My Emily Dickinson

by Susan Howe, Eliot Weinberger (Introduction)

Overview

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...."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811216838
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/15/2007
Series:	New Directions Paperbook Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, That This, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Quarry, and The Birthmark.

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.

Editorial Reviews

"One of our seminal works of creative scholarship."

Michael Palmer

"In the non-conformist tradition of William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain and Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael, Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson reclaims the primacy of the poet's voice in American literary criticism even as it redresses the troubling absence of women within those antecedents. In this groundbreaking and influential work, Howe explores Dickinson's poems in all their radical indeterminacy and acoustical complexity, brilliantly revealing their explosive, modern power. My Emily Dickinson is visionary criticism at its best."

Elizabeth Willis

"As a poet and a critic she articulates precisely those soundings of uncertainty, those zones of failed or impaired utterance that constitute the literary history of America's uneasy commerce with the world."

Times Literary Supplement - Richard Sieburth

Howe's 1985 volume took Emily Dickinson study to another level, as she revealed new depth in the poet's work undiscovered by previous critics. Howe traces the many influences on the poems, ranging from Dickens, Browning, and Shakespeare to Puritan sermons to local nature. Solid for American lit collections.

—Michael Rogers

Library Journal