An even more mythic solution to the need to escape the center is given by the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish:^[11]

Oppressed by Israeli governments who refuse the Palestinian dream of a homeland, his people literally marginalized to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Darwish’s vision is to see an invisible parallel world living coincidently with the visible Jewish homeland of the Song of Songs. It is a world made of love and tears, a mythic world of an invisible circumference which cuts directly across the powerful and oppressive center. The strategy here is to counterpoint the physical and the spiritual, to allow a victory to the physical and an ultimate triumph to the spiritual. Ironically, then, the Palestinian poet takes on the role of an Old Testament prophet, and the poem is a subtle prophecy for the ultimate failure of the transient and the physical which is equated with the oppressive Israeli state.

We find in the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva a similar desire to build not an invisible world of the heart, but an unspoken world. Oppressed by the Soviet government, she was first abandoned to starve in Moscow by her husband who was off fighting the Bolsheviks, then she followed her husband into exile in Prague and Paris. In Paris, he eventually turned sides by betraying both her and other exiles, resulting in her ostracization by other Russians. She finally returned to Russia in despair and eventually committed suicide. Her poems transform the harsh realities of her life into exquisite and complex lyrics that acknowledge and transcend the pain and longing. For Tsvetaeva the unspoken world of the heart is not an escape, but a means of telling the truth, of establishing the self, and it is a world that must be implied by the metaphoric structure of the poem. Even in one of her early, pre-revolution poems, perhaps addressed to her husband, we see this poetic gesture:^[12]

The secret world here — her only real contact in the second half of her life with other writers was through the uncertain mails — is what lies beyond the words of the letters, and indeed, of the poems. Tsvetaeva is the master of the unspoken, the implied, the metaphoric.

In this technique of the unspoken, she resembles Emily Dickinson, who wrote to Higginson: “My business is circumference.”^[13] We must remember that she lived in a society where women’s poetry was relegated to the realm of the domestic and the emotional, rather than the cosmic and intelligent, and where even her own father thought of her as rather unimportant in relation to her brothers. This was a society in which Hawthorne, for example, expressed dismay and apprehension at the rise of many women writers; granted, these women writers were far inferior, but that was mostly a product of the social structure and poetic hierarchy that dictated that they should write an overly sentimental poetry about everyday objects. Dickinson’s solution to finding herself already on one periphery because of her sex was to deliberately establish herself on the margins of two other value systems of the day, the religious and the stylistic, as her letters show, for this was also a society that expected a religiously symbolic literature and a Latinate style. Early on she gave up church going and began criticizing the Calvinist and Miltonic god of the day which she pictured as detached, invisible, uncaring; and she situated herself deliberately on a stylistic periphery with her creative play with the strict eight/six meter of the popular hymnals, as well as her off-rhymes, half-rhymes, dashes, and quick turns of thought. Now, fully at the edges of poetic and everyday life, secluded in her house in Amherst, she began her ironic attack on the center, for it is her incredible sense of irony and comedy that so distinguishes her poetry. Perhaps this withdrawal is also related to why Dickinson herself seemed in her letters and meetings with Higginson to present a persona who cared little for publication. As she says in one poem,

And she ends the poem after playfully taking on the roles of charioteer and emperor closing her lids “like stone.” What she closes herself off from is one part of society and poetry, so that she can “select” quite another.