Heaped Words in the Void: Some Recent Dickinson Criticism

Abstract

Sharon Cameron. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.280 + x pp. Karl Keller. The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty : Emily Dickinson and America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. 340 + xiv pp. Rebecca Patterson. Emily Dickinson's Imagery. Ed. with intro. by Margaret H. Freeman. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 238 + xvii pp. David Porter. Dickinson : The Modem Idiom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. 316 + xii pp. In 1970 Willis T. Buckingham published a thorough and invaluable historical survey of the literary commentary on Emily Dickinson as the introduction to his Emily Dickinson : An Annotated Bibliography. He identified therein three major, and quite conventional, strains in that commentary: biography, scholarship and criticism. He identified himself with the academic predilection of our own day by deprecating biographical interests and applauding the efforts of scholars and critics. Now, there is of course, in some measure, good reason for this reaction. Buckingham quite correctly pointed out that in the first two historical eras of Dickinson commentary, "The Period of Todd and Higginson" (1890-1913), and "The Period of Bianchi" (1913-1930), biographical interests dominated both scholarship and criticism, producing on the one hand corrupt editions of Dickinson's writings, and on the other criticism "by epithet," evoking the legend of "the Nun of Amherst," and "calling her anything from the Gnome of Amherst to the American Sappho." In the third era, according to Buckingham, the era he entitled "The Johnson era" (1930-1968), biographical concerns receded from dominance and editorial and critical undertakings proved their superior worth. He was especially satisfied that the emphasis had switched from the life of the poet to her life as artist. Nonetheless, he continued to be worried by the persistent "primordial desire to peep behind Miss Dickinson's window shades," though he expressed the hope, almost the confidence, that "we are armed with Johnson's texts, Leyda's log, Rosenbaum's concordance, and a history of some excellent criticism among much that is flawed and irrelevant. We have, in short, the tools to seek the poet, Dickinson, and the wisdom to let the White Moth of Amherst fall where she may" (p. xxi).