Every reader and every generation creates their own Emily Dickinson. This is the central thesis of Vivian R. Pollak’s persuasive new book Our Emily Dickinsons. For the modernist poet Marianne Moore, Dickinson represented a model for The New Woman. For Elizabeth Bishop, she raised anxiety, with her expressions of same-sex desire threatening “to out” lesbian poets like Bishop herself. For Muriel Rukeyser, Dickinson first symbolized the near failures of female artists, yet later, when Rukeyser’s career and life were more stable, Dickinson came to suggest a validating genealogy of American female poets. The many vacancies in Dickinson’s biographical record enable her to function as a kind of poetic Rorschach test, and interpretations of her life and work say as much about the readers and their contexts as they do about the poetry.
Today, Dickinson is a pop culture icon. Apple TV is in its third year of production on...
