Sign-In
Cart
Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson
Paperback
Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism
ISBN13: 9780292776661
Publisher: Univ Of Texas Pr
Published: Dec 1 1992
Pages: 300
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.85 Width: 6.03 Depth: 9.01
Language: English
Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to the world and left it lying in her drawer more than a century ago. This widely admired epistle was her poems, which were never conventionally published in book form during her lifetime. Since the posthumous discovery of her work, general readers and literary scholars alike have puzzled over this paradox of wanting to communicate widely and yet apparently refusing to publish. In this pathbreaking study, Martha Nell Smith unravels the paradox by boldly recasting two of the oldest and still most frequently asked questions about Emily Dickinson: Why didn't she publish more poems while she was alive? and Who was her most important contemporary audience?
Regarding the question of publication, Smith urges a reconception of the act of publication itself. She argues that Dickinson did publish her work in letters and in forty manuscript books that circulated among a cultured network of correspondents, most important of whom was her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Rather than considering this material unpublished because unprinted, Smith views its alternative publication as a conscious strategy on the poet's part, a daring poetic experiment that also included Dickinson's unusual punctuation, line breaks, stanza divisions, calligraphic orthography, and bookmaking-all the characteristics that later editors tried to standardize or eliminate in preparing the poems for printing.
Dickinson's relationship with her most important reader, Sue Dickinson, has also been lost or distorted by multiple levels of censorship, Smith finds. Emphasizing the poet-sustaining aspects of the passionate bonds between the two women, Smith shows that their relationship was both textual and sexual. Based on study of the actual holograph poems, Smith reveals the extent of Sue Dickinson's collaboration in the production of poems, most notably Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers. This finding will surely challenge the popular conception of the isolated, withdrawn Emily Dickinson.
Well-versed in poststructuralist, feminist, and new textual criticism, Rowing in Eden uncovers the process by which the conventional portrait of Emily Dickinson was drawn and offers readers a chance to go back to original letters and poems and look at the poet and her work through new eyes. It will be of great interest to a wide audience in literary and feminist studies.
Also in
Poetry Criticism
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
Addonizio, Kim
Laux, Dorianne
Paperback
Letters to a Young Poet: With the Letters to Rilke from the ''Young Poet''
Kappus, Franz Xaver
Searls, Damion
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Hardcover
Faeries, Sprites & Malevolent Spirits: An Anthology of Classic Poetry & Stories
Thorne, Aurora
Hardcover
Poem a Day: 366 Poems, Old and New - One for Each Day of the Year
Albery, Nicolas
McCosker, Karen
Paperback
Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (1922)
Johnson, E. Pauline
Paperback
Poetry from Spaceship Earth: Empire and Ecology in Post-1945 American Poetry
Rahimtoola, Samia
Paperback
Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Editions: A Library of America Paperback Classic
Whitman, Walt
Paperback
Three Simple Lines: A Writer's Pilgrimage Into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku
Goldberg, Natalie
Hardcover
The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition): Including Sor Filotea's Letter and New Selected Poems
de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés
Paperback
The Enclosures of Free Verse: Racializing Poetic Form in the Modernist Era
Kappeler, Erin Joyce
Paperback