Emily's Lyrical Ballads

A recent paper exploring Emily Brontë's poetry:

Emily Brontë's Lyrical Ballads
Lee O'Brien
Victorian Poetry
West Virginia University Press
Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 2019
pp. 511-53

George Levine wrote of Darwin that he "spent his life discovering differences." The discovery of differences and the subsequent wrestling with the destabilizing energies they bring into play may be said to be a defining preoccupation of Victorian thought as it manifested itself across an astonishing variety of cultural endeavors. Levine goes on to note Darwin's awe at little things: "pinhead-sized barnacles, and worms and bees and ants" (p. 245) that accompanied the sweep of his scientific imagining of the vast, inhuman process of natural selection. Emily Brontë's poetic imagination similarly changes scale, moving from cosmic visions to linnets, bees, and bluebells. Differences, the often-troubled borders between warring states of mind, of will, of desire, shape her poetry. Her language subtly blends visionary intensity with a powerful awareness of the significance of the ordinary fabric of day-to-day life. Reading the poems provokes a tantalizing sense that what they are obviously about is not what they are actually about: apparent simplicity breaks down very quickly under the pressure of the questions it raises.