R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

The Women Poets of the 'Seventies 131chronology; may I now take a liberty with geography?For in America, an almost exact contemporary ofChristina Rossetti, was living a poet, a woman, who hadno respect whatever for the literary figures of her age, andwho said what she meant in the roughest and fewest ofpossible words. She lived in complete seclusion; shewould lower baskets full of fruit or sweets on a string fromher window to the local children, but if the editor of TheAtlantic Monthly wanted to see her he must come to herhome, for she would not go to Boston. She believed profoundlyin herself; and language was to be her instrument,not she the instrument of language. The result wasodd sometimes; twisted; ungainly; she paid the price ofthose who, like Thomas Hardy, say what they want tosay rather than that which poetry wants them to say.She was alive to both the advantage and the disadvantageof this determination, for if she could write,The thought beneath so slight a filmIs more distinctly seen,—As laces just reveal the surge,Or mists the Apennine,she could also writeI felt a clearing in my mindAs if my brain had split;I tried to match it, scene by scene,But could not make them fit;The thought behind I strove to joinUnto the thought before,But sequence ravelled out of reachLike balls upon a floor.I refer, of course, to Emily Dickinson, the one womanpoet of that time, or so it seems to me, who had truly felt'a clearing in her mind, as if her brain had split'. Forthough the others, the English women, wrote and wrote,always copiously and often competently, it was not intheir brain that the split had occurred, but in the fashion9-3