Our Emily Dickinson

A tough Yankee thriftiness underlies many of Emily Dickinson's musings on fame. She drove a hard bargain with posterity. Against the short-term profits of the literary marketplace she held out for grander gains. In a poem written around 1862, she scorned the "Bullion of Today" in favor of the "Currency of Immortality." The wordplay wasn't only wry but prescient: More than a century after her death in 1886, her greatest poems display a startling currency. The rough-hewn, deliberately knotty stanzas, drawing on the rhythms of hymns and nursery rhymes, give them a compelling urgency. In their abrupt swerves, their jagged syntax, their eccentric punctuation — and particularly those notorious dashes — her poems aren't so much telegraphic as downright cybernetic. They could be e-mails sent by "Immortality" itself.

Dickinson's thrift led her to prize the small. Her eye was as economical as her verse. "It would have starved a Gnat — To live so small as I," she wrote. At the same time, out of that cherished smallness she spun the largest of worlds:

Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.

This fierce compression accounts in part for Dickinson's enduring appeal: She reduces herself, the better to make room for the rest of us in her imagination. Her very hiddenness offers unexpected intimacy, as though she were whispering our own secret thoughts to us, those thoughts we hide even from ourselves. This may explain too why she inspires such strong devotion, and why her admirers are often jealously possessive. In the poet Susan Howe's study, entitled simply "My Emily Dickinson" (New Directions, 160 pages, $14.95), this sense of ownership sounds loud and clear. But the book, first published in 1985 and now reissued with an admiring introduction by Eliot Weinberger, isn't quite as proprietary as its title suggests.

"My Emily Dickinson" starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops. Ms. Howe begins by linking Dickinson with Gertrude Stein, claiming both writers "conducted a skilful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary history." Nothing in her work suggests that Dickinson did anything of the sort; and to compare her spare and witty verse to Stein's verbose and boring self-advertisements seems misguided. Though Dickinson certainly lived in a "patriarchal" milieu, the term has grown stale. And to say that the poet's work was "ignored and misunderstood" by her contemporaries is misleading. Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems during her lifetime; she was unknown rather than ignored. Ms. Howe's recourse to ugly and meaningless jargon, such as "decreation" and "acutist," weakens her first chapter still further.

Later, however, Ms. Howe's true strength shows in her attention to particulars. On Dickinson's use of dashes, a device which annoyed many early critics, she notes aptly that these afford the "liberty of interruption inside the structure of each poem." The dashes provide a "hush of hesitation for breath." She is sensible too on the "Master Letters," suggesting that they are in fact "self-conscious exercises in prose" rather than the impassioned and desperate love letters they are usually taken to be. This interpretation is consistent with Ms. Howe's view of Dickinson. For her, refreshingly, Dickinson was neither the helpless victim of male supremacy, nor the cloistered recluse of legend, but a bold and confident explorer — an independent thinker as well as a poet of genius — who was keenly aware of the upheavals of her time.

Not only was she steeped in English literature, from Shakespeare and Spenser to Keats, Dickens, and the Brownings, but drew on it, sometimes quite subversively, for her own original purposes. This isn't so surprising, but in her remarks on Jonathan Edwards, whose Calvinist thought may have influenced Dickinson indirectly, Ms. Howe offers fresh insights. For her, Dickinson's decision not to publish her work was not "the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego," but a "consummate Calvinist gesture of self-assertion."

In the 23 years since this book was published, many new works on Dickinson have appeared that develop certain of the themes Ms. Howe first broached. Especially noteworthy are Judith Farr's wonderful "The Passion of Emily Dickinson" of 1998 (Harvard, 416 pages, $21), and the luminous "La prison magique" of 2007 by the brilliant French-Canadian scholar and translator Charlotte Melançon (Noroit, 196 pages, $24) — a work which should be translated into English.

Ms. Howe's study is by turns cranky and opinionated, genial and adventurous. That seems about right. This is, after all, "her" Emily Dickinson. But her close attention to the poems themselves takes us beyond any sense of mere possessiveness. Poetry, she concedes at the end, leads "to transfiguration beyond gender." Our Emily Dickinson would have agreed.

eormsby@nysun.com