Arts
If you know this podcast, you know how much I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson. No, more than love. How much in awe of it I am. I'm in the middle of teaching eight two-hour sessions on her poems--and they're doing to me what they always do: they break my brain. How did anyone write like this in the nineteenth century? This poem is one I just finished teaching in a larger set of poems about her relationship with Romanticism and nature. It's an oft-anthologized poem but one that gets at the core of some of what her art does. "There's a certain slant of light" takes all our expectations of nature poetry, Christian imagery, and personal insight and turns them all on their head. Or worse, on our head, forcing us to realize that revelation is not all it's cracked up to be.