The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

I wasn't impressed by Emily Dickinson – actually I've read her because Cioran is one of her biggest fans. What I have disliked: a touch of passive nihilism, of Schopenhauerian renunciation. I am not an active spirit myself, but compared to her I am prince Arjuna from Bhagavad Gita (after the conversation with Krishna). Therefore, I would have wished that the intensity of her poems had sparked up her biography as well. But at the same time I realize that the combination between her fire from within and complete impersonality and public facelessness (“How dreary to be somebody!/ How public, like a frog ...”) turns her in such a splendid case.

What I have enjoyed – the fact that she is such a direct (lyrical) philosopher. She has wonderful poems about anxiety and despair and I am sure (and I am glad) she hasn't read Kierkegaard! She is a true philospher (or better said, a wise woman) and her eyes are so fresh because she doesn't cary the coffin of the history of philosophy (like professional philosophers) after her. She has complete access to immediacy, to directness, to the (essence of the) Real that transgresses ordinary reality. Moreover, she has an aphoristic genius which completes this surreal wisdom.

“Power is only pain,
Stranded, through discipline”

“THE soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend,—
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.”

“Anger as soon as fed is dead;
'T is starving makes it fat”

“REMORSE is memory awake”

“THE brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.”

“SOME keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.”

“PROUD of my broken heart since thou didst break it,
Proud of the pain I did not feel till thee”

“LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.”

“A death-blow is a life-blow to some
Who, till they died, did not alive become;
Who, had they lived, had died, but when
They died, vitality begun.”

“ONE need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.”

“THE difference between despair
And fear, is like the one
Between the instant of a wreck,
And when the wreck has been.”

“A thunder storm combines the charms
Of Winter and of Hell.”