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My Emily Dickinson
My Emily Dickinson does more than just explore Dickinson's life and poetics, although it does that expertly. It falls in line with a tradition of books of poets writing about poets who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry.
This is more personal than a biography in that it is a writer's concern with Dickinson's place in history and what she was trying to do with her poetry. Howe does a wonderful job of trying to get into the poems through playing with language.
It's a place to meet Dickinson as a lover of games and words.
This is more personal than a biography in that it is a writer's concern with Dickinson's place in history and what she was trying to do with her poetry. Howe does a wonderful job of trying to get into the poems through playing with language.
It's a place to meet Dickinson as a lover of games and words.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
About the author
Susan Howe
67 books155 followersSusan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990).
Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).
Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rotherberg (1998).
She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the winter of 1998 she was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities.
Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).
Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rotherberg (1998).
She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the winter of 1998 she was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 95 reviews
September 6, 2015
Boy howdy, do I feel like an idiot.
Not one reviewer here says anything along the lines of, "Um, guys – what just happened?"
Not one reader I could find rated it lower than 3 stars – and the vast majority of reviewers give it four or five, and swoon in their reviews.
So I guess it's just me.
I'm the dork who feels as if I stumbled into someone else's drug trip when I thought I was supposed to be reading a book about a poet and her work.
I thought I was reasonably literate (for a civilian), but reading this book felt like having books flung at my head by an invisible assailant.
If you know me, you know I'm all about the Post-Its when I read. And my library copy of My Emily Dickinson is stuck with its fair share – but all the passages I found worth hanging onto are quotations from other people's works.
The only bits I marked that Susan Howe actually wrote are things I wanted to mention here because I disagree with them strenuously. "Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse," Howe says at one point, because apparently being a poet herself means having permission to speak on behalf of a long-dead writer. (Hint: NO.)
And "Elizabeth Barrett Browning...failed as a poet herself."
Excuse me? EBB wrote poems even non-poetry lovers can admire:
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only.
Does that sound like the beginning of a failed sonnet?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote beautifully, and her writing is remembered – people quote her all the time. (She wrote the sonnet that begins, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.") By any reasonable standard, she did NOT fail as a poet.
So I couldn't keep up with most of Howe's writing here, and I didn't like the few opinions I could understand.
I feel like a weirdo and an idiot; but other than being glad to see some of the quotes Howe passed along from other writers, I did not enjoy this book, nor did I get much out of it.
Back to the library it goes, and on to the next book about Dickinson I go.
Not one reviewer here says anything along the lines of, "Um, guys – what just happened?"
Not one reader I could find rated it lower than 3 stars – and the vast majority of reviewers give it four or five, and swoon in their reviews.
So I guess it's just me.
I'm the dork who feels as if I stumbled into someone else's drug trip when I thought I was supposed to be reading a book about a poet and her work.
I thought I was reasonably literate (for a civilian), but reading this book felt like having books flung at my head by an invisible assailant.
If you know me, you know I'm all about the Post-Its when I read. And my library copy of My Emily Dickinson is stuck with its fair share – but all the passages I found worth hanging onto are quotations from other people's works.
The only bits I marked that Susan Howe actually wrote are things I wanted to mention here because I disagree with them strenuously. "Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse," Howe says at one point, because apparently being a poet herself means having permission to speak on behalf of a long-dead writer. (Hint: NO.)
And "Elizabeth Barrett Browning...failed as a poet herself."
Excuse me? EBB wrote poems even non-poetry lovers can admire:
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only.
Does that sound like the beginning of a failed sonnet?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote beautifully, and her writing is remembered – people quote her all the time. (She wrote the sonnet that begins, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.") By any reasonable standard, she did NOT fail as a poet.
So I couldn't keep up with most of Howe's writing here, and I didn't like the few opinions I could understand.
I feel like a weirdo and an idiot; but other than being glad to see some of the quotes Howe passed along from other writers, I did not enjoy this book, nor did I get much out of it.
Back to the library it goes, and on to the next book about Dickinson I go.
September 30, 2017
I feel as though I've falling through Alice's rabbit hole into a terribly confusing conversation of one.
If I said, along with most of the other readers who have rated this book, that it was inspiring, profound or brilliant I would feel like one who viewed the Emperor's new clothes and in an attempt to appear wise, commented to my neighbor in the crowd how beautifully breath-taking the new wardrobe was. Breath-taking indeed!
When I ordered this book, I was expecting something along the lines of a bio from an endearingly personal point of view. What I got was a mess of thoughts that had very little to do with Emily Dickinson.
I think that some poet-scholars make mountains out of molehills. The author takes E.D. poem My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun and tries to tell us what Emily Dickinson meant by it, and then 76 pages into the book gives us 11 possibilities of what the words 'My Life' alone could mean, Only to finally say 'it's hard to know what poets of the past meant when they wrote their poems'. You don't say!?!
I don't profess to know anything about Emily Dickinson, or poetry for that matter, but after reading this book I'm not a hair's breadth closer to being any more enlightened or educated on the subject.
If I said, along with most of the other readers who have rated this book, that it was inspiring, profound or brilliant I would feel like one who viewed the Emperor's new clothes and in an attempt to appear wise, commented to my neighbor in the crowd how beautifully breath-taking the new wardrobe was. Breath-taking indeed!
When I ordered this book, I was expecting something along the lines of a bio from an endearingly personal point of view. What I got was a mess of thoughts that had very little to do with Emily Dickinson.
I think that some poet-scholars make mountains out of molehills. The author takes E.D. poem My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun and tries to tell us what Emily Dickinson meant by it, and then 76 pages into the book gives us 11 possibilities of what the words 'My Life' alone could mean, Only to finally say 'it's hard to know what poets of the past meant when they wrote their poems'. You don't say!?!
I don't profess to know anything about Emily Dickinson, or poetry for that matter, but after reading this book I'm not a hair's breadth closer to being any more enlightened or educated on the subject.
October 20, 2012
No words to describe what a piece of shit this book is. And I'm an English major.
November 12, 2017
An incoherent collection of random quotes of other writers' works. Lacked focus, and talked more about other writers than Emily Dickinson. A confusing one-person discussion.
March 2, 2018
Emily Dickinson is a beautiful gnome, who the more read and interpreted the better. This book is a wonderful way to see her under the light of who and what might hace influenced her, from Shakespeare to The Bronte sisters. A wonderful read I will go back to again many times.
March 8, 2016
This book was assigned reading for one of my classes and after buying it at the beginning of the semester, I had high hopes and expectations. I was looking forward to reading about Emily Dickinson and learning more about her work. Unfortunately, this book was an enormous disappointment.
My Emily Dickinson is written in prose format, with many, many quotes from other writers. The writing style seems like an attempt at poetic prose, and there are a good amount of singular sentences that I like for making me stop and think. This being said, most of the book seems quite erratic and all over the place. Howe, in a lot of instances, will include a quotation from a written work (not necessarily Dickinson’s), but she will not refer to it afterwards and doesn’t include any analysis as to why she added that quote and how it relates to Dickinson. They break up her own writing which only adds to the sense of being erratic, and sometimes it is hard to tell what is a quotation and what is Howe’s original writing.
When Howe does include analysis of Dickinson’s poetry or letters, it isn’t very long before she throws in history and context. This isn’t a bad thing regarding analysis of literature, but Howe goes on for pages on a small piece of information that has a minor (if even notable) connection to Dickinson. It almost seems as if this is more of a historical nonfiction book, rather than an analysis of Emily Dickinson and her poetry.
Overall, I trudged through the reading of this book and didn’t enjoy the majority of it. There are a lot of sentences that I highlighted and flagged because they made me think, but they still couldn’t make up for how little I enjoyed the rest of the book.
Review can also be found on my book blog: swimmingthroughliterature.wordpress.com
My Emily Dickinson is written in prose format, with many, many quotes from other writers. The writing style seems like an attempt at poetic prose, and there are a good amount of singular sentences that I like for making me stop and think. This being said, most of the book seems quite erratic and all over the place. Howe, in a lot of instances, will include a quotation from a written work (not necessarily Dickinson’s), but she will not refer to it afterwards and doesn’t include any analysis as to why she added that quote and how it relates to Dickinson. They break up her own writing which only adds to the sense of being erratic, and sometimes it is hard to tell what is a quotation and what is Howe’s original writing.
When Howe does include analysis of Dickinson’s poetry or letters, it isn’t very long before she throws in history and context. This isn’t a bad thing regarding analysis of literature, but Howe goes on for pages on a small piece of information that has a minor (if even notable) connection to Dickinson. It almost seems as if this is more of a historical nonfiction book, rather than an analysis of Emily Dickinson and her poetry.
Overall, I trudged through the reading of this book and didn’t enjoy the majority of it. There are a lot of sentences that I highlighted and flagged because they made me think, but they still couldn’t make up for how little I enjoyed the rest of the book.
Review can also be found on my book blog: swimmingthroughliterature.wordpress.com
October 11, 2018
By the middle of high school I was done with a formal education. I sputtered about in art school, but academia wasn’t for me. While I don’t want to return to school - my wife and kids have kept that distaste fresh in my mouth - I wouldn’t mind some learning. For example, I just read all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and know that my cursory experience could be deepened with the right teacher. I hoped poet Susan Howe would do that in her poetic and scholarly exploration MY EMILY DICKINSON. She did, to a degree. Her work is a creative and personal one that dispels the myths about the isolated poet and puts her in context and as a precursor of the modernist masters of language, such as Gertrude Stein, who didn't ignore the world around her (such as the Civil War). Dickinson is part of a lineage that traces back to theologian Jonathan Edwards and is rooted in American literature of its time. Howe rights the wrongs that saw Dickinson as an asterisk on literature and places her atop its mantel where she belongs. Her language inventive, her poetry deceptively reflecting its time and still I can’t make heads or tails of it.
January 15, 2009
Reread this last week. And reread the poems and began to see why certain narratives are brought in, just a mention of their name in a poem is enough to bring in a discussion from Howe. Examples: Bronte, Daniel Boone. The eyeshine story about Daniel Boone's wife seems to correspond with something popularly held about Dickinson. I was always a little off balance about the number of historical figures that drive Howe's book. They come and go very casually, without much introduction. That's a very smart thing to do in retrospect. I didn't know the poems well enough when I first read her book to appreciate the sweep of what Howe was doing. It feels like the namedropping in Dickinson was part of early work, don't know if it persisted all the way through. Going through all of it, the later poems shorten and can be sped through, maybe the last 500 poems take a few hours, where the first 1300 took four or five days. I'll reread Howe's book again in a few months to see what can get better.
April 23, 2017
The two greatest American poets are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; we have to take them together, like day and night. John Marsh's faith that Walt can save the nation's soul and his own is not exactly misplaced. What Emily can do for us is a subtler, darker service: she offers the comfort of company in the knowledge that we will not and cannot be saved. I once speculated of Muriel Spark that "she may be the exponent of a tragic non-political nihilist feminism—women having an equal share in the void." That is the view of Dickinson we are granted in Susan Howe's classic 1985 essay, My Emily Dickinson:
Howe's Dickinson aestheticizes Mary Rowlandson's ordeal in her captivity; more intellectually, she learns from Jonathan Edwards's later attempt to shock his congregation with violent language into a faith he could no longer reason them into. Howe argues that Dickinson's poetic experiments—the broken sonorities of her dash-scored lines, sometimes incomprehensible but always recognizably profound—derive from the same idea that motivated Edwards to compose a sermonic language that would compel rather than convince: "Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding." But Dickinson, unlike Edwards, did not aim to move an immediate audience, did not necessarily mean to communicate with her contemporaries at all:
Howe's is not an academic book. It is a poet's criticism, a subjective book as indicated by the possessive in the title. "Connections between unconnected things are the unreal reality of poetry," she writes. Unsurprisingly, then, I did not always follow her logic, especially as her method is often montage—juxtaposition of quotations from across time and space—rather than unbroken argument. Anti-logic is part of her argument, in fact: "Poems and poets of the first rank remain mysterious." The poet sees unity in contradiction and contradiction in unity, expresses the mystery of being. It would be false to the nature of poetry to reason about it, she implies. I agree, but I reject the literalism of taking this idea to its extreme in a militantly irrationalist or anti-mimetic literature like that of the poetic movement most associated with Howe, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. Often—as in, just for instance, Shakespeare and Emily Brontë—the best way to reveal the mystery is to dramatize it with clarity and beauty, not to redouble obscurity, to blow smoke through the fog, by writing willful gibberish that requires for its justification the museum curator's jargon-clogged tag. But I digress.
Dickinson's beloved correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, dominates the end of the book. Howe wants, on one hand, to save him from the condescension of Dickinson criticism, which seems to have regarded him as an insensitive male chauvinist; but he was, Howe explains, a fierce activist, abolitionist, and feminist; a collaborator with John Brown and a Civil War volunteer—a literal social justice warrior. On the other hand, he comes to stand, in Howe's telling, for the inadequacy of the social mind, however progressive, for the "lack of imaginative intensity" that characterizes his century of sentimental poetasters and false innocence.
Much of My Emily Dickinson unfolds as an explication of "My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun—," one of Dickinson's most obscure but compelling lyrics. Howe conjures its mystery rather than dispelling it—I understand it little better than I did before I perused her close reading—but the upshot (pseudo-etymological pun intended) seems to be, like that of Wuthering Heights, the cosmic inevitability that love, poetry, and authentic experience will involve everything progress would extirpate, including the mythical personae of male and female and their danse macabre:
For this northern will to become I—free to excavate and interrogate definition, the first labor was to sweep away the pernicious idea of poetry as embroidery for women.She writes against a still male-dominated literary establishment whose finest critics—she mentions Hugh Kenner and Harold Bloom—ignored Dickinson (Bloom, by the way, has since written at length about Dickinson, much in Howe's spirit, in The Western Canon and The Daemon Knows). But she writes still more bitterly against what she sees as the trivialization of Dickinson by feminist critics who ostensibly set out to rescue the poet from oblivion; mocking Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar—somewhat unfairly, I think—as heirs to Victorian "poetesses" with their modest domestic arts and their sentimental meliorism, Howe sets Dickinson before us as ferocious spiritual quester into the frigid sunless latitudes where only a select few precursors, male (Shakespeare) or female (Emily Brontë), went before her. Howe's stern judgment against the oeuvre of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her contemporaries (save her husband) sums up her attitude toward art's (ir)responsibility to public life:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose tragic sense of the injustices stalking Victorian living was a catalyst for her husband's writing and for Emily Dickinson, failed as a poet herself, because she thought formal linear progression of plot through forward moving time of a poem was enough for its telling. […] Good intentions prove nothing. Faith proves nothing. Velocity and force of violent motion, gunfire at every human soul in every blind nation struggling. Victorian scientists, philosophers, historians, intellectuals, poets, like most contemporary feminist literary critics—eager to discuss the shattering of all hierarchies of Being—didn't want the form they discussed this in to be shattering.For Howe, Dickinson descends, spiritually and aesthetically, from Puritanism: "Like Hawthorne and unlike Emerson, her conscience still embraced the restless contradictions of this Puritan strain." The contradictions include those between grace and predestination, individual isolation and social order, and savagery and civilization. Trying and failing to erect rigid barriers against the spiritual chaos occasioned by their abandonment of Catholic rationalism and the social chaos created by their Utopian transgression into both nature and the nations of others, the Puritans exposed the souls gathered under their aegis to a nearly gnostic loneliness in a threatening and alien cosmos.
Howe's Dickinson aestheticizes Mary Rowlandson's ordeal in her captivity; more intellectually, she learns from Jonathan Edwards's later attempt to shock his congregation with violent language into a faith he could no longer reason them into. Howe argues that Dickinson's poetic experiments—the broken sonorities of her dash-scored lines, sometimes incomprehensible but always recognizably profound—derive from the same idea that motivated Edwards to compose a sermonic language that would compel rather than convince: "Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding." But Dickinson, unlike Edwards, did not aim to move an immediate audience, did not necessarily mean to communicate with her contemporaries at all:
The decision not to publish her poems in her lifetime, to close up an extraordinary amount of work, is astonishing. Far from being the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego, it is a consummate Calvinist gesture of self-assertion by a poet with faith to fling election loose across the incandescent shadows of futurity.Dickinson understood, according to Howe, that "social existence negates spiritual progress." Howe compares her to another isolata, another northern soul composing counter-Calvinist myth in the North Atlantic solitudes:
In the separate souls of these two women, once again the inhuman legalism of Calvinism warred with the intellectual beauty of Neoplatonism. Violence of the occult in Puritan thought. Twofold wisdom, rational and supernatural—ceaseless mythic advance of poetic composition. […] Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, two of the self-emancipated "little women" Nietzsche was so fond of scorning, often anticipate him in their writing.From the vantage of Shakespeare's history plays, Dickinson sees the Civil War slant: "All war is the same. Culture representing form and order will always demand sacrifice and subjugation of one group by another." From Robert Browning's "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,'" she derives a myth of the poet's doomed quest for life in a universe of death. For Howe's Dickinson, the terms reverse, so that life, social or natural, is constraint, and death means emergence into actual experience: "I must be obedient to the dominant social system until Death blows the door open. Liberation from life is Death."
Howe's is not an academic book. It is a poet's criticism, a subjective book as indicated by the possessive in the title. "Connections between unconnected things are the unreal reality of poetry," she writes. Unsurprisingly, then, I did not always follow her logic, especially as her method is often montage—juxtaposition of quotations from across time and space—rather than unbroken argument. Anti-logic is part of her argument, in fact: "Poems and poets of the first rank remain mysterious." The poet sees unity in contradiction and contradiction in unity, expresses the mystery of being. It would be false to the nature of poetry to reason about it, she implies. I agree, but I reject the literalism of taking this idea to its extreme in a militantly irrationalist or anti-mimetic literature like that of the poetic movement most associated with Howe, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. Often—as in, just for instance, Shakespeare and Emily Brontë—the best way to reveal the mystery is to dramatize it with clarity and beauty, not to redouble obscurity, to blow smoke through the fog, by writing willful gibberish that requires for its justification the museum curator's jargon-clogged tag. But I digress.
Dickinson's beloved correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, dominates the end of the book. Howe wants, on one hand, to save him from the condescension of Dickinson criticism, which seems to have regarded him as an insensitive male chauvinist; but he was, Howe explains, a fierce activist, abolitionist, and feminist; a collaborator with John Brown and a Civil War volunteer—a literal social justice warrior. On the other hand, he comes to stand, in Howe's telling, for the inadequacy of the social mind, however progressive, for the "lack of imaginative intensity" that characterizes his century of sentimental poetasters and false innocence.
Much of My Emily Dickinson unfolds as an explication of "My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun—," one of Dickinson's most obscure but compelling lyrics. Howe conjures its mystery rather than dispelling it—I understand it little better than I did before I perused her close reading—but the upshot (pseudo-etymological pun intended) seems to be, like that of Wuthering Heights, the cosmic inevitability that love, poetry, and authentic experience will involve everything progress would extirpate, including the mythical personae of male and female and their danse macabre:
Sadism knocks down barriers between an isolate soul and others. Violence forces reaction. That unity of souls may be linked to sadism is the sad riddle of the world.Such bleak wisdom was not actually unknown to Whitman, but Dickinson promises no higher unity, no eventual comprehensive view from some Hegelian plateau that will redeem the pain, as Walt occasionally does. Sometimes all the solution we can ask is for someone else to see the sad riddle too.
July 4, 2021
I find a lot of “modern” criticism difficult to read because the critics are obsessed with theory, 14-letter words, and abstraction in lieu of directly addressing the text in front of them: the parade of the supercilious. Howe is difficult because she leaves gaps in her approach, she jumps, she pulls strange threads. Is this really an examination of Dickinson, Edwards and others, or rather an exploration of Howe’s consciousness and how she sees what she reads? You tell me.
November 16, 2019
Honestly, this book was awful. I had high hopes for it, given the "place" it seems to occupy in works by poets about poets. I did not come away with anything that would help me know and understand Emily Dickinson. Just a bowl of Mumbo Gumbo.
April 20, 2024
A magnificent and slow read. I can only tell to read R. Browning’s Roland Childe, Shakespeare’s historical plays (and Lear), and Cooper’s Deerslayer before undertaking this book. Having not done my homework, I could barely keep up with Howe.
November 9, 2017
I think I must be missing something here, because this was awful. I understand that Howe is trying to bring a poetic style into her prose, is choosing to treat the subject matter in the way one might treat a poem, as a counterpoint to a more traditional analysis where a point is made, evidence, then made again. Maybe I'm just not a poet enough in my soul to understand but I have to admit that, for me, the style of delivery served to obscure the meaning more than clarify it. I don't read an analytical text to come away more confused. Again, the fault is probably in my reading but give me straightforward and clear analysis any day.
March 26, 2020
Lo intenté.
Me pareció absolutamente sin asunto, forzado, desordenado en un mal sentido, lleno de cabos sueltos.
Pero quizá soy yo, por supuesto.
Voy a dejarlo ahí y quizá vuelva en un par de años.
Quizá no.
Como sea, la poesía de Howe me dejó la misma sensación.
Qué oportunidad perdida para hacer un gran ensayo sobre una obra tan genial como la de Dickinson.
Me pareció absolutamente sin asunto, forzado, desordenado en un mal sentido, lleno de cabos sueltos.
Pero quizá soy yo, por supuesto.
Voy a dejarlo ahí y quizá vuelva en un par de años.
Quizá no.
Como sea, la poesía de Howe me dejó la misma sensación.
Qué oportunidad perdida para hacer un gran ensayo sobre una obra tan genial como la de Dickinson.
January 3, 2011
I love love love Susan Howe and love love love Emily Dickinson to the 10th power: so my thrill in reading this book was that of a child discovering a candy cottage with no witch! Probably best read tho' by people familiar with both writers (and already loving them).
Ellie NYC
Ellie NYC
April 29, 2022
Wow. Susan Howe is extraordinary—her book…somewhere in the universe something must have happened when she wrote it. Independent of her. Like an enormous sound moved through the darkness or a door that had never been opened somehow did and the view inside (or outside) was beautiful. I deeply admire this book.
I understand what some readers suggest about following the text. I was not bothered by the style, felt Howe herself made an argument for it in her assertion that Dickinson pulled from reading—adding, subtracting…. Howe is making a composition herself here, in fact a piece of art—a collage/montage/poem/essay. I accepted this and let myself be led, no I was grateful to be led through Howe’s imagination and expansive, careful (meaning with care), bold, beautiful mind and in a sense her version of Dickinson’s imagination/intellect.
This book is an experience.
I understand what some readers suggest about following the text. I was not bothered by the style, felt Howe herself made an argument for it in her assertion that Dickinson pulled from reading—adding, subtracting…. Howe is making a composition herself here, in fact a piece of art—a collage/montage/poem/essay. I accepted this and let myself be led, no I was grateful to be led through Howe’s imagination and expansive, careful (meaning with care), bold, beautiful mind and in a sense her version of Dickinson’s imagination/intellect.
This book is an experience.
February 10, 2018
This book is an amazing essay on Emily Dickinson poetry that not only focuses on her work but in her influences within he American Civil War repositioning her as one of the most important and indispensable American poet. (From 12/04/2017)
Re-reading this amazing essay help us understand how American puritanism, as a left over of the colonial Calvinism, is still ruining this country. Or, maybe we have always embraced such despicable form of dehumanization and cruelty. (From 02/10/2018)
Re-reading this amazing essay help us understand how American puritanism, as a left over of the colonial Calvinism, is still ruining this country. Or, maybe we have always embraced such despicable form of dehumanization and cruelty. (From 02/10/2018)
September 22, 2019
Creative lit crit also doubling as critique of lit crit with an in-depth analysis of Emily Dickinson’s life & poetry relying upon erudite study of context? Hello. Sign me up. Howe also stops you dead in your tracks page after page with philosophically complicated thoughts conveyed in three to four word sentences. A gorgeous book—work of art—Rather.
March 21, 2018
While it was the most difficult book of its size that I've read in a while, I found it highly rewarding. There are plenty of moments that enlighten the basic connections between such people/things as Dickinson, Emily Bronte, the Civil War, Puritanism, Calvinism, Robert and EB Browning, and Shakespeare, but the book's real work is the very intricate lyric connections that she makes both within and without Dickinson's texts. It's difficult work for the reader to make -- there are very few underlined arguments, and at some point you need to surrender reading it like an essay and embrace reading it like a poem. Once you let this happen, Howe's writing becomes as meaningful and as powerful as you're willing to admit. This is both wonderful and quite uncomfortable, as though the work knows of the hardened layers of yourself that it's chipping away at.
October 26, 2020
Well this is a weird-ass brilliant book. Home with the plague, but at least I know my mind is fine, because I'm following Susan Howe's and her mind is like a meteor? Yes: I want to say "a meteor."
Anyway. When I tell students who bloodlessly imitate academic writing to, like, make it new!, I think I mean: like this.
Anyway. When I tell students who bloodlessly imitate academic writing to, like, make it new!, I think I mean: like this.
Read
December 2, 2022[Read for lyric/discontents course] a visionary account of emily dickinson’s work and themes of autonomy, devotion (religious and otherwise), literary antecedents and lineages. a really generative work on a poet who can feel completely blocked off
January 15, 2023
Aprendí bastante sobre las influencias que tuvo Dickinson para realizar su obra, pero no sé si soy un poco tonta o si este es un ensayo muy difícil, porque la verdad es que entendí muy poco de lo que leí jiji
September 4, 2012
My Emily Dickinson is a deliciously dense concoction about one of America's most celebrated and mysterious poets. Written by Susan Howe, herself a poet (although I'm not familiar with her work), My Emily Dickinson is rather more an exegesis of Dickinson's celebrated poem that begins My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - than a biography. If you don't know the meaning of the word exegesis fair warning, you're already in trouble.
Howe tosses historical, religious, theological and Transcendental references into her poetic mix like citron in a fruitcake, for which readers must already have developed a taste before approaching her little creation. I hold a divinity degree, wrote a Master's thesis on 19th century Quaker women ministers, spend most of my leisure time flipping through 19th century fiction and biographies ~ yet many of Howe's references were obscure to me! (Although at least I do know Ann Hutchinson's her-story thanks to my seminary schooling.)
In addition, Howe attempts to break open our understanding of the poet's process and thoughts via the use of her (Howe's) own non-linear prose and poetry. Words are jumbled together in sentences like dried ingredients into a cake batter, which (purposefully) lack the moisture necessary to give them meaning, context or solid form. Presumably the mix is intended to shift us into an alternate form of consciousness where we meet the Amherst genius on her own home turf, perhaps to share a "glass of sherry" (of which I caught a whiff while reading). Sometimes, as I just mentioned, Howe's technique worked for me. Sometimes I found myself throwing up my hands and saying: This is nuts!
However, I kept reading Susan Howe's odd My Emily Dickinson despite these challenges because quite simply I found that I had developed a taste for it. I'm not an ardent Emily Dickinson fan (although I'm fast becoming one as I make my way through The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson) so whether Howe's work captures the essence of "the Belle of Amherst" or not I can't say. The bottom line for me: this little concoction about Emily Dickinson is as delicious and dense as a fruitcake, and, like those who consume that curious cake, readers will either love Howe's writing or hate it. There is no in-between, which, I suspect, was the same for the compelling and curious little "wren" of a woman, whom Howe serves up as My Emily Dickinson
Howe tosses historical, religious, theological and Transcendental references into her poetic mix like citron in a fruitcake, for which readers must already have developed a taste before approaching her little creation. I hold a divinity degree, wrote a Master's thesis on 19th century Quaker women ministers, spend most of my leisure time flipping through 19th century fiction and biographies ~ yet many of Howe's references were obscure to me! (Although at least I do know Ann Hutchinson's her-story thanks to my seminary schooling.)
In addition, Howe attempts to break open our understanding of the poet's process and thoughts via the use of her (Howe's) own non-linear prose and poetry. Words are jumbled together in sentences like dried ingredients into a cake batter, which (purposefully) lack the moisture necessary to give them meaning, context or solid form. Presumably the mix is intended to shift us into an alternate form of consciousness where we meet the Amherst genius on her own home turf, perhaps to share a "glass of sherry" (of which I caught a whiff while reading). Sometimes, as I just mentioned, Howe's technique worked for me. Sometimes I found myself throwing up my hands and saying: This is nuts!
However, I kept reading Susan Howe's odd My Emily Dickinson despite these challenges because quite simply I found that I had developed a taste for it. I'm not an ardent Emily Dickinson fan (although I'm fast becoming one as I make my way through The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson) so whether Howe's work captures the essence of "the Belle of Amherst" or not I can't say. The bottom line for me: this little concoction about Emily Dickinson is as delicious and dense as a fruitcake, and, like those who consume that curious cake, readers will either love Howe's writing or hate it. There is no in-between, which, I suspect, was the same for the compelling and curious little "wren" of a woman, whom Howe serves up as My Emily Dickinson
July 31, 2023
READING VLOG
"𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦. 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘴 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳. 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘱𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘮. 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘯𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯…"
Life is but a list of tireless dedications. Some failed, and some so stout with amorous confidence and nonchalance that it goes beyond the combative arguments over the chicken or the egg, fate or destiny, it just is.
Here, Howe expresses so much intent, knowledge, and power to Dickinson's poetry. Linking her work through the letters of other writers that shared her spirits.
As an introduction to Dickinson's poetry, this was a generous gesture in a deep reading of her work from a feminist lens among her contemporary colonial male writers that spited her.
She lived through the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination. She lived through one of the deaths of the Brontë sisters. She loved Shakespeare. She was agoraphobic. She was so quiet and mysterious yet her mind was loud and explosive in its inquisitive nature. She "𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘴 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯."
Passion lives within Howe's prose in her academic brilliance and her trusted feelings in texts she knows so well. She cares so much and you can tell. What a beauty it is to dedicate your life to the work of a single writer, to understand their world in 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.
"𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦. 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘴 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳. 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘱𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘮. 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘯𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯…"
Life is but a list of tireless dedications. Some failed, and some so stout with amorous confidence and nonchalance that it goes beyond the combative arguments over the chicken or the egg, fate or destiny, it just is.
Here, Howe expresses so much intent, knowledge, and power to Dickinson's poetry. Linking her work through the letters of other writers that shared her spirits.
As an introduction to Dickinson's poetry, this was a generous gesture in a deep reading of her work from a feminist lens among her contemporary colonial male writers that spited her.
She lived through the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination. She lived through one of the deaths of the Brontë sisters. She loved Shakespeare. She was agoraphobic. She was so quiet and mysterious yet her mind was loud and explosive in its inquisitive nature. She "𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘴 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯."
Passion lives within Howe's prose in her academic brilliance and her trusted feelings in texts she knows so well. She cares so much and you can tell. What a beauty it is to dedicate your life to the work of a single writer, to understand their world in 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.
Read
April 5, 2008My new light rail book. . .
But alas, I'm finding Howe's Dickinson not much more helpful than Lucie Brock-Broido's version. Each woman seems to think that the spirit of Dickinson is best served by epigrammatic enigmas--Howe's being typically declarative, Brock-Broido's descriptive. I imagine the underlying idea is that ED's concision demands a like economy in explicator and reader, but--but--in the case of a purportedly helpful book like Howe's, I think some translation might be allowed. --Particularly because Howe doesn't come off terribly well in the attempt to match ED's style. Where ED sounds Biblical and childlike and simple even in the midst of her brilliance, Howe's perfervid.
But I go on. Howe has done a mountain of research here, and she's clearly thought about it all a lot, so perhaps I'll glean something. . .
Having finished this, I feel somewhat more sympathetic towards Howe's intention. I still don't think that the pseudo-Dickinsonian utterances quite work, but I do like the pile of references Howe assembles to illuminate "My life had stood". . . and Howe does make her point about Dickinson's rebellious brilliance.
But alas, I'm finding Howe's Dickinson not much more helpful than Lucie Brock-Broido's version. Each woman seems to think that the spirit of Dickinson is best served by epigrammatic enigmas--Howe's being typically declarative, Brock-Broido's descriptive. I imagine the underlying idea is that ED's concision demands a like economy in explicator and reader, but--but--in the case of a purportedly helpful book like Howe's, I think some translation might be allowed. --Particularly because Howe doesn't come off terribly well in the attempt to match ED's style. Where ED sounds Biblical and childlike and simple even in the midst of her brilliance, Howe's perfervid.
But I go on. Howe has done a mountain of research here, and she's clearly thought about it all a lot, so perhaps I'll glean something. . .
Having finished this, I feel somewhat more sympathetic towards Howe's intention. I still don't think that the pseudo-Dickinsonian utterances quite work, but I do like the pile of references Howe assembles to illuminate "My life had stood". . . and Howe does make her point about Dickinson's rebellious brilliance.
July 18, 2008
I applaud Howe for transcending the (often) stiff critical constraints that limit the way we talk about poetry. To me, though, she tends to wander too much in her own prose. The result is a text that--while sometimes insightful (and often beautiful)--succeeds mainly in proliferating (this isn't the right word, but I can't think of a better one), rather than elucidating the lovely, enigmatic quality of Dickinson's work.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for the enigmatic. After all, that's what makes Dickinson so exceptional. I just...prefer to have a few more footholds? In my criticism, at least.
But perhaps this was Howe's intention. I'm not very familiar with her work, so I won't presume to know. I am looking forward to reading more of her poetry. I suspect that Howe is a far better poet than she is a critic. Which is certainly not a bad thing.
Overall, I enjoyed this book and was grateful for the recommendation.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for the enigmatic. After all, that's what makes Dickinson so exceptional. I just...prefer to have a few more footholds? In my criticism, at least.
But perhaps this was Howe's intention. I'm not very familiar with her work, so I won't presume to know. I am looking forward to reading more of her poetry. I suspect that Howe is a far better poet than she is a critic. Which is certainly not a bad thing.
Overall, I enjoyed this book and was grateful for the recommendation.
June 15, 2013
I loved this book. People have been telling me for years to read it. I wish I'd taken notes because parts of it just blew me away. One lovely thing was that I felt very close to Emily Dickinson, reading this -- I felt I understood something new and crucial about her that I hadn't before. Partly this comes directly from Susan Howe's putting her work and person in context, and I appreciated how she does that like a poet: juxtaposing quotes from various authors and religious speakers of the time, commenting on and connecting those works but in a fragmentary, lyrical way. To be sure, sometimes I grew weary of this style and wished she'd just come out with a complete thought in a complete sentence, but mostly it's very beautifully woven.
In many ways I simply didn't realize how f-ed up the conversation around Dickinson really was until fairly recently, and I'm grateful to this book for so elegantly pointing that out and making a new map of her.
In many ways I simply didn't realize how f-ed up the conversation around Dickinson really was until fairly recently, and I'm grateful to this book for so elegantly pointing that out and making a new map of her.
July 12, 2015
One of the most amazing books of literary criticism I have read. Howe weaves together several influences, including Shakespeare, Browning, James Fenimore Cooper, the Brontes, and others into an exploration of the deep forces motivating Dickinson's work. I have always loved Dickinson, but this book has given me a deeper and richer appreciation of her poetry, and opened fascinating avenues of interpretation. Howe's poetical style of writing applies a lyrical sensibility while maintaining a rigorous critical examination, a challenging but satisfying approach. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and did not want it to end. This book of less than 150 pages took a week of careful reading, but well worth the time.
December 2, 2023
A poet-critic staging a radical intervention in literary criticism. Revisiting My Emily Dickinson reminds us to always ask “whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence?” And to extend the question further: Whose order is shut inside the structure of criticism? Of genre? Of memory?
July 5, 2011
On this site, you may scroll down to read one for whom, "if you're to have any literary criticism on your shelf, this [Howe's book on ED] is a smart bet." Ah, why not just scrap it altogether?
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