The focus of this title, first published in 1989, begins with Dickinson's poems themselves and the ways in which we read them. There are three readings for each of the six poems under consideration that are both complementary and provocative. The selected poems show Dickinson speaking of herself in increasingly wider relationships - to love, the outside world, death and eternity - and are grouped together to reveal her overlapping attitudes and feelings. Other topics discussed range from general epistemological and critical considerations to the poet's self-identification and the process of reading her poetry as a feminist critic. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

The focus of this title, first published in 1989, begins with Dickinson's poems themselves and the ways in which we read them. There are three readings for each of the six poems under consideration that are both complementary and provocative. The selected poems show Dickinson speaking of herself in increasingly wider relationships - to love, the outside world, death and eternity - and are grouped together to reveal her overlapping attitudes and feelings. Other topics discussed range from general epistemological and critical considerations to the poet's self-identification and the process of reading her poetry as a feminist critic. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

Widely considered the definitive edition of Emily Dickinson's poems, this landmark collection presents her poems here for the first time "as she preserved them," and in the order in which she wished them to appear. It is the only edition of Dickinson's complete poems to distinguish clearly those she took pains to copy carefully onto folded sheets in fair hand-presumably to preserve them for posterity-from the ones she kept in rougher form. It is also unique among complete editions in presenting the alternate words and phrases Dickinson chose to use on the copies of the poems she kept, so that we can peer over her shoulder and see her composing and reworking her own poems. The world's foremost scholar of Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller, guides us through these stunning poems with her deft and unobtrusive notes, helping us understand the poet's quotations and allusions, and explaining how she composed, copied, and circulated her poems. Miller's brilliant reordering of the poems transforms our experience of them. A true delight, this award-winning collection brings us closer than we have ever been to the writing practice of one of America's greatest poets. With its clear, uncluttered page and beautiful production values, it is a gift for students of Emily Dickinson and for anyone who loves her poems.

In this inventive work on Emily Dickinson's poetry, Cristanne Miller traces the roots of Dickinson's unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style, finding them in sources as different as the New Testament and the daily patterns of women's speech. Dickinson writes as she does both because she is steeped in the great patriarchal texts of her culture, from the Bible and hymns to Herbert's poetry and Emerson's prose, and because she is conscious of writing as a woman in an age and culture that assume great and serious poets are male. Miller observes that Dickinson's language deviates from normal construction along definable and consistent lines; consequently it lends itself to the categorical analysis of an interpretive "grammar" such as the one she has constructed in this book. In order to facilitate the reading of Dickinson's poems and to reveal the values and assumptions behind the poet's manipulations of language, Miller examines in this grammar how specific elements of the poet's style tend to function in various contexts. Because many, especially modernist, poets use some of the same techniques, the grammar throws light on the poetic syntax of other writers as well. In the course of her analysis, Miller draws not only on traditional historical and linguistic sources but also on current sociolinguistic studies of gender and speech and on feminist descriptions of women's writing. Dickinson's language, she concludes, could almost have been designed as a model for twentieth-century theories of what a women's language might be. As a critical examination of the relationship between linguistic style and literary identity in America's greatest woman poet, Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar provides a significant addition to feminist literary studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson is designed to engage, inform, interest, and delight students and scholars of Emily Dickinson, of nineteenth-century US literature and cultural studies, of American poetry, and of the lyric. It also establishes potential agendas for future work in the field of Dickinson studies. This is the first collection on Dickinson to foreground the material and social culture of her time while opening new windows to interpretive possibility in ours. The volume strives to balance Dickinson's own center of gravity in the material culture and historical context of nineteenth-century Amherst with the significance of important critical conversations of our present, thus understanding her poetry with the broadest "Latitude of Home"-as she puts it in her poem "Forever-is composed of Nows." Debates about the lyric, about Dickinson's manuscripts and practices of composition, about the viability of translation across language, media, and culture, and about the politics of class, gender, place, and race circulate through this volume. These debates matter to our moment but also to our understanding of hers. Although rooted in the evolving history of Dickinson criticism, the chapters foreground truly new original research and a wide range of innovative critical methodologies, including artistic responses to her poetry by musicians, visual artists, and other poets. The suppleness and daring of Dickinson's thought and uses of language remain open to new possibilities and meanings, even while they are grounded in contexts from over 150 years ago, and this collection expresses and celebrates the breadth of her accomplishments and relevance.

Not confessional or autobiographical, not openly political or gender-conscious: all that Marianne Moore's poetry is not has masked what it actually is. Cristanne Miller's aim is to lift this mask and reveal the radically oppositional, aesthetic, and political nature of the poet's work. A new Moore emerges from Miller's persuasive book--one whose political engagement and artistic experiments, though not cut to the fashion of her time, point the way to an ambitious new poetic.

Miller locates Moore within the historical, literary, and family environments that shaped her life and work, particularly her sense and deployment of poetic authority. She shows how feminist notions of gender prevalent during Moore's youth are reflected in her early poetry, and tracks a shift in later poems when Moore becomes more openly didactic, more personal, and more willing to experiment with language typically regarded as feminine. Distinguishing the lack of explicit focus on gender from a lack of gender-consciousness, Miller identifies Moore as distinctly feminist in her own conception of her work, and as significantly expanding the possibilities for indirect political discourse in the lyric poem. Miller's readings also reveal Moore's frequent and pointed critiques of culturally determined power relationships, those involving race and nationality as well as gender.

Making new use of unpublished correspondence and employing close interpretive readings of important poems, Miller revises and expands our understanding of Marianne Moore. And her work links Moore--in her radically innovative reactions to dominant constructions of authority--with a surprisingly wide range of late twentieth-century womenpoets.