Public domain photograph of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

A selective list of online literary criticism for Emily Dickinson, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the Modern Language Association Guidelines for Authors of Web Pages

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Literary Criticism

Belasco, Susan; and Kenneth Price. Spiders, the Web, and Dickinson & Whitman. from The Classroom Electric, 2001

Belasco, Susan. Foreground and Apprentices: Dickinson and Whitman, from The Classroom Electric, 2001

Brantley, Richard E. Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), is reviewed in the Wordsworth Circle, Autumn, 2005, by Robert M. Ryan

Bray, Robert. "Why Thoughts Are Better Than Music, or Emily Dickinson's Fascicle 18 as a Lyric Sequence" Paper from an MLA presentation on Emily Dickinson in 1997

Browner, Stephanie. Love and Conquest: The Erotics of Colonial Discourse in Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters" from The Classroom Electric, 2001

Burr, Zofia. "The Canonization of Emily Dickinson," in Of Women, Poetry, and Power: Strategies of Address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorde, and Angelou (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002). "Of Women, Poetry, and Power demonstrates how the canonization of Dickinson has consolidated limiting assumptions about women's poetry in twentieth-century America and models an alternative reading practice that allows for deeper engagement with the political work of modern poetry." Publisher's web site. At Google Books

Crumbley, Paul James. "Fascicle 1: The Gambler's Recollection" Paper from an MLA presentation on Emily Dickinson in 1997

Diehl, Joanne Feit. "Another way to see: Dickinson and the counter-sublime," in Women Poets and the American Sublime: Women Poets and the American Sublime (Indiana Univ. Press, 1990) Publisher's web site. At Google Books

Felstiner, John. "Earth's Most Graphic Transaction": The Syllables of Emily Dickinson. American Poetry Review, Mar/Apr 2007.

Finnerty, Páraic. "The Daisy and the Dandy: Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde." In Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2005 Apr; 9 (1): 63-87

Folsom, Ed and Kenneth Price. Dickinson, Slavery, and the San Domingo Movement from The Classroom Electric, 2001

Franke, William. "The missing all": Emily Dickinson's apophatic poetics [poetry and faith]. Christianity and Literature, Autumn, 2008; 58 (1): 61-80.

Freeman, Margaret H. An introduction to Emily Dickinson from the Literary Encyclopedia, 11 January 2005. On Letters (1842); Poems (1842)

Gilson, Annette. On the notion of circularity in John Ashbery and Emily Dickinson, From Twentieth Century Literature, 1998

GriffinWolff, Cynthia. A review of a 1987 biography of Emily Dickenson, Emily Dickinson National Review, July 17, 1987 reviewed by Thomas P. McDonnell

Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson. "Dickinson's Aesthetics and Fascicle 21" Paper from an MLA presentation on Emily Dickinson in 1997

Hubbard, Melanie. 'Turn It, a Little': The Influence of the Daguerreotype and the Stereograph on Emily Dickinson's Use of Manuscript Variants. Mosaic, Mar 2005; 38 (1): 115-32.

Lundin, Roger. A review of Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief. Reviewer David Yezzi notes, "given the housebound poet's hymnal meters, her biblical references, clipped Calvinist idiom, and enduring preoccupation with God, Jesus, suffering, death, and (her "Flood subject") immortality, the question persists: To what extent did Dickinson espouse the Congregationalist faith of her family and of her community?" Commonweal, Oct 9, 1998

Mayer, Nancy. "Finding Herself Alone: Emily Dickinson, Victorian Women Novelists, and the Female Subject." Romanticism on the Net, May-Aug, 2005; 38-39.

Perloff, Marjorie. On the position of Emily Dickinson in the canon, from the point of view of the theorists. "How, then, to explain the neglect of Dickinson on the part of post-structuralist theory? My own hunch is that it has to do with certain assumptions about poetic language and poetic process–assumptions that differentiate Dickinson from the Modernists and their Romantic precursors whose work remains exemplary for theorists from Adorno and Jameson to Cixous and Kristeva."

Smith, Martha Nell and Lara Vetter. Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem from The Classroom Electric, sponsored in part by U.S. Dept. of Education

Snider, Clifton. "'A Druidic Difference': Emily Dickinson and Shamanism," poems discussed include "I reckon--when I count at all--" and "Much Madness is divinest Sense." Orig. in The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 14 (1996): 33-64

Wardrop, Daneen Leigh. "'The Nameless Pod' and Other Miscarriages of Language in Dickinson's Fascicle 28" Paper from an MLA presentation on Emily Dickinson in 1997

Werner, Marta. "'The Soul's Distinct Connection': Emily Dickinson, Photography, and 19th-Century American Culture" from The Classroom Electric, 2001

Werner, Marta. Writing Otherwise: Emily Dickinson and the Scenes/Surfaces of Writing" from The Classroom Electric, 2001

Wilson, James Matthew. "Representing the Limits of Judgment: Yvor Winters, Emily Dickinson and Religious Experience." Christianity and Literature, Spring, 2007; 56 (3): 397-413.

Wineapple, Brenda. A review of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Reviewed in The New Yorker by Judith Thurman, August 4, 2008.

Zapedowska, Magdalena. "Wrestling with silence: Emily Dickinson's Calvinist God." The American Transcendental Quarterly, March, 2006

Introduction, lighter reading

An extended introduction to Emily Dickinson, from the Poetry Foundation

Excerpts from reputable critical authorities on Emily Dickinson, with sections on Dickinson's Life; On 258 ("There's a certain Slant of light"); On 280 ("I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"); On 303 ("The Soul selects her own Society"); On 341 ("After great pain, a formal feeling comes--"); On 465 ("I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--"); On 508 ("I'm ceded--I've stopped being Theirs); On 520 ("I started Early--Took my Dog--"); An Essay by Russell Reising on "I started Early--Took my Dog--"; On 601 ("A still--Volcano--Life--"); On 613 ("They shut me up in Prose--"); On 657 ("I dwell in Possibility--"); On 712 ("Because I could not stop for Death"); On 754 ("My Life had Stood--a Loaded Gun--"); On 1072 ("Title divine--is mine!"); On 1129 ("Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--"); On 1705 ("Volcanoes be in Sicily"); About Dickinson's "Fascicles"; About Dickinson's Use of the Dash; "Why Dickinson Didn't Title." From Modern American Poetry at Univ. of Illinois

The Dickinson Electronic Archives. Emily Dickinson's Correspondence, Teaching Emily Dickinson, Responses to Dickinson's Writing, Critical Resources. From the Univ. of Virginia.

A brief biography of Emily Dickinson with links to some of her best known poems: Because I could not stop for Death (712); Fame is a fickle food (1659); I cannot live with You (No. 640); I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280); I heard a Fly buzz (465); I measure every Grief I meet (561); I taste a liquor never brewed; I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260); The Soul unto itself (683); There's a certain Slant of light (258); To make a prairie (1755), from the Academy of American Poets.

"How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay," by Philip F. Gura. About the discovery at an online auction of "what may be the second known photograph of Emily Dickinson." In Commonplace, vol. 4, no. 2, January 2004

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