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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... Poets, American — 19th century — Biography. 3. Women authors. LTitle. PS1541.Z5H68 2007 811'.4— dc22 2007034673 New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation 80 Eighth Avenue, New York ...
... poet Harold Monro declared in 1 925 that she is "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 half-idiotic school-girl instead of the grave ...
... poet of the century except Christina Rossetti and the Bronte sisters." But Lorine Niedecker — who would be compared to Dickinson far too often - included her among the ten writers in her "immortal cupboard," and cited an 1891 letter ...
... poets — whose 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 ...
... 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." (The next ...