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
Results 1-5 of 22
... intellectually blind, partially dead, and mostly dumb to the art of poetry": "Her tiny lyrics appear to be no more than the jottings of a ... intellectual training. . . . She cannot reason at all. She CONTENTS Preface by Eliot Weinberger.
... intellectual deficiency was her greatest distinction." Charles Olson refers to her only once, in an early draft of Call Me Ishmael (1947): "Dickinson loved Christ but jilted Him and married Death. Her stretch and yawn for the grave ...
... intellectual, and historical context in which male poets are routinely considered. Against the cliche of Dickinson as some sort of Rousseauian natural spirit, producing quirky, unlettered effusions, Howe's Emily Dickinson is an erudite ...
... intellectual women. Molly Bloom may have said "Yes" to the future of new writing, but she was a character not an author. For her author, the intellectual future was masculine. All the elements that Cixous longs for in the writing women ...
... intellectual gesturing, men gesticulated and lectured, while women sat in parlors or lecture halls listening. Women like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot were the rare exception, and they suffered agonies of insecurity about ...