美国国家公共电台 NPR New Film Celebrates Emily Dickinson's Poetry And 'Quiet Passion'

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The American poet Emily Dickinson is the subject of a new film called "A Quiet Passion." The writer and director is Terence Davies. He's best known for his depictions of working-class life in his native Britain. The American actress Cynthia Nixon plays the poet. NPR's Lynn Neary says the film creates an image of a complicated woman whose poetry is steeped in pain.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE 1: Terence Davies discovered Emily Dickinson on television. An actress was reading one of her poems. And afterwards, Davies ran out and bought one of the collections. Davies became fascinated by this brilliant poet whose work was never recognized while she was alive and who rarely left her family home in Amherst, Mass.

TERENCE DAVIES: I think she was afraid of life. Like a lot of geniuses, you knew that she had skin missing, and that makes you very, very vulnerable.

NEARY: Dickinson's life story was compelling, Davies says, but it was the poetry that drew him to her.

DAVIES: What moves me about all her poems I've read is everything is distilled 2 down to the bare essential, but it's the very reticence 3 of that that makes it desperately 4, desperately moving.

NEARY: In the film, Davies uses Dickinson's poetry as a kind of commentary on her life. In the opening scene, Dickinson is severely 5 chastised 6 by the headmistress of her school because she refuses to say she wants to be a Christian 7. Dickinson is dismissed as a no hoper. As the scene ends, she stands alone by a window as Cynthia Nixon reads one of her poems.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A QUIET PASSION")

CYNTHIA NIXON: (As Emily Dickinson) For each ecstatic instant we must an anguish 8 pay in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy 9. For each beloved hour sharp pittances 10 of years, bitter contested farthings and coffers heaped with tears.

NEARY: Much of "A Quiet Passion" focuses on Dickinson's spiritual struggles. Davies says he identified with her because he also went through a spiritual crisis in his youth.

DAVIES: From 15 to 22 were my seven years of doubt and I really, really prayed for God to reveal himself. Of course, he didn't, so I know what that is like. And faced with mortality, what do we do about this thing which we call the soul?

NEARY: In the film, Dickinson's refusal to compromise her beliefs often puts her at odds 11 with the conservative religious beliefs of her family and friends. In one scene, she refuses to kneel when a visiting minister leads her family in prayer. Her disobedience infuriates her father.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A QUIET PASSION")

KEITH CARRADINE: (As Edward Dickinson) It is both unchristian and unseemingly.

NIXON: (As Emily Dickinson) I will not be forced to piety 12.

CARRADINE: (As Edward Dickinson) You will do as you are instructed.

NIXON: (As Emily Dickinson) I know your Christian shore is safer, Father, and I know I must seem recalcitrant 13, but my soul is my own.

CARRADINE: (As Edward Dickinson) Your soul is God's.

NEARY: Dickinson has a few close relationships but is heartbroken when friends leave her. The only man she's attracted to is already married. He appreciates her poetry but few others do. She withdraws into her family home, sheltering herself from a world she doesn't really understand.

DAVIES: To interpret the world, you have to be an observer of it. What being an observer does, it puts you on the outside of life. You're never really part of it, and life seems almost incomprehensible. How do other people manage their way through the world?

NEARY: Emily Dickinson's reclusive life has always been a source of fascination 14 for artists.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: There's a kind of mystery around Dickinson, and where mystery is, stories bloom.

NEARY: Brenda Wineapple is the author of "White Heat" about Dickinson's friendship with a well-known abolitionist. Wineapple sees Dickinson as a strong, witty 15 woman who did have lasting 16 friendships. She says Davies has created an Emily Dickinson whose radical 17 life choices cost her a great deal.

WINEAPPLE: Over time, she becomes caustic 18 and angry and disappointed, which is not necessarily how people particularly in the recent past have imagined Emily Dickinson.

NEARY: But Terence Davies says of course she was angry. She wanted to be loved, and she wanted her work recognized, even though she chose to live as a recluse 19.

DAVIES: In the end, that haven 20 becomes a prison. It's sort of an emotional prison she can't get away from. That's very sad and very hard to bear, I think.

NEARY: "A Quiet Passion" ends with Dickinson's death before the hundreds of poems that would make her famous were discovered. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS BORDEAUX'S "1ST SESSION")