Oh, jeez, not another one of those annoying Emily Dickinson poems, I thought as I leafed through my literature book. So cutesy and perky and self-righteous. Why, any one of Sandra Cisneros’s Loose Women could kick the (stuffing) out of all 1,775 of Dickinson’s little aphorisms. You can imagine my surprise when I found out that Cisneros' favorite poet, her inspiration through her years of starving writerhood, is that very same Emily Dickinson I love to hate.

"No one knew she was a poet until after she died, and then, when they discovered those poems handwritten on sheets of paper folded and stitched together, the world rang like a bell." (Notes 51) Like Cisneros, Dickinson labored in silence, keeping her heart’s work in her own version of dog-eared spiral notebooks. Sandra hoped that she wouldn’t have to wait until she died to become recognized for her work, but strived to possess Emily’s same strength and universality.

But look at the differences between them. Dickinson—so structured and concise, her sparse words decorated with dashes and neat, sweet rhymes. The language she uses is "English with its starched r’s and g’s. English with its crisp linen syllables. English crunchy as apples, stiff and resilient as sailcloth." (Creek, 153) Alone, the crispness of English can be wonderful, but Dickinson seems to make it harsher and stricter than necessary; she compounds upon this by ordering her feelings, making them so stately that they seem superficial. The narrator of Dickinson’s poems almost always resolves to follow her sense of duty instead of her emotions. She is fixated upon death, calmly, passively, contemplating it; it seems that she has nothing exciting to occupy her mind—nothing to live for—but death. Each one of her poems becomes a riddle as the reader tries to figure out exactly what is she talking about.

Sandra, on the other hand, bursts with metaphor, bombards the reader with gorgeous imagery, and drags everything (menstruation, sex) out into the open. Glorious, bloody, daring lines that sacrifice structure for lyricism. Her language is "crooned to babies, that language murmured by grandmothers, those words that smell like your house, like flour tortillas, and the inside of your daddy’s hat…that sweep of palm leaves and fringed shawls. That startled fluttering, like the heart of a goldfinch or a fan." (Creek, 153)

Now that I’ve compared Sandra and Emily, their lives and works, I realize that I don’t have such a deep revulsion for Miss Dickinson. I admire her drive and devotion. I admire that she drew such pleasure from her introverted life, and she translated this into poems that give readers around the world pleasure in the little details of life. Her poems show tremendous work and talent, but I still don’t like them. Perhaps I love extravagant metaphors and sonorous strings of words. I’d rather read--or write—garishly purple prose (as long as it’s got one good image) instead of a lean, factual piece, no matter how elegantly balanced it is. And Cisneros' poetry, which some may consider to be garish and overblown, certainly strikes my fancy with its wonderful words and details

Dickinson: "If You were Coming in the Fall"