Nonfiction

Emily Dickinson has achieved the rarest of distinctions for a nineteenth-century poet (and a female one at that): lasting, evolving fame. Having escaped the confines of academic study and school syllabi, Dickinson has become a popular figure beloved by a wide and varied readership and the subject of films, television programs, and fan clubs. She is acknowledged not only as an important American poet, but as one of the greatest poets of any time and place. Dickinson understands the power and the magic of words and knows how to breathe life into metaphor. Her writing is associative and allusive, frequently enigmatic or ambiguous, and always peculiarly original. Poetry was for her not just a craft or a vocation (though it was certainly both of these),…