Joseph Addison, in the halcyon days of literary criticism (how come you can say “halcyon days” but not “kingfisher days”?), remarked that a true critic “ought to dwell rather upon Excellencies than Imperfections, to discover the concealed Beauties of a Writer, and communicate to the World such things as are worth their Observation”. Though we also seek beauty in imperfection now, the point about things that are worth observation is still pertinent.

I've barely scratched the surface of Emily Dickinson research, so I may be doing the field an injustice, but it seems a good example of being beset with criticism that is, from this perspective, marred. The problem is its emphasis on studying Dickinson qua a quiet provincial homebody rather than qua one of the world's most celebrated poets. Whilst obviously her background had a tremendous effect on her psyche and thus her poetry, as it does with every poet, surely the basis of investigation in the ancient Addisonian sense is that she was able to transcend expectations and become a philosophe?

Dickinson's poems are about so many things—from identity to religion, from nature to companionship, all woven in a sometimes paradoxically complex mesh with her mastery of metre and connotation and cadence—that it's an imbalance to merely concentrate on her domestic circumstance and its place in the whole Dickinsonian scheme. Compare studies of male poets: we might, especially in the liberalisation of the 20th century, concentrate on their sexual orientation and their sexual drive and its place in their poetry, but for all good poets and good criticism about them that only holds a minor place; as do their domestic arrangements. Domesticity is just one characteristic of many myriad components that make up the poet's roving mind. Whilst Dickinson was more locked into her domestic arrangements, that just makes her accomplishment all the brigher; that she not only reached lofty rarified heights, but that she also had further to go to get there.

Obviously I'm thinking of many pieces of work that display this bias, but here's a single example concerning Dickinson's non-standard use of dashes in her work, by way of illustration. It's from Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles, by Sharon Cameron, p.3: ‘In Harman's discussion, the hyphen becomes emblematic. “Perhaps because it both joins and divides, [it is like] a hymen. … That hyphen-hymen persephonates Emily.”’ Apart from the bias, it also has another weakness in its awful classical allusion. Compare it to the following example that a friend subsequently provided me, an accusation levelled by Dr. Erwin Chargaff at genetic research: “The hybridization of Prometheus with Herostratus is bound to give evil results”; the implication being, as my friend put it, “that the scientists were doing something audacious (like stealing fire from the gods), simply for the sake of becoming famous”.

One of the reasons that I tend to turn to the literary historians in a field, people like Malone, Coburn, Schoenbaum, Holmes, Sir E. K. Chambers, is that they turn out to be very intelligible and intelligent critics too. So much so that in fact if you want to be a literary historian at my university, you are based in the English department rather than the History department: there's a systematic acceptance of it, which is wonderful. Perhaps one of the best hybrid historian-critics of recent times is James Shapiro, which may betoken some good things to come.

Paul Collins, in Banvard's Folly, has a chapter about Delia Bacon, a critic of Shakespeare who went mad in pursuit of her subject. His summary of the whole situation is marvellous, but two things that he says stand out: “Educated madness retains all the syntax and cadence of rational, educated discussion. It sounds sane. But when strung together, the words make no sense”. And, after reproducing a long tortuous quote from Bacon, that she “is desperately wrestling with an idea here, a coherent idea. But it is like light trying to pass through several panes of cracked glass—bent through layer after layer, until it is refracted and twisted into a wraith of reason.” Paul Collins is perhaps the most outstanding historical miscellanist of our generation; check him out.

The domesticity bias surrounding Dickinson is at a less pernicious level than intellectual nonsense, but I think that things like it can lead to the kind of sloppy thinking that engenders nonsense. In some people a reticence to speak clearly may be because they have nothing to say, or it may be because they do not know how to say it, or it may even be that their peers simply don't expect them to speak clearly. But whichever way, there is never any defence for it.