Take a look at this passage from 1945’s “Ancestors’ Brocades” by Millicent Todd Bingham, daughter of Mable Loomis Todd, the co-editor of the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poetry; these comments set the stage for Bingham’s take on the power of Dickinson’s poetry:
“To excite Emily’s interest nothing was too trivial or too familiar. She took nothing for granted, ignoring it as one ignores air. Snakes and flies, grass and stones, as well as wind and rain and the rising of the moon over the Pelham hills, all were of the essence of miracle. The lowliest forms of life were as authentic, as worthy of note, as those usually celebrated in poetry.”
Dickinson’s appreciation and passion for the quotidian lies at the heart of Bingham’s assessment of the poet’s depth and profundity:
“Emily did not reach out toward abstractions in order to find universal truth. The smallest object close at hand would serve. Through the gateway of minutiae she opened mighty vistas, each one adjusted to him who is able to perceive it. Indeed, I have at times suspected that what we think of Emily’s poetry is more a measure of ourselves than of her. By our changing attitude toward it we can estimate our own growth. Many of the poems I have known by heart since early childhood. But as insight deepens, sentences whose tinkle always pleased me suddenly become heavy with significance. One rereading the words familiar through a lifetime, their truth suddenly flashes.”
Bingham then quoted these lines:
For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.