In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 283.
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant —” (1263)
By Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” What does this mean? And how can it be of use in writing poetry? How can we get to a truth in a poem we don’t yet know?
In “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” Dickinson advocates a circuitous method. To get to the essence of what you want to reveal, go slowly. Take a meandering course. Wind along one road and then perhaps another. “Truth must dazzle gradually,” she warns; otherwise, it won’t surprise us. It must not come to the reader too brightly; its true surprise comes at the conclusion of the poem when it strikes the reader as “lightening to the children eased / with explanation kind.” Truth must creep up on us slowly, kindly, if you will, or the meaning will escape us and we will be “blind” to it.
How can we achieve this quality of truth-telling in our writing? “Success in circuit lies,” Dickinson writes. Perhaps the taking of a roundabout course is desirable and effective, even when we feel lost along the way. A roundabout course could be as simple as describing a scene or an event, with an understory in mind. Several revolutions make a final electric charge feel even more earned.
Let’s take, for example, Ada Limón’s narrative poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl.”
Limón finds a situation, in this case, a horse race, to tell her story. The focus is on the female horse the speaker hopes will win the race. Limón employs T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative—a concept he popularized to describe how specific setting, imagery, mood, and plot details can more readily elicit a desired emotional response than a direct statement.
The turn in the poem occurs when Limón declares about the horses she likes “that they’re ladies,” and transfers her own experience, wishes, and desires onto the horse. By finding the circuitous course, she claims her own female power. It’s the circuitous description and questioning that brings her to her own surprise and truth.
My own poem “Sonnet for the Tendered Garden” uses this meandering method too. By writing about tending to a shrub that had been uprooted, I was able to find the circuitous course to conceiving a poem about a pregnancy loss.
“Sonnet for the Tendered Garden”
Tender shrub, green leaves of its foliage,
the curl of a baby’s fingernail, knocked
over by storm, its brush crumbling to touch—
how did I miss it—it’s all that I can do—
for those I could not save—but twist
the stubborn bush from its tangled roots
& turn it upright as if giving birth
to a baby in breach. I don’t mind mud
underneath my nails, worms my fingers touch
(they enrich the soil), mosquitos swarming
crazily (it’s one hundred degrees!),
circling my head like a halo of distrust.
It’s nature’s promise I curse. All those weeks
when I prayed for a triumphant birth.
I encourage you to write a poem where you write about a particular concrete situation but allow yourself time and surprise by approaching the topic with a winding path.
Jill Bialosky is the author of six collections of poetry including Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2026). Her book Asylum (Knopf, 2020) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and she is the author of the memoir Poetry Will Save Your Life (Atria Books, 2017). She is an executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton.
“Sonnet for the Tendered Garden” was reprinted from Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems with permission from Knopf. image credit: Thomas Verbruggen