Tuesday, March 23, 2010

News at Eleven: Yet the voice [Jerome] Charyn has created

for Emily Dickinson doesn't truly suggest this range of personalities. This Dickinson is forever defined by--if not trapped in--the breathless yearnings of a (female) adolescent as imagined by a (male) novelist: we are led to wonder of the Emily Dickinson who read widely, and purposefully, in all the great poets she could get her hands on, including Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, and "Mr. and Mrs. Browning"--what of the poet who read with an eye for the craft of poetry? It is surely true that lines came like "lightning" to the poet--as to many poets; but it is also true that Dickinson worked and reworked her poems, often over a period of years, as she worked and reworked her brilliantly teasing letters.

from The New York Review of Books: Ardor in Amherst

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2 comments :

Alan said...

Here's an essay about a young poet's journey through craft and the lessons along the way. Please read it at http://wp.me/pC3Xj-dK

Rus Bowden said...

Hi Alan,

Your post is off topic here, but I let it remain--not the one under the obituary, though. The obituaries are important to the family and friends of the deceased poet, and often bring comments of grief and remembrance from them.

Thanks for stopping by.

Yours,
Rus