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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... thought the permissions fee too high: $25.) Kenneth Rexroth declared that Dickinson "is the equal of any woman poet of the century except Christina Rossetti and the Bronte sisters." But Lorine Niedecker — who would be compared to ...
... thought of Heaven - and ignore the structural warping of her 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 ...
... thought she was writing. Against the isolated neurotic, Howe's Dickinson is fully aware of events, including the Civil War, in the world outside. Howe goes backward, down into the roots, to show Dickinson's as a sensibility and ...
... thoughts joining split thoughts theme to theme," was an artist as obsessed, solitary, and uncompromising as Cezanne. Like him she was ignored and misunderstood by her own generation, because of the radical nature of her work. During ...
... you would certainly doubt his word. One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy's bosom- then would you believe? . . . (L233, from second "Master" letter) Day and night I worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed 24 Susan Howe.