Volume 34, Number 5 · March 26, 1987
Lady in the Dark
By Christopher Benfey
Emily Dickinson
by Cynthia Griffin Wolff
Knopf, 641 pp., $25.00
The centenary of Emily Dickinson's death last year was filled with celebratory conferences, lectures, and poetry readings—precisely the kind of public occasions that she despised. (She avoided groups of men and women because, as she once explained, 'they talk of Hallowed things, aloud—and embarrass my Dog.') A hundred years can reclaim a poet, as Whitman has been reclaimed. Dickinson herself was merely voicing the taste of the times when she wrote of her near contemporary, in 1862: 'I never read his Book—but was told that he was disgraceful.' A century can also make a once-popular poet like Fanny Fern—who probably influenced both Whitman and Dickinson—seem impossibly remote. The year 1986—in this respect no different from many other recent years—also saw the publication of several new books on Dickinson's life and work. By far the most ambitious of these, Emily Dickinson by Cynthia Griffin Wolff, raises the question where Dickinson stands now, one hundred years after her death.
Review, 4077 words
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