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My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe

New Introduction by Eliot Weinberger

Finally, My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe's singular and unforgettable 1985 creative study, is available as a New Directions paperbook

For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art."  Susan Howe -- taking 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 her 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...." 

"One of our seminal works of creative scholarship."  -- Michael Palmer

Date of publication: November 2007