My Emily Dickinson

Title: My Emily Dickinson
Author: Susan Howe
ISBN: 9780811216838
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2007
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: Reissue
Number of Pages: 160
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description:

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...."