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“Her iconic legend and the few poems we were taught to read in high school are so familiar that we’re tempted to think we know the sum total of Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, the reclusive Lady in White, “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”… Anyone really swimming in her poetry will quickly find that she is unknowable, a spirit and a mind that cannot be contained or catalogued. With Dickinson, limitation gave birth to boundlessness.
Whatever her reclusive persona in the outer world, Dickinson was the vibrant heroine of her imaginative life. In her poems, she is a shape-shifter, taking up and shedding identities like a Shakespearean actor. The poems swing vastly between awe, morbidity, ecstasy, violence, Christian devotion, a profoundly modern nihilism. Behind her vestal virgin façade, Dickinson was the soul of rebellion.
Reading her poetry is like stepping into space. “My business is Circumference” -- her mind sought to absorb the cosmos. Her intellect is that of a philosopher and theologian; no other writer can touch Dickinson on the subject of Death, with whom she is on intimate speaking terms. Her art is one of compression. Gnomic and kernel-like, each of the best of her poems is the universe in miniature.
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