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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... Richard Grossinger of North Atlantic Books, the original publisher of My Emily Dickinson, for his help in arranging this new edition. Special thanks are also due to Margaret R. Dakin from the Archives and Special Collections Department ...
... Richard Sewall's The Life of Emily Dickinson is not a photograph of the poet, but rather of Williams' maternal grandmother, "born in England about the same time," and whose name was Emily Dickenson.] By the time of the writing of this ...
... Richard Ellmann's exhaustive biography of Joyce, there are only three brief references to Stein. The first, on page 543, puts her down at once. Mary Column reports that Joyce, when asked his opinion of his famous contemporary and ...
... Richard SewelPs meticulously researched Life of Emily Dickinson, are invaluable sources of information about her living, but the way to understand her writing is through her reading. This sort of study, standard for most male poets of ...
... that dares be What these lines wish to see; I seek no further, it is She. (Richard Crashaw, "Wishes to His Supposed Mistress") Archaeology Foreshadowings: I shall particularly speak of the severall Removes 36 Susan Howe.