Contrasting Approaches to Dickinson

There are definite points of similarity between the works of criticism written by Eunice Glenn and Charles Anderson regarding Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”, which are both entitled “On 712” in Modern American Poetry. Dickinson is highly regarded as one of the most celebrated poets in the romaticism genre. The authors come to similar conclusions regarding the theme and the interpretation of the poem. However, they do so largely through the means of different critical approaches. Glenn’s effort largely utilizes the expressive approach towards literary criticism and details the way the work was created as the principal means of discerning its meaning and interpretation. Anderson, for his part, relies on several elements of the formal approach (which is based on structure) to draw meaning from this work, although some of his analysis leans towards the expressive approach as well. Examining these works of literature according to the respective lenses in which the authors construct them enables the prudent reader to understand that Anderson’s is the more efficacious piece of literary criticism. 

One of the most revealing aspects of Glenn’s review is the fact that he is overtly concerned with the author’s choice in creating this poem. He tells the reader at the end of this piece that, “I have tried to focus more upon the mechanics of her poetry” (Glenn). Those mechanics do not pertain so much to structure as they due to the literary devices the author utilizes to convey the sweeping away of life for the eternal existence of death. In order to denote what thematic and literary devices Dickinson is employing to create meaning in this poem, Glenn begins with a stanza-by-stanza analysis that appears somewhat tedious and in which he makes a number of claims—some fairly obvious and others unsupported—in which he discerns that the poem is primarily about “a situation in terms of human experience”, which is “the conflict between mortality and immortality” (Glenn). To arrive at this conclusion, however, his examination of the individual stanzas makes some huge assumptions and outright errors that are not properly corroborated. He attributes a quotation from this poem that is not in it—“Their lessons scarcely done” (Glenn). He refers to stanzas with an inaccurate sequencing, and he claims that “gazing” (Glenn) suggests death without explaining how. He is on much firmer ground when he discusses the importance of the conflict and resolution of immortality and mortality—which is the theme around which the poem is based.

Anderson’s usage of the formal approach yields many of the same conclusions regarding the meaning and reasoning of the poem’s interpretation. However, it allows him to do so without a plethora of unfounded assumptions. From a strictly structural viewpoint, he analyzes the personification of the characters in the carriage that the female traveler embarks on a journey with as representing immortality. He examines the author’s alliteration and anaphora, respectively, to emphasize the eternal nature of the journey and the slipping away of all things mortal and earthly. He also deconstructs the concluding paragraph as a formal “coda” (Anderson), in which the poem’s narrator emphasizes the passing away of her mortality for a never-ending abstraction of a timeless death. An analysis of how the author structures this work is the definite highpoint of this piece of criticism, which slows considerably when the author devotes a substantial amount of this work to responding to another critic who has claimed that the conclusion of the poem “breaks down at this point because it goes beyond the ‘Limits of Judgment’, in so far as it attempts to experience death and express the nature of posthumous beatitude” (Anderson). The author assumes that readers apply some degree of credibility to this opinion and he diverges from his overall premise in interpreting the poem to discuss what the poem is not about, which is a digression at best.

The most valuable part of Glenn’s review is the attention he gives to the central theme of the poem—the contradiction of using immortal and mortal imagery and diction to denote a conflict between these two primal forces. Although the principle contradiction involves mortality and immortality, there are other paradoxes or contradictions that the author uses, such as the fact that in the work “remoteness is fused with nearness” (Glenn) while the narrator observes earthly surroundings from the detached perspective of death’s carriage. More importantly, Glenn uses this conflict to symbolize the essential meaning of the poem, which is that “The resolution of the conflict lies in the implications concerning the meaning of eternity: not an endless stretch of time, but something fixed and timeless, which interprets and gives meaning to… mortal experience” (Glenn).  It is important to realize that Anderson’s usage of the formal approach to literary criticism arrives at much the same conclusion. Despite the fact that Anderson attaches a plethora of other connotations to the poem’s meaning—involving aspects of religion, marriage, and an imagined and not literal journey, he still concludes that the journey symbolizes “the last sensations of consciousness as the world fades out”(Anderson) and a transition made from life to death.   

In this respect, it truly does not matter whether or not Anderson posits that the journey described by the author was literal or figurative, for the simple fact that it still represents a transition from the mortal to the immortal (regardless if the narrator actually dies or merely imagines the proceedings in the poem). What is important is that he is able to draw this conclusion by analyzing the various formal, structural elements of this work. Glenn arrives at the same basic interpretation of the poem by concentrating on the expressive elements and the theme of conflict and resolution present throughout Dickinson’s poem. 

Works Cited

Glenn, Eunice. "On 712 ("Because I Could Not Stop for Death")." Modern American Poetry. 1943. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps//poets/a_f/dickinson/712.htm

 Anderson, Charles R. "On 712 ("Because I Could Not Stop for Death")." Modern American Poetry. 1960. Web