The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830‐1886) is, of course, a major figure in the evolution of a distinctively US literature, essentially as a poet. She helps to redeem it from its more masculine and forceful characteristics, of the “frontier” mentality, brashness and preoccupation with the external and the realistic. At any rate, she is still arguably the USA’s greatest woman poet: living and writing in an almost complete obscurity in the small Massachusetts town of Amherst. She was alone, unhappy, yet utterly articulate. It was poetry shrunk to the scale of domesticity; yet also poignant and impressive, the communion of a single, isolated...