My Emily Dickinson

By: Susan Howe

Narrated by: Susan Howe

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.

©1985 Susan Howe (P)2022 New Directions Publishing Corp.

Critic reviews

"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops." (The New York Sun)

So beautiful and so beautifully read by the author

“Every day life feels mightier—-and what we have the is power to be more stupendous.” Exactly!