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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... Emerson, though she "does not have any of his range as a social critic." Even as late as 1980, she does not appear at all in John T. Irwin's American Hieroglyphics. D.H. Lawrence doesn't mention her in Studies in Classic American ...
... [Emerson] was a poet, in the making, lost. His spiritual assertions were intended to be basic, but they had not — and they have not today — the authenticity of Emily Dickinson's unrhymes. And she was of the same school, rebelliously ...
... Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper . . . the company in which, from the distance she did not perceive as a distance, Dickinson thought she was writing. Against the isolated neurotic, Howe's Dickinson is fully aware of events, including the ...
... Emerson that "... the Poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre." She said something subtler. "Nature is a Haunted House- but Art -a House that tries to be haunted." (L459) Yes ...
... Emerson visited her brother's house next door. One unchosen American woman alone at home and choosing. American authors reverently swept the dust of England's intellectual domain. Meek at whose feet did this myriad American Daisy play ...