My Emily Dickinson"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York Sun For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...." |
From inside the book
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... Amherst College Library. Author's Note: In 2007 I wouldn't rely on Thomas H.Johnsons editorial decisions for Dickinson's line breaks or variant readings. But the book is a product of the spiritual and textual scholarship of the early ...
... Amherst attic where Olson's famous first sentence ("I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America . . .") does not apply. Howe would go from here to the well-known essay, "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart" (in The ...
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