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Last Things: Emily Brontė's Poems: Emily Bronte's Poems
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Review
Janet Gezari's book has received well-deserved critical acclaim. (Debra San, Essays in Criticism )
the most sensitive, sympathetic, discriminating account of the work to date... powerful, persuasive (Beth Newman, Review of English Studies )
the most sensitive, sympathetic, discriminating account of the work to date... powerful, persuasive (Beth Newman, Review of English Studies )
Product Description
Emily Brontë's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written by Victorian women. This much-needed study reinstates Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. Last Things presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to its own inner experience of the world while seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. Last Things also brings the emotions and concerns that inform Wuthering Heights into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a relatively short book (150 pages) on the poetry of Emily Brontė which is refreshingly free of much academic jargon and oneupmanship which (I find) bedevil much literary criticism. It's all the more readable for that.
Janet Gezari is good at teasing out the crucial differences between the outlook of Charlotte and Anne compared to Emily (1818-1848) in, for example, their approaches to death: While Charlotte and Anne were resigned to divine intention, Emily instinctively accepted the unpredictable and unwilled course of natural events ("All medical aid she has rejected," Charlotte wrote to a specialist in London shortly before her death). Also, unlike Charlotte, Emily did not seem to struggle with the morality of favouring a visionary world over a 'real' world of homely duties. It is probably those moral struggles which account for Charlotte's fussy intrusions and comments on Emily's authorship. In seemingly misguided fashion, Charlotte silently added eight lines, for example, to Emily's poem 'A Visionary' and possibly composed - Gezari claims - the verse 'Often rebuked, yet always back returning' (if she did, she published it under her sister's name).
Their divergent attitudes to publication and public knowledge of their identitites seemed to create an emotional distance between the two sisters after Charlotte discovered Emily's poems in 1845 and eventually persuaded her to publish them. "Publication," Gezari summarises elegantly, "was never the horizon in view" for Emily. For readers to get a more intimate sense of Emily's compositions, she reprints facsimilies of six poems.
American poet Emily Dickinson asked to have one of Emily Brontė's most famous poems 'No coward soul is mine' - written when Brontė was in her 28th year - read at her funeral. What pulled Dickinson to her namesake's poetry, pulls us still. "Instinct with tragic power and quite terrible in their bitter intensity of passion" (as Oscar Wilde wrote), they throb with the force of something intractably and irrepressibly hers:
'What my soul bore, my soul alone
Within itself may tell!'
(My Comforter)
Janet Gezari is good at teasing out the crucial differences between the outlook of Charlotte and Anne compared to Emily (1818-1848) in, for example, their approaches to death: While Charlotte and Anne were resigned to divine intention, Emily instinctively accepted the unpredictable and unwilled course of natural events ("All medical aid she has rejected," Charlotte wrote to a specialist in London shortly before her death). Also, unlike Charlotte, Emily did not seem to struggle with the morality of favouring a visionary world over a 'real' world of homely duties. It is probably those moral struggles which account for Charlotte's fussy intrusions and comments on Emily's authorship. In seemingly misguided fashion, Charlotte silently added eight lines, for example, to Emily's poem 'A Visionary' and possibly composed - Gezari claims - the verse 'Often rebuked, yet always back returning' (if she did, she published it under her sister's name).
Their divergent attitudes to publication and public knowledge of their identitites seemed to create an emotional distance between the two sisters after Charlotte discovered Emily's poems in 1845 and eventually persuaded her to publish them. "Publication," Gezari summarises elegantly, "was never the horizon in view" for Emily. For readers to get a more intimate sense of Emily's compositions, she reprints facsimilies of six poems.
American poet Emily Dickinson asked to have one of Emily Brontė's most famous poems 'No coward soul is mine' - written when Brontė was in her 28th year - read at her funeral. What pulled Dickinson to her namesake's poetry, pulls us still. "Instinct with tragic power and quite terrible in their bitter intensity of passion" (as Oscar Wilde wrote), they throb with the force of something intractably and irrepressibly hers:
'What my soul bore, my soul alone
Within itself may tell!'
(My Comforter)
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
a powerful book
11 Jun 2008
Format:Hardcover
For the uninitiated, first let me say that Brontė studies isn't merely an academic specialty. It is a cult. As Miss Austen has her Janeites, so Charlotte, Emily, Anne and sometimes Branwell have their devoted (if less succinctly monikered) following.
The result is that debates linger which otherwise might have died away in under a century and a half. One is attribution. Ever since the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in print, people have argued over who wrote what. "Last Things" inserts a fresh word into this and other ongoing Brontė controversies.
But don't be misled. This book is neither a retracing of tired ground nor a tortured argument driven by the bare hope of saying something new. It is, first and foremost, an examination of Emily Brontė's poems offered in language as incisive as a well-honed blade. Gezari's taut economy of expression occasionally creates enigmas. Chapter five, for instance, makes passing reference to ambiguity in a section of verse that, to my eyes, admits only one interpretation. A very few such moments aside, "Last Things" bears its readers along in close reading that is as vividly alive to the feel of the poetry as to its signification.
Gezari warns at the outset that the poems give little information on the private life of their author, yet the accumulated insights of this book provide a glimpse, like a shadow in a mirror, of someone quite different from the misanthropic self-hurter, the feminine Heathcliff with the rage turned inward, in whose form Emily has been known. At the heart of Brontė's poems, "Last Things" discovers a view of life bound to give us all pause on a human and personal level as well as a literary one.
The result is that debates linger which otherwise might have died away in under a century and a half. One is attribution. Ever since the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in print, people have argued over who wrote what. "Last Things" inserts a fresh word into this and other ongoing Brontė controversies.
But don't be misled. This book is neither a retracing of tired ground nor a tortured argument driven by the bare hope of saying something new. It is, first and foremost, an examination of Emily Brontė's poems offered in language as incisive as a well-honed blade. Gezari's taut economy of expression occasionally creates enigmas. Chapter five, for instance, makes passing reference to ambiguity in a section of verse that, to my eyes, admits only one interpretation. A very few such moments aside, "Last Things" bears its readers along in close reading that is as vividly alive to the feel of the poetry as to its signification.
Gezari warns at the outset that the poems give little information on the private life of their author, yet the accumulated insights of this book provide a glimpse, like a shadow in a mirror, of someone quite different from the misanthropic self-hurter, the feminine Heathcliff with the rage turned inward, in whose form Emily has been known. At the heart of Brontė's poems, "Last Things" discovers a view of life bound to give us all pause on a human and personal level as well as a literary one.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
crave injustice to Emily Bronte
10 Aug 2007
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Why an author would suggest that you can jumble up the word order of a poet's output is beyond my keen. To parse, reverse, take in jumbled order a poem and ask me to spend my time trying to understand what the author is on about, while the poem, undisturbed and before my very eyes, reads so fine, smooth, deep and emotive. This author is smoking the drapes.
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