Apr 19, 2024 08:12 PM
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/article...ill-answer
INTRO: Forget the Emily Dickinson you think you know, that hermetic author of bedeviling sense [...] Say goodbye to the Belle and Recluse of Amherst, Mythic Emily, and every other epithet that scholars, biographers, and critics have coined to stoke the public’s fascination with a human sphinx.
Behold, instead, a woman who baked—a lot—for friends, family, and neighbors; who lamented that she didn’t receive any valentines at school [...] who was very often funny and used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family [...] and who, until age 35, traveled and visited friends, before poor health made traveling impossible.
Toward the end of her life, in 1884, she sent 86 letters to 34 recipients: the majority express thanks, others include a gift of flowers or food, and a handful convey condolences or congratulations. Her supposed withdrawal from the world—and readers’ continued interest with such a narrative—has an apocryphal dimension we must be willing to forego in order to see and hear the poet clearly, perhaps for the first time.
Edited by the scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024) promises to be the definitive edition of the poet’s 1,304 letters, expanded, revised, and annotated for the first time in more than 60 years. At least 80 letters have been discovered or re-edited since Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward published their edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1958.
As Miller and Mitchell make plain, “Editorial standards have changed dramatically. And Dickinson scholarship has exploded. Scholars were still debating the significance of Dickinson’s oeuvre in the 1950s, but her position in the pantheon of great writers is now secure.” In other words, there has never been a better time to revisit and restore the author’s charismatic, sensitive, and characteristically brilliant prose.
The new book’s extensive and considered introductory essay establishes Miller and Mitchell’s modus operandi, and carefully outlines the ways this version distinguishes itself from its predecessors. Among the editors’ contributions to Dickinson scholarship is a painstaking effort to correct the chronology of the letters that Johnson and Ward previously published. Even poems dated by R.W. Franklin, the leading scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, are identified only by year, or season and year.
As Miller and Mitchell explain, “A collection of letters that proceeds chronologically, however, requires greater precision than a year to establish a likely sequence of correspondence. Our redating, together with our annotation, indicates that Dickinson was writing in response to local and world events and to the visits of her friends, and we attempt to recreate that sequence of response.”
To undertake this delicate work, Miller and Mitchell set out on an investigation of poetic observation, relying on Dickinson’s own attention to the natural world... (MORE - details
SAMPLE (PDF): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/P...sample.pdf
INTRO: Forget the Emily Dickinson you think you know, that hermetic author of bedeviling sense [...] Say goodbye to the Belle and Recluse of Amherst, Mythic Emily, and every other epithet that scholars, biographers, and critics have coined to stoke the public’s fascination with a human sphinx.
Behold, instead, a woman who baked—a lot—for friends, family, and neighbors; who lamented that she didn’t receive any valentines at school [...] who was very often funny and used a prodigious number of exclamation points in letters to her family [...] and who, until age 35, traveled and visited friends, before poor health made traveling impossible.
Toward the end of her life, in 1884, she sent 86 letters to 34 recipients: the majority express thanks, others include a gift of flowers or food, and a handful convey condolences or congratulations. Her supposed withdrawal from the world—and readers’ continued interest with such a narrative—has an apocryphal dimension we must be willing to forego in order to see and hear the poet clearly, perhaps for the first time.
Edited by the scholars Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024) promises to be the definitive edition of the poet’s 1,304 letters, expanded, revised, and annotated for the first time in more than 60 years. At least 80 letters have been discovered or re-edited since Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward published their edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1958.
As Miller and Mitchell make plain, “Editorial standards have changed dramatically. And Dickinson scholarship has exploded. Scholars were still debating the significance of Dickinson’s oeuvre in the 1950s, but her position in the pantheon of great writers is now secure.” In other words, there has never been a better time to revisit and restore the author’s charismatic, sensitive, and characteristically brilliant prose.
The new book’s extensive and considered introductory essay establishes Miller and Mitchell’s modus operandi, and carefully outlines the ways this version distinguishes itself from its predecessors. Among the editors’ contributions to Dickinson scholarship is a painstaking effort to correct the chronology of the letters that Johnson and Ward previously published. Even poems dated by R.W. Franklin, the leading scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, are identified only by year, or season and year.
As Miller and Mitchell explain, “A collection of letters that proceeds chronologically, however, requires greater precision than a year to establish a likely sequence of correspondence. Our redating, together with our annotation, indicates that Dickinson was writing in response to local and world events and to the visits of her friends, and we attempt to recreate that sequence of response.”
To undertake this delicate work, Miller and Mitchell set out on an investigation of poetic observation, relying on Dickinson’s own attention to the natural world... (MORE - details
SAMPLE (PDF): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/file/feeds/P...sample.pdf
