First published 1993
Sharon Cameron challenges how readers have understood Emily Dickinson's poetry for over a century. While scholars have treated Dickinson's verses as individual pieces, Cameron returns to the manuscript notebooks where the poet originally bound her work. She argues that Dickinson arranged her poems deliberately within these fascicles, creating connections and conversations between pieces that disappear when poems stand alone. Cameron identifies a pattern of deliberate ambiguity throughout Dickinson's work. The poet refused to choose between alternative words, left poem boundaries unclear, and never indicated whether readers should approach her work as separate lyrics or connected sequences. This refusal to make definitive choices becomes both a creative method and a philosophical stance. Cameron builds on her previous scholarship in Lyric Time to reveal how Dickinson's resistance to conventional decisions produced a body of work that embraces uncertainty and multiplicity rather than singular meaning.
Genres: biography, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, criticism, 21st-century, 19th-century, academic
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: multiplicity, unreliable-narrator
Period: 19th-Century, 20th-Century
271 pages · Paperback · University of Chicago Press