Emily Bronte
... uncontrolled passion and ambition reign.” (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.32) “Gondal functioned as a set of myths, out of which any action, situation, or passion could be taken up according to mood and inclination,” Neufeldt states. (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.32) He explains, “Gondal wars, with all there attendant misery, violence, and cruelty, become Emily’s chief metaphor for the world in which she lived.” (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.32) Emily’s best uses of unorthodoxy as well as her best command of sound and effects are in her poem “No Coward Soul is Mine.” These lines from the poem show it best: Vain are the thousand creeds That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amidst the boundless main. Neufeldt also says that “the Gondal love poems reveal a continual state of tension between passionate indulgence and morality. Passion can only be indulged in at another’s expense, such indulgence must be paid for, and retribution occurs in this world not the next.” (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.32) One example of this is in “The Old Stoic,” when Emily writes: Riches I hold in light esteem And Love I laugh to scorn And lust of fame was but a dream That vanished with the morn. In the opinion of Siobhan Craft Brownson “the Gondal stories concern impetuous royalty, political intrigue, love thwarted and abandoned, wars, murders, and assignations.” (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.199) Yet another critic, Tom Winnifrith from the University of Warwick, says that “clearly, Gondal is a land dominated by dynamic, cruel people prompted by the same violent emotions of love and hate which rule Wuthering Heights.” (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.21) It seems unanimous among critics that Gondal was a nasty, awful place. Brownson said, “Critical reception of the Gondal poems has been uneven. Some critics reject them for their melodramatic, formulaic qualities and simplistic meters and rhymes.” (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.199) Winnifrith says that even though “words like “drear” and “dark” are to frequent, even in these poems Emily rises above the level of her sisters by occasionally inserting an unexpected, often a prosaic word. Her thought, moreover, is highly original.” (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.21) The non-Gondal poems seem even harder to evaluate and interpret because there is still much controversy about exactly who the speaker is. Is it Emily herself, writing about personal things? Or is it someone from Gondal that she uses as the poetic voice? Neufeldt says that “the “I” of her poems is often neither Emily nor a Gondolian, but a personified state of feeling.” (Dictionary of Lit. Biography, Vol.32) Some people think that Emily is a nature poet when she is not writing about Gondal. However Neufeldt says, “Although references to the natural world Emily loved...