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Emily Dickinson
National Review, July 17, 1987 by Thomas P. McDonnell
Finally, Mrs. Wolff does not let usknow that the most perplexing vacuum in Emily Dickinson's life was not her want of love--or her aversion to it? --but rather the historical amnesia she displayed regarding the Civil War. It is supremely ironic that the poet along with whom Emily Dickinson encompassed the whole of American poetic form, Walt Whitman, would alone provide us with an exquisitely feminine consciousness of our greatest tragedy. Some of Emily Dickinson's letters and a few of her poems do show a certain stinging awareness of the conflict, but there is nothing even close to a real sense of our nation's anguish and the causes of it.
Leaving aside this grim omission,however, an unencumbered reading of Emily Dickinson's poetry must take into full account its irrepressible play of mind and words. Her great subjects were also her obsessions: love, and its rejection; nature, and its sacramental presence; death, and its almost desired inevitability; and, of course, immortality. She perceived the natural world in far lovelier and more vivid images than had Thoreau, and she circumscribed the darknesses that enclosed the guilt-ridden fictions of Hawthorne and Melville. Emily Dickinson was unique, an American original, and arguably our purest poet. Unfortunately, for all its appearance of substantiality, Cynthia Griffin Wolff's biography fails to advance the best of Dickinson studies today.
COPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
