Our Emily Dickinsons : American women poets and the intimacies of difference
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Our Emily Dickinsons : American women poets and the intimacies of difference
（Haney Foundation series）
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2017
- : [hbk.]
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [317]-336) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
For Vivian R. Pollak, Emily Dickinson's work is an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference that would be taken up by the generations of women poets who followed her. She situates Dickinson's originality in relation to her nineteenth-century audiences, including poet, novelist, and Indian rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson and her controversial first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, and traces the emergence of competing versions of a brilliant but troubled Dickinson in the twentieth century, especially in the writings of Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Pollak reveals the wide range of emotions exhibited by women poets toward Dickinson's achievement and chronicles how their attitudes toward her changed over time. She contends, however, that they consistently use Dickinson to clarify personal and professional battles of their own. Reading poems, letters, diaries, journals, interviews, drafts of published and unpublished work, and other historically specific primary sources, Pollak tracks nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets' ambivalence toward a literary tradition that overvalued lyric's inwardness and undervalued the power of social connection.
Our Emily Dickinsons places Dickinson's life and work within the context of larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America and complicates the connections between creative expression, authorial biography, audience reception, and literary genealogy.
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. Dickinson and the Demands of Intimacy
Chapter 1. Helen Hunt Jackson and Dickinson's Personal Publics
Chapter 2. Mabel Loomis Todd and Dickinson's Art of Sincerity
Chapter 3. "The Wholesomeness of the Life": Marianne Moore's Unartificial Dickinson
Chapter 4. Moore, Plath, Hughes, and "The Literary Life"
Chapter 5. Plath's Dickinson: On Not Stopping for Death
Chapter 6. Elizabeth Bishop and the U.S.A. Schools of Writing
Conclusion. Dickinson and the Demands of Difference
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
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