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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... Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Lei oh: By the way. The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight. Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, To put on when you're weary-or a stool To stumble over ...
... Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot were the rare exception, and they suffered agonies of insecurity about daring to speak more than "Lady's Greek, without the accents." If scholar was an uncertain word, love was more uncertain ...
... Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her fellow poet? George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was raised in a strict evangelical household. Later in life, she refused to attend church, a rebellion taken very seriously by her family. Although their ...
... Elizabeth Barrett Browning was isolated, inventing, SHE, and American. Isolation in nineteenth century England and America was spelled the same way, but there the resemblance stopped. Poe, Melville, and Dickinson all knew the falseness ...
... Fragment 119) Found among her papers after her death, these two fragments offer a hint as to Emily Dickinson's working process. Whether 'her' was Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Emily Bronte is unimportant. What is My Emily Dickinson 23.