Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson

Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson (Sexual Personae, Yale Univ. Press, 1990, p 638-9)

Changed formatting, changed continuity, split whenever & wherever I liked:

• Dickinson’s nature has two faces, savage and serene.
• heaven is stasis, a permafrost of nonbeing.
• The bride poems are clever hoaxes that turn princesses into pumpkins, mere chunks of debris.
• Corpses drop into the grave with a thud. A frequent finale is a slow fade, the voice fumbling for words, as consciousness gutters out.
• The sadomasochistic poems are the tectonic, the slow brute contortions of the frigid mineral world. It is botany versus geology, spring destroyed by winter. 
•  Speaking of the widespread “horror of reptiles,” G. Wilson Knight claims we would prefer death by tiger to death by boa constrictor or octopus: “From such cold life we have risen, and the evolutionary thrust has a corresponding backward disgust. … And since we do not know what to make of tentacles mindlessly groping and distrust the clammy sea-moistures of the body, we fear especially our sex-organs with multiform inhibitions, seeing in them shameful serpentine and salty relations. And yet this fear is one with a sort of fascination."