The Tension of the Metaxy in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Of American poets taught regularly in secondary education, the two most ill-served, it seems to me, are Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.1 [1] Students are typically introduced to these poets through their most-anthologized poems, and the majority of these are chosen in part for their accessibility--not too undaunting conceptually, and technically fluid--but also for a sort of charmingness, albeit in both cases of a slightly dark and eccentric kind. The best-known and most-taught of their poems present the personae of these two quintessentially American poets as, respectively, a wise, avuncular, white-haired, cracker-barrel lover of New England country life and its rugged solitudes, and as the whimsical and ladylike recluse spinster, the belle of Amherst, prone to occasional morbidity but mostly concerned to express her delight in bees, flowers, sunsets, and assurances of Eternity. This image of Frost is not unsettled by acquaintance with his most-anthologized poems "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,� "Mending Fences,� "The Road Not Taken,� and Birches�; nor is this caricature of Emily Dickinson undermined by her poems "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,� I Like to See It Lap the Miles,� "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,� "A Bird Came Down the Walk,� "I Never Saw a Moor,� nor even by "Because I Could Not Stop for Death� or "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died� or "There's a Certain Slant of Light.� But a truly broad and penetrating familiarity with the works of these two poets subverts fairly radically the benign portraits sketched above.