This was a Poet –

This was a Poet –
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From Ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense 

From the familiar species
That perished by the Door –
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it — before — 

Of Pictures, the Discloser –
The Poet — it is He –
Entitles Us — by Contrast –
To ceaseless Poverty — 

Of portion — so unconscious –
The Robbing — could not harm –
Himself — to Him — a Fortune –
Exterior — to Time –
                                                                    F446 (1862)  J448

In this paean to poets – amid whom Dickinson was in the process of assigning herself a place – Dickinson begins with a rhetorical device: “This was a Poet” – an address directly to the reader as if she were an orator with the body laid out before him on a slab of marble. And then she describes the poet. The “He” is probably a universal “he” and would include any women poet as well (such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning whom Dickinson admired – as she did Robert Browning).
    The true poet can distill “amazing sense / From Ordinary meanings.” Yes, a very good depiction of the poet, at least in some critical circles. The essential oil of life, the “attar,” that the poet wrings from life is orders of magnitude better than anything the we might have expected common door-side roses to produce. The “immense” is a bit surprising, as one expects the poet’s attar might be “intense.” I suppose the oil is so fragrant it fills the air. The poet’s perceptive insights fill readers up, too, until we wonder how we’d never seen things quite that way before.

Painters, such as Matisse, can also make us see those
common doorway flowers in a new way

    The poet tells us what the pictures are, shows us their meanings. So gifted is he/she that the rest of us in contrast are in “ceaseless Poverty.” His good fortune is so great that we could rob him of a bit of it and it would not hurt him. The poet, caught up in his (her) art is “unconscious” of being copied or even plagiarized. Poets like Shakespeare are not bound by time. Indeed, he stands outside of the flux that shapes and propels the rest of us. Perhaps he even contributes to the flux.

Helen Vendler notes that Dickinson in this poem is speaking as a reader and not a poet. If so, Dickinson would be hearkening to Shakespeare, Browning, or Keats, for example, and musing about the power they hold.

Although I like the poem, I don’t think the imagery or ideas are among Dickinson’s most powerful or creative.