Of Women, Poetry, and Power: Strategies of Address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorede, and Angelou (review)

Zophia Burr's Of Women, Poetry, and Power explores the critical reception of Emily Dickinson's work, not only for what it can tell us about the poet's rise to prominence as "the exemplary image of the true poet," but also as a basis for understanding the impact of Dickinson's canonization on the women writers who have followed in her wake (22). Burr's greatest strength lies in her agile synthesis of historical inquiry with the literary and theoretical analysis. She combines all three of these elements in her opening chapter, "The Canonization of Emily Dickinson," an exploration of the events, circumstances, and scholarly trends that built and have maintained the poet's status as a literary historical construction.

Burr unpacks the intriguing, often self-serving politics of authenticity that preceded the publication of some of the major editions of Dickinson's oeuvre, explaining that "since the first publication of Dickinson's writings in book form, each successive generation of critics has taken the editions produced by the previous generation as a sign of the limits of its predecessors' capacity to recognize and understand the 'real' Dickinson" (44). For Burr, however, this race to reveal the real, true Emily is flawed at its very core, primarily because it relies on a sloppy equation of her limited publishing record and relative isolation with romanticized notions of the "true poet," unconcerned with the accolades and aesthetics of her cultural moment, and free "to produce a distinct or singular voice that is private, truth-telling, and autobiographical" (2).

To underscore the popularity of this notion, Burr includes this brief passage from Louise Bogan's 1955 review of Thomas H. Johnson's edition of The Complete Poems: "To read Emily Dickinson in this new text, in which every idiosyncratic habit of spelling, punctuation, diction, and localism is reproduced, is to read her in a slightly different language. But that language is at last her own" (44). Bogan's review exemplifies for Burr the increasing tendency on the part of critics and other readers of women's poetry "toward a conflation of the genres of poetry and spiritual diary" (2). This perception, she contends, has resulted in several decades of scholarly and critical analyses which "privilege those aspects of [women's] work that can be read as self-expression and . . . devalue those qualities most fundamental to the cultural work these poetries engage in" (2-3).

If this tendency to devalue the "cultural work" undertaken by some women poets originated in an idealized vision of Emily Dickinson, and if that vision itself is a socio-cultural and literary construction distorted by the interests of her editors, survivors, critics and biographers, then not only must the critical assumptions that depend on this vision be reconsidered, but so too must the poets whose work has been assessed on the basis of those assumptions. Burr offers Of Women, Poetry, and Power not only as a revisionist or alternative literary history, but as a series of exempla, with each chapter demonstrating the deeper, more compelling readings that are possible when the burden of expectation (for truth telling, for self-expression, for singularity) is removed.

Indeed, Burr ends her first chapter (and begins her historicized re-readings of U.S. women's poetry) with a revisionist close reading of Dickinson herself. Possibly the most surprising and exhilarating portion of an already compelling chapter, Burr's line-by-line analysis of the piece that appears in Thomas H. Johnson's Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson as "Expanse cannot be lost—"reveals the ways that his and other editors' seemingly arbitrary methods for extricating the "real poems" in Dickinson's letters from the remainder of the text have served to reinforce the image of Dickinson's work as enigmatic and unfathomable, an interpretation that conveniently supported the popular notion that hers was...