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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... never have heard of. In the most influential essay of the time, Allen Tate in 1 932 compared her to John Donne — the New Critics compared everyone to John Donne - in that she "perceives abstraction and thinks sensation" but writes that ...
... never occurred to him to think of Emily Dickinson's dashes as aural notations, rests or rallentandos. He had supposed them to be merely a sort of scribbles, meaning nothing, presumably intended by E.D. to be filled in with "proper ...
... . The Dickinson family owned the eight volume Knight edition. I want to thank Quincy Howe, Barbara Folsom, and Maureen Owen for their help in correcting and proof-reading the manuscript. It is the women above all - there never have.
... Never a woman: never a poet. That's an axiom. Never a poet saw sun here. (William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain.) INTRODUCTION: My book is a contradiction of its epigraph. Emily.
... Never a woman, never a poet. . . . Never a poet saw sun here," I think that he says one thing and means another. A poet is never just a woman or a man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber. Here "we have ...