Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference by Vivian R. Pollak (review)

In this diligently researched, beautifully crafted, and meticulously documented study of American women poets who positioned themselves in the long shadow of Emily Dickinson, Vivian Pollak extends the psychological approach and gender concerns of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984) to some of the poet's contemporaries (Helen Hunt Jackson and Mabel Loomis Todd) and successors (Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and – in less detail-Muriel Rukeyser). Her goal is not to document Dickinson's direct influence on her fellow women writers so much as to show how each used Dickinson "to clarify what is at stake in personal and professional battles of their own" (6). There are multiple stories here, often overlapping, of literary ambition, erotic exploration and concealment, and daughterly obedience or rebellion with respect to the authors' own mothers and the literary foremother who could neither be ignored nor understood. "In this book," Pollak declares, "I describe attempts to normalize a poet who refuses to be normalized" (263) and concludes that "Dickinson represents the intimacies of difference: the sociability that draws us together and the profound self-absorption that keeps us apart" (266).

A strength of this book is Pollak's care in reminding her readers of Dickinson's changing reputation over the course of this narrative. Of her subjects, only Jackson directly met the reclusive poet, and Pollak reminds us that when she chose "Success" for A Masque of Poets, "H. H." had access to a relatively small, unrepresentative sampling of poems: those made available to her by Thomas Wentworth Higginson along with the few Dickinson herself shared in letters (nature poems, chiefly, that were wholly unreflective of Dickinson's psychologically charged writings). Mabel Loomis Todd had access to many poem manuscripts in their original fascicle arrangements; she had also corresponded with the poet and spent much time at the Homestead without meeting her. Marianne Moore probably read Dickinson first as a Bryn Mawr senior, necessarily relying on Todd's edition, and then gradually amplifying that with Bianchi's collections and memoirs, supplemented by Josephine Pollitt and Genevieve Taggard's 1930 biographies. An important development for Muriel Rukeyser was Millicent Todd Bingham's Bolts of Melody. Sylvia Plath's mother, an enthusiastic Dickinson reader, raised her daughter to read poems available by mid-century, and Ted Hughes treated his wife to the Johnson edition as a birthday gift that increased their shared admiration for Dickinson. In her treatment of Elizabeth Bishop, Pollak calls attention to the influence of Theodora Van Wagenen Ward with Emily Dickinson's Letters to Doctor and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland, which Bishop reviewed, and Rebecca Patterson with The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, which she also reviewed, though scathingly.

Our Emily Dickinsons is not intended to offer groundbreaking perspectives on Dickinson's poetry nor, aside from the chapter on Jackson, on internal conflicts that caused her to avoid self-exposure as a poet even as she laid the groundwork for her poems' survival. It also avoids stretching evidence to claim Dickinson as the prime inspiration for any of these other writers. Rather, Pollak focuses on women writers who tried to make sense of their most notable progenitor's psychological complexities and professional choices based on incomplete, flawed, but ever-expanding texts and novelistic life sketches. Their own complex situations drove their reactions. Carefully safeguarding her own and her husband's deviations from genteel respectability, Todd found it useful to represent Dickinson as a brilliantly gifted but quietly content home-keeping woman who suffered no romantic disaster and who simply chose to circulate poems only among close friends. Plath, with her driving ambition, struggled to comprehend Dickinson's apparent lack of that passion. As a self-consciously heterosexual woman intent on establishing herself as wife and mother as well as author, Plath felt entitled to greater amplitude of personal fulfillment. Bishop, cautiously self-protective in the Cold War environment that punished deviance from...