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 human being with nature. When she died, she left over a thousand unpublished poems known only to a few friends. She wrote about the little things in life, making them big or at least significant. Although uneven in quality, her poetry still lives on, and she has her patches of pure genius.
She remains, therefore, a widely read and acknowledged US writer, although enigmatic and challenging. The publication under review amply lives up to the expected Cambridge standards: it is intended chiefly for undergraduates, consisting of 11 specialized contributions, mostly but not entirely, by US scholars. All of these are original, decisive and challenging, with a particular emphasis upon the poet’s relationship to her US cultural setting. There is also – what we so much need nowadays – an elucidation of Emily Dickinson’s hitherto rather obscure relationship with feminism, popular culture and class.
Emily Dickinson retains her relevance, even today, largely because, in her own lifetime – like Gerald Manley Hopkins – she dealt with themes, in both poetry and psychology, much ahead of her own times. Her essential genius, therefore, lies in her ability to transcend the limits of her own time, place and gender. She was rooted within her own domesticity and her own US culture; yet, also, she struggled, often successfully, into a poetic voice, immensely capable of retaining its meaning and its effectiveness on both sides of the Atlantic and in terms often lucidly universal, global and transcendental.
In that abiding context, therefore, we must welcome this fresh and revealing study into the poetry of one of the USA’s greatest women writers. In particular, this is a volume that seeks to indicate that Emily Dickinson was by no means entirely pre‐occupied, like a spider, with “spinning delicate webs out of a secret self”. Her poetry should also be related to her own contemporary US environment, so giving it – what is necessary for its permanence – at least the vestiges of insights into both transcendence and materiality. Language cannot be a self‐enclosed system. It should point to its own external environment, as well as, hopefully, to the needs and the expectations of the future. This new study of the poetry of Emily Dickinson serves to refute the idea that she was completely self‐obsessed. Her claim to enduring fame, perhaps, must rest on the residue of her meaning, globally, and relative to our own continuing quest for meaning and universality, in the elusive terms of Anglo‐Saxon poetry.
