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 Bronte, 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...."
- ISBN10 0811216837
- ISBN13 9780811216838
- Publish Date 3 November 2017 (first published 31 December 1985)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Format Paperback
- Pages 160
- Language English