Much Madness is divinest Sense

620
Emily Dickinson

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

Emily Dickinson is difficult at the best of times--her seemingly random punctuation and profligate capitalization tend to evoke confusion rather than significance--but I think this poem falls right in line with my project. I came to it while thinking about Cathy Park Hong and her overt troubling of the public space. Though that poem was published in 2007, Hong's idea is at least as old as Emily Dickinson (this poem was written in 1863).

The first three lines are, to me, the most intriguing. The chiasmatic arrangement of the nouns--from madness to sense to sense to madness--add a symmetry to the opening that frames the "discerning Eye". This symmetry suggests a pattern to the movement of the poem, the kind of pattern that the purportedly mad revel in exploring. We begin the poem, then, with the hint that the speaker might border on insanity; however, the fact that the speaker summons a classical rhetorical device to make a coherent argument demonstrates her ability to impose her own order and structure. The "discerning Eye" suggests both visual apprehension of the rhetorical trick, in that a discerning reader will understand the text, and "I" as in self-hood. The rhetorical trick, the structural fancy, also frames the speaker's identity and self-awareness. Her understanding of identity involves a simultaneity of "madness" and "sense", which she amalgamates in herself to form a fundamental statement of being. The third line, it might be mentioned, is parallel to the first line in all but the absence of a verb. In its place, Dickinson places a dash. The question of Dickinson's unique punctuation has a different answer in every poem, but in this particular instance it contains all the energy of self that the speaker channels from the rhetorical structure. The absence of the verb is more important than any word she could insert there, given that the silent dash holds all the possibility of vocabulary.

If the first three lines represent Dickinson at her most clever, the last five show her at her most biting. Her poetry has often been criticized as detached from politics (the fact that she mentions slavery a handful of times in the midst of the Civil War substantiates this claim), but in this poem she decidedly subvert the public space. Her nod to the "Majority" is a clear invocation of all the conventions of American democracy and its rule over the public utterance. The aside, "as all," hints at Dickinson's distrust of the Majority. Dickinson resists the well-established fact that an individual must assent to certain normative processes of society in order to become a member of the Majority. The dashes between "assent" and "demur" and their predicates serves to frame the predicates in dashes, to define them inside a constricting space. Dickinson sets up a societal equation, an if-then statement that leaves no room for exploration. She demonstrates in her first three, complex lines, however, that retaining a voice, that actualizing the self allows the individual to escape the confines of the Majority to instead enjoy poetic freedom. Whether or not the poet's place inside the chiasmus is constricting is another point entirely. Though "handled with a Chain," Dickinson subverts the restriction, queers the definition of "madness" to create a personal freedom to embrace her unique structuralization of her world. With that in mind, here come the questions:

1) What is the main struggle in this poem? What does the Majority do to individuals who don't agree with it? How might someone who doesn't agree with the Majority be threatening to it?
2) In light of the major conflict, how might the first three lines of the poem make more sense? What is the "discerning Eye," and what kind of critical faculty does it represent?
3) Do you think Dickinson is responding directly to her readers, or to a broader audience? How might her readers develop a "discerning Eye" from reading and understanding the poet's difference?

Guiding students through the conflict between the Majority and the individual will allow them to access the need for self-expression, even in the face of oppressive socialization. I think this might be a good poem to begin talking about "queering" spaces by introducing elements that crack the monolithic face of cultural dominance. The first three lines, though complex, offer a way into a discussion of how to understand not only Dickinson's poetry, but to understand how to appreciate other cultures or viewpoints.