Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-rnpqb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-29T21:24:44.822Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Emily Dickinson in Belles Lettres, Music, and Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Fred D. White
Affiliation:
Santa Clara University
Get access

Summary

If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her —

— E. D. to Higginson, 7 June 1866

… legend won't explain the sheer sanity

of vision, the serious mischief

of language, the economy of pain.

— Linda Pastan, “Emily Dickinson” (2000)

EMILY DICKINSON AND HER WORK have served as subject matter for poets and fiction writers, painters, sculptors, and composers going back to the poet's own lifetime. The protagonist in Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876) is said to have been modeled after the poet, a friend since childhood. Artistic works based on the poet have proliferated over the decades, yet have only very recently begun to receive serious critical attention. Bibliographic surveys include those by Klaus Lubbers (1968), who comments briefly on poems, novels, and dramas about the poet's life published or produced through 1957; by Carlton Lowenberg, who in Musicians Wrestle Everywhere: Emily Dickinson and Music (1992) cites hundreds of musical compositions based on Dickinson's poems; and by Jonnie Guerra, whose “Dickinson Adaptations in the Arts and the Theater,” appears in The Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998). Titanic Operas, an online bibliography of more than 150 published poems about Emily Dickinson, is accessible through the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives. In the introduction to her Emily Dickinson: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources, with Selective Annotations, 1890 through 1987, Jeanetta Boswell omitted what she terms “literary tributes to Dickinson” because “they seemed to say more of the person who wrote them than about Emily Dickinson” (she nevertheless cites poems about Dickinson by Hart Crane and Richard Wilbur).

Type
Chapter
Information
Approaching Emily Dickinson
Critical Currents and Crosscurrents since 1960
, pp. 176 - 186
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×