The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

Jerome Charyn, on the Powell's Books blog, writes a love letter to Emily Dickinson.

From the essay...

Some readers may be disturbed that I wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson in Emily's own voice. I wasn't trying to steal her thunder or her music. I simply wanted to imagine my way into the head and heart of Emily Dickinson. I decided to start the novel at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, even though many scholars and critics of her work do not feel that the time she spent there — seven or eight months in 1848 and 1849 — was particularly important to her. I disagree. Even though she rarely mentioned Mount Holyoke in her later letters, and was homesick from the minute she arrived to the minute she left, I still feel that the seminary shaped her in several subterranean ways. It gave her a sense of the Devil, and allowed Emily to hurl off the straitjacket of established religion. Emily was someone "without Hope," who couldn't declare her faith in the Lord. Her religion was much more private, much more particular.

Slowly, slowly, she turned towards the gods and devils of creation. Such gods and devils empowered her whenever she was scrunched over her writing desk in Amherst. She suffered a great deal and had to hide her own fierce intelligence, since women in a nineteenth century American village weren't supposed to think for themselves. And thus she had a dual life — obedient daughter, loving sister, and later a loving aunt, and all the while she smoldered inwardly and was a demon at her desk.

That's one of the reasons why each new generation of readers responds to her poetry in such a visceral way. These scrawls on scraps of paper — she often wrote on the backs of envelopes and at the bottom of old recipes — were a matter of life and death. We can feel her trembling in the words themselves. Her celebrated use of the dash wasn't some fanciful artifact. It was a weapon, as Emily moved from image to image without giving us a chance to breathe. Her words attack us, bite our heads off, even while they soothe and delight. There has never been another poet like her, male or female.