Martin W. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. — 160 p.Emily Dickinson is best known as an intensely private, even reclusive writer. Yet the way she has been mythologized has meant her work is often misunderstood. This introduction delves behind the myth to present a poet who was deeply engaged with the issues of her day. In a lucid and elegant style, the book places her life and work in the historical context of the CivilWar, the suffrage movement, and the rapid industrialization of the United States.Wendy Martin explores the ways in which Dickinson’s personal struggles with romantic love, religious faith, friendship, and community shape her poetry. The complex publication history of her works, as well as their reception, is teased out, and a guide to further reading is included. Dickinson emerges not only as one of America’s finest poets, but also as a fiercely independent intellect and an original talent writing poetry far ahead of her time.Wendy Martin is Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (2002).Life
The Dickinson family
A portrait of the poet as a young girl
Early ambitions, difficult changes
Preceptors
"Sister Sue"
A "Woman - white - to be"
Context
Religious culture: Puritanism, the Great Awakenings, and revivals
Industrialization and the individual
Political culture: expansion and the antebellum period
Social movements: Abolition and women's rights
Philosophical reactions: Transcendentalism
The Civil WarWorksSweeping with many-colored brooms: the influence of the domestic
Blasphemous devotion: biblical allusion in the poems and letters
"Easy, quite, to love": friendship and love in Dickinson's life and works
"The Heaven - below": nature poems
"A Riddle, at the last": death and immortality
Reception
"The Auction Of the Mind": publication history
Editing the poems and letters
Earlyreception
New Criticism
Dickinson's legacy todayGuide to further reading