In her excellent study of Dickinson,^[14] Cynthia Griffin Wolff describes three ironic voices Dickinson uses in her attack. The first is the voice of the child, reminiscent of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which produces an ironic questioning. “Do People moulder equally, / They bury, in the Grave?” she begins one poem, only to suggest an ironically naive view at the end that God has said “Death was dead.” Behind the poem, though, is the woman’s experience of death by disease, by childbirth, by wilting age, which gives the lie, from the child’s perspective to god’s words: there is a sense that he has abandoned the world, that there is no controlling center. The second voice is that of the “wife,” a figurative way of dealing with the position of the woman in society. For example, in #199, she begins

She goes on to lament here is the “soft Eclipse” that a “Girl’s life” suffers as “wife” before she becomes “woman.”

What is unique about the strategy of the poem in sociological and poetic terms is that the wife or woman is not defined in terms of a husband, and no male figure, save the metaphor of the Czar usurped by the speaker, ever enters the poem: the perspective stays securely at the margin, eshewing any further comparisons, defining womanhood entirely in terms of the margin which has now become, in essence a new center, a new relationship with the self, from which the two commands, orders that end the poem, can be given.

The third voice is in many ways the most important for it includes elements of the first two, an utter openness to experience and a reaching beyond accepted boundaries. Given her predicament by gender and religion, she projects herself as dead in a number of poems, and speaks from the furthest circumference we know, from beyond the grave. She also challenges the central function given to Poe who equated Death and Beauty in a way that seemed as perverse to Dickinson as the Calvinist equation of Death and Life. One of her landmark poems in this voice is #465:

The self is gradually disintegrated here, the synechdotal eyes and breaths of onlookers seem oppressive, and by the third stanza the “I” has become little more than a legal function. The most important function for the poet is be the observer at the moment of death, from the perspective of the other side, to reveal to us if whether our beliefs are true. This is the reason sight — as we saw earlier in Padilla — becomes so important, and a loss of which is the sure sign of death as we know it. And yet one great discovery is made with the last bit of sight — and reported from the far horizon. It has to do with the image of the “King.” Is it merely death? The last pulse of life? God? It is all three of these, and ironically, almost sacrilegiously, its onset comes with the fly, the insignificant but annoying insect that is at once a reminder of death and a reminder that there is still life in the observer, that something goes on, and in either case the image suggests that the King, the Calvinist, repressive god perhaps, is something like a fly. The weapons here are her hallmark irony and ambiguity in a poem that would be impossible for a man or woman within the power centers of Amherst.

The poet as outsider, then, as peripheral figure, has a number of strategies to deploy. Building upon the paradigmatic gestures in the poetry of Dante, Clare, Knight and Dimitrova — satire, nest building, appropriation of a lost center, redefinitions of terms — each poet, as marginalized figure, deals with her or his situation differently. It might be useful to recall for a moment Blake’s satiric, aphoristic style, discontinuously interrupting a central static theme in order to reformulate a a new vision; William Wordsworth’s use of memory to recall a lost center and imagine a new one; Dorothy’s intense function on the now that makes the distant familiar; Coleridge’s expanding periphery that makes circumference and center simultaneous; Wyatt’s building of a nest against the court; Pope’s expansion of the nest idea to a transcendent form of love; Ratushinskaya’s creation of centers of singular beauty at the desolate edges of the world; Hernández’s nearly surreal use of the unexpected to create a mythology for the isolated self; Vallejo’s mythic projections from the periphery; Faiz’ further projections of the horizon beyond the savage reaches of time; Darwish’s invisible center within an all too tangible periphery; the secret world Tsvetaeva creates in her isolated circumstances; Dickinson’s subtle undercutting of the male establishment and the breaking of barriers imposed by Calvinist Amherst through a variety of voices that extend the periphery beyond life itself… And of course, we could have mentioned many more poets who were forced to the periphery: exiles like the Greek poets Ritsos and Seferis, the imprisoned and harassed like the Russians Mandelshtam and Akhmatova, the Turkish Hikmet, or the Chilean Neruda. It is important to re-emphasize, however, that whatever periphery these poets found themselves on, they used these positions as dramatic forces and images in their poems. Indeed several, such as Dickinson, Pope, Hernández, Wyatt and Tsvetaveva, created further, other, peripheral positions, recognizing the importance of being somewhat disenfranchised by various central powers. We could well have explored Thomas McGrath’s return to the “cold, black North” in a self-imposed exile to write his great political poems, or Rexroth’s self exile in Santa Barbara to escape the poetry wars of his time. We should also remember Elizabeth Bishop’s travel to Brazil where she wrote her great, individual poems, and Jack Gilbert’s self-exile in Greece where he wrote his tightly compressed lyrics against the loosely expansive poetics of the beat generation. We should remember Rimbaud’s self-exile to escape the pandering literary scene, and the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu’s self-exile in Spain where he wrote in a forbidden language at the far edge of Spanish poetry. For all these poets, poetry was not an exercise, something learned in school and rewarded with prizes and books. It was a way of defining their lives running counter to the norm, the center, the prefabricated state, religious or social patterns.