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 Brontė, 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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... line breaks or variant readings. But the book is a product of the spiritual and textual scholarship of the early 1980s. Acknowledgments: Poems reprinted by permission of the publishers and Trustees of Amherst College from 'Hie Poems of ...
... line. And what a lovely measure, what an immediate thing comes out! Levertov replies: You know, actually those dashes bother me — it seems to give a monotony of tone. I can't quite explain it. . . . There's something cold and perversely ...
... lines from the "Jacataqua" section of In the American Grain (1925) are the epigraph to this book, and against which, we learn in the first sentence, this book is written. In Williams' prose, it is often difficult to know what he means ...
... lines, the rhymelessness, the distress marking the place at which she turned back. She was a beginning, a trembling at the edge of waking — and the terror it imposes. But she could not, and so it remains. In 1934, in an essay on "The ...
... lines on the page. Poets got it immediately; the Dickinsoni- ans found it scandalous. The writing of writers on writers tends to last longer than standard literary criticism, and not only because it is better written. Critics explain ...