said,
May 22, 2010 @ 5:21 am
Stephen Jones said "You couldn't make this up. What problem does the American have with spelling apart from using American spelling and not British spelling?"
For a group of language people, you are doing a v good job of ignoring the context and purpose of production – his opinionated columns, like AA Gill's restaurant reviews, are designed to entertain rather than inform – and the above is clearly intended as humour and self-deprecating humour at that.
Picky said,
May 22, 2010 @ 6:04 am
YetanotherStephen: What you do with it, of course, is use it as a sort of all-purpose small talk to cover your social ineptitude. The humour doesn't have to be funny – in fact it just needs to use the cadences of humour to do the job. Sad, innit?
Chris Brew said,
May 22, 2010 @ 8:54 am
Here is an example of the correct attitude to poetry
Alfred Lord Tennyson ( King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth. and Cambridge, did not graduate, for family reasons) 's original:
"Every moment dies a man, /Every moment one is born." (The Vision of Sin)
Charles Babbage (private tutors, Cambridge, but did not graduate with honours )'s response:
I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:
'Every moment dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born.' I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.
http://www.todayinsci.com/B/Babbage_Charles/BabbageCharles-Quotations.htm
ignoramus said,
May 22, 2010 @ 3:08 pm
It is great to be perfect in being able utter words in perfect harmony with the listeners filters.
The English language is popular with the gnu of the world because the majority are forgiving of the imperfections written or uttered, unlike many other Language groups whom have a high intolerance for any thing less than An A++ perfection [ Yorkshire is intolerant of Cockney or any other combination of local [im] perfections. .
First and foremost language is for people to be in communication with each other, It is enjoyable to hear or read the variations, but if both parties understand each other [?] then all is well, raising standards so more people can communicate, is a great idea but many use the imperfections as a source ego gratification. The vowel shift may be from changes in the DNA, and not just a failure of being brainwashed by members of a Cambridge [Granta/Carlos] elite.
I do enjoy your exposure of the idiosyncrasies of utterances.
Every one has an opinion, it is not law, it still an opinion which may or may not help with communication of thought.