“Poets with 'Fine Ears’, or, the ‘Responsibility’ of the Artist: R. W. Emerson, E. Dickinson, and G. Paley"

The essay explores the idea of the artist in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Grace Paley. Notwithstanding their different contexts - Emerson, a public man, Dickinson, a self-secluded woman, both white, writing in nineteenth century New England, and Paley, a twentieth century feminist, pacifist, secular Jewish public figure from New York – they have much in common. Major attention will be placed on Emerson’s essay “The poet”, and on the perspective of the sense of hearing, less explored by critics than the sense of sight. Poets are “men of more delicate ear”, writes Emerson; they are able to listen to the music of nature and to transcribe its rhythms. According to him, however, the addressee, too, should have an equally refined ear in order to appreciate the text. Emily Dickinson also dedicates a number of poems to the quality of the addressee’s ear: the poet is the one who “Distills amazing sense / From ordinary Meanings”; however it is crucial for the poet to find a refined ear able to understand what it hears; it is the ear’s very shape that allows to transform what is listened to from a “common thing” into a “divine” thing. In Grace Paley’s poetics too, the ear becomes as important an organ as it is in Emerson and Dickinson, mainly through the person of the artist: furthermore, for her it is essential to have two ears: one ear is for listening to the language of literature, the other for listening to the language of the house and the street: “The artist comes next … She will listen/ It’s her work. She will be the listener / in the story of the stories” Most of all, the three writers share the “responsibility” of the artist, that is “to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time”.