Emily Dickinson Lesbian Puritan Poetess by Louis Brown

I originally intended to do a report on the work of Constantine P. Cavafy.

However, after I took a good look at who wrote what previously on the Tell Your Story blog, I noticed that Colin Dale gave an even better report on Constantine P. Cavafy than myself. His article is entitled “Details,” dated 2-27-2013.  So I decided on my second choice for favorite of the past and that was Emily Dickinson, before which, however, on Cavafy:

When I was at SAGE New York, I looked at the Community Bulletin Board, and I noticed that there was going to be a public reading of the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy. I guess over the years we have heard some mention of gay poets, Alan Ginsberg, and in 19^th Century France, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.  I wonder if Sylvester Stallone knows that his character Rambo has the same last name a gay French poet?

When I saw the ad for the reading of Cavafy’s poetry, I said to myself that an insightful gay libber did a good deed in trying to popularize Constantine Cavafy’s poetry. Right now for our community, he is the most interesting gay poet, the hottest potato, so to speak, for several reasons. Like the work of 19^th century homophile writers John Addington Symonds in America, Magnus Hirschfield in Germany, Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis in England, Cavafy’s poetry has a specific reference to ancient gay history, that is to our golden age, ancient Greece.

Wikipedia: Constantine P. Cavafy (/kəˈvɑːfɪ/;^[1] also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, or Kavaphes; Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης; April 29 (April 17, OS), 1863 – April 29, 1933) was a Greek poet who lived in Alexandria and worked as a journalist and civil servant. He published 154 poems; dozens more remained incomplete or in sketch form. His most important poetry was written after his fortieth birthday.

He wrote in Greek.

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Emily Dickinson was a 19^th Century Lesbian Puritan Poet, called the Dame of Amherst. She was one of a number of writers of the New England “Renaissance,” which include among others two gay men Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her years were 1830- 1886. When I think about it, I could have done a report on Walt Whitman, n’est-ce pas? Considering the historical period, we are talking about the Yankee defeat of the Confederate Army.

If Puritanism had not been so repressive, I am sure Emily Dickinson would love to have said something like, “When people ask why I never married, I would answer that I get a warm feeling when certain women enter the same room I am sitting in.”  But of course she couldn’t because it was “Verboten”.

  

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

[This teaches us how to be skeptical of politicians].

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Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

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Snake

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, -did you not?
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun, -
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

[Subtle resemblance to Edgar Allen Poe].

Moral of story: we need a Gay and Lesbian school to popularize our literary past.

© 27 June 2014  

About the Author  

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA's. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.