My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe
"My Emily Dickinson" by Susan Howe is a complex exploration of the intersections between Emily Dickinson's poetry and the socio-cultural context of her time. Howe approaches Dickinson not merely as a subject of critique but as a fellow poet, engaging deeply with the intricate web of influences that shaped her work. The text is structured in three parts, with a focus on Dickinson’s poem "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," and delves into the religious, literary, and philosophical contexts that informed Dickinson's writing.
Howe emphasizes the significance of texts by other writers, including Emily Brontë, Jonathan Edwards, and various English poets, in understanding Dickinson’s poetic vision. She argues that Dickinson's poetry serves as a dialogue with these influences, revealing a tension between personal experience and the broader literary landscape. Furthermore, Howe challenges conventional feminist readings by suggesting that true understanding of Dickinson's work transcends simplistic categorizations of gender.
Throughout, "My Emily Dickinson" resists definitive interpretations, reflecting Howe's belief in the enduring complexity of poetry. The text not only celebrates Dickinson’s unique voice but also invites readers to engage with the layers of meaning that define her work, making it a significant contribution to the study of both Dickinson and feminist poetics.
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Subject Terms
My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe
First published: 1985
Type of work: Literary criticism
Form and Content
Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson meditates on the political, social, and cultural conditions that informed Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Howe’s work, though erudite, is a poet’s investigation into the poetic imagination rather than a critic’s analysis of poetry. Like Howe’s own poetry—or that of Dickinson—My Emily Dickinson defies any easy categorization. Howe’s text is not commentary; instead, it is an assemblage of meditations and citations from other works, compiled in an attempt to reconstruct Dickinson’s reading and poetic connections. With its lyric energy, it is as much a poetic essay as it is an essay on poetics. The most significant implication of Howe’s work is that Dickinson’s poetry is as informed by textual appropriations as it is by autobiographical events. Howe’s reading of Dickinson seeks to reinvoke the visionary capacities of Dickinson’s poetry.
My Emily Dickinson is divided into three parts. The untitled first part provides the context for the second and third parts, whose central focus is Dickinson’s poem “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” (c. 1863). Although questions of gender and difference are significant, Howe rejects superficial feminist critiques and programs that “relegate women to what we ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing.” Instead, Howe argues that there is a “mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living"; thus, the “conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.”
Although social and economic conditions define a life, a poet’s writing, Howe argues, can only be understood through the poet’s reading. For Emily Dickinson, her “life was language and a lexicon her landscape.” To move toward an understanding of Dickinson’s vision, one must read her in conjunction with the English poets and novelists Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Shakespeare as well as the American theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards.
In the book’s second and third parts, Howe commences a close reading of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun.” The poem, like any true poem, Howe argues, eludes any final or specific interpretation. Instead, it results from compression, masking, riddling, rewriting, pulling text from texts. The second part, titled “Childe Emily to the Dark Tower Came,” initiates an archaeological reading of the poem. The first of its two sections, “Archaeology,” places texts of Calvinist tracts by Increase Mather and Cotton Mather as well as Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative alongside Dickinson’s poems. These form the mythology of the region, which, Howe argues, reflects a region’s reality and thus informs Dickinson’s writings. Most important, however, are the religious tracts of Jonathan Edwards, which became the basic texts for the religious revival that swept the United States during Dickinson’s life. Howe asserts that Dickinson’s faith in the futurity of her poetry, which sustained her decision not to publish, is rooted in the Calvinist beliefs expounded by Edwards more than a century earlier in self-assertion and the belief in being elected for a higher purpose. It is this idealistic energy that allowed Dickinson to survive.
The second section, “To Imagination,” draws parallels between Dickinson and Emily Brontë. In both Dickinson and Emily Brontë, Howe sees the conflict between the “inhuman legalism of Calvinism” and the “intellectual beauty of Neoplatonism” at work to create a “twofold wisdom, rational and supernatural.” Society, for both writers, was a hostile territory; it doomed passion to conform to necessity.
“Childe Emily to the Dark Tower Came” provides an archaeology of the region and its dominant myths through specific texts. The third part, “Trumpets Sing to Battle,” discusses the literary texts that also inform Dickinson’s poetry. Howe begins this part with a comparison between Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and Dickinson’s poem. Both, written in the mid-nineteenth century at the time of civil unrest and war, written by masters of the dramatic monologue, concern the fates of nameless narrators faced with the paralysis of power as they wander in a wasteland of old myths, archaic language, and the detritus of the world.
Following this untitled introductory section, “Trumpets Sing to Battle” is subdivided into two sections. The first, “Architecture of Meaning,” provides an associative reading of Dickinson’s poem stanza by stanza. Here, as throughout My Emily Dickinson, Howe describes the textual appropriations and allusions that inform Dickinson’s poetry. The second subsection, “Thomas Wentworth Higginson: 1823-1911,” concludes the stanza-by-stanza reading. Focusing on the final stanza of the poem, Howe reads it in conjunction with an examination of Dickinson’s relationship with Higginson, her literary correspondent and mentor. What Howe makes clear throughout My Emily Dickinson is that there is no definitive reading of this poem—that any true poem defies criticism’s strategies of containment.
Context
My Emily Dickinson, like Howe’s poetry, raises central questions concerning the relationship of the literary avant-garde and feminist poetics. The issue of gender, for Howe, is not the defining element of her poetics. While the avant-garde and feminism need not be antithetical, Howe’s work does not support any reductive ideology, including that which implicitly establishes categories based on gender. Howe’s poetry and her works on poetics, such as My Emily Dickinson, explore the issues of power, domination, exploitation, and patriarchy—in the most fundamental of ways, her work is feminist. It does, however, depart from following a poetics that primarily and explicitly defines itself through the portrayal of women-centered experience.
Howe’s work breaks boundaries and defined genres. My Emily Dickinson resists any easy definition; therefore, it is easily neglected or marginalized. This is less a result of gender than it is of the relationship of experimental or avant-garde writing to writing that adheres to a poetic decorum. By turning away from a linear and hierarchical organization of argumentation, Howe’s writing acts to subvert various forms of domination. In understanding that language is a historical material as well as a spiritual source, Howe is able to embrace the feminist project of re-visioning the language.
Howe celebrates Dickinson for her adherence to her vision. The constraints placed on Dickinson are not dismissed by Howe, but those constraints are not transferred to the poetry—the poetry remains undiminished. Howe, like Dickinson before her, demonstrates a way of reading that is responsive and thereby shows her readers possibility.
Bibliography
Howe, Susan. “Women and Their Effect in the Distance.” Ironwood 28 (1986): 58-91. This article is, essentially, an extension of My Emily Dickinson, but with a focus on Dickinson’s family, her correspondence, and the relation of her correspondence to her poetry.
Naylor, Paul Kenneth. “Where Are We Now in Poetry?” Sagetrieb 10, nos. 1-2 (1991): 29-44. A discussion of Howe’s poetry as seen as a landscape of language in comparison to the work of the poets Wallace Stevens and Jack Spicer.
Perloff, Marjorie. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Perloff, in separate essays, discusses Howe’s poetry and My Emily Dickinson in relation to feminist poetics and Howe’s use of history.
Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. A collection of essays on noncanonical, experimental poets, including one on Howe. The disjunctive properties of these poets’ works are intended to empower their readers, making them active participants in the construction of meaning.
Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Compares Susan Howe’s work with that of the poets Michael Palmer and Charles Bernstein, employing poststructuralist theories.