Here's the Scoop

​Yesterday, I posted a portion of Andrew Lang’s harsh review of Emily Dickinson’s “Poems” (1890) for the London Daily News (HERE).

Here’s a bit more of what he said when he picked apart one of Dickinson’s most famous poems:
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I taste a liquor never brewed
From tankards scooped in pearl

Of this poem, he said the following:
“It is literally impossible to understand whether she means that she tastes a liquor never brewed at all, or a liquor never brewed ‘from’ tankards scooped in pearl.  By ‘from’ she may mean ‘in.’ Let us give her the benefit of the doubt, and she still writes utter nonsense.  It is clearly impossible to scoop a tankard from pearl.  The material is inadequate.”

He then turned to these lines:

How many times these low feet staggered,
Only the soldered mouth can tell;
Try! can you stir the awful rivet?
Try! can you lift the hasps of steel?
​

Lang said this:
​
“We could, perhaps, if we tried, but we cannot make sense out of balderdash.  What are ‘low feet’?  The words are meaningless.  This remarkable composition ends thus:

Indolent housewife in daisies lain!

This is no more English than it is Coptic.  “In Daisy’s lane” might have a meaning….”

Ouch!

First of all, who was Andrew Lang?  This site, HERE, states, “Lang is best known today either for the twelve color fairy books that bear his name or for his periodical writings, though he was also a poet, a translator of Homer, a historian and biographer, a scholar with interests in myth and folklore and anthropology, and the author of various works of fiction…..”

Second – and this is a bit odd – the first British edition of Dickinson’s poems wasn't published until the summer of 1891; however, Lang’s scathing review appeared six months earlier – in January 1891. 

More on this tomorrow.