r t l p n n t l D n n: L t r r R f r nt H r L f nd r (r v

Jane Donahue Eberwein

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 18, Number 1, 2009, pp. 110-113(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/edj.0.0198

For additional information about this article

Access provided by username 'Azure' (27 Jul 2014 03:49 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/edj/summary/v018/18.1.eberwein.html

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 1

110

conversation, and in this she echoes the theologian Horace Bushnell, who in 1849 startlingly averred that “‘language as an instrument’ is ‘wholly inadequate to the exact representation of thought’”(qtd. in Deppman 119), let alone truth. Chapter five explores Dickinson’s thinking about reading as a trope for female self-definition and negotiation with society, and chapter six treats death as the limit-thought that marks both our nearness to the sublime and our human inability to contain or think it.

Deppman anticipates, in his introduction, the objection that his approach might be considered ahistorical (10), and it is, I think, a weakness that the book argues that there are affinities with postmodern thinkers otherwise quite alien to Dickinson, but not why. How, indeed, did Dickinson come to reject both Common Sense and Transcendentalism—especially Transcendentalism? The answer has to involve yet further historicizing. My money’s on the long shadow of David Hume, the father of anti-foundationalist thinking and arguably the first pragmatist, but Thomas Brown, Sampson Reid, Alexander Bain, and Horace Bushnell, all discussed by Deppman, deserve closer study, too. What is clear is that there is now considerable critical agreement that Dickinson’s philosophical positionings have to be characterized as anti-foundationalist and anti-metaphysical. This book is part of a welcome historical turn in Dickinson studies. There is much yet to be done.

JANE DoNAHUE EBERWEIN

Leiter, Sharon. Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2007. $75.

Sharon Leiter has given us an enthrallingly readable new reference book on Emily Dickinson, her poetry and letters, her family members and friends, and her social and cultural backgrounds. Although Facts on File, Inc. reports on its website that it intends books in its “Cultural Companion” series chiefly for high school and college students and identifies this one as suitable for “grades 9 and up,” this substantial volume should become a treasured resource for teachers at all levels,

Book Reviews

111

indeed for anyone who delights in Emily Dickinson’s poems. While students are likely to zero in on entries for specific poems and be led by Leiter’s helpful cross-referencing to complementary information, readers already acquainted with the scholarly conversation on Dickinson’s work will savor Gregory orr’s foreword and the author’s introduction, admire the care with which Leiter develops her knowledgeable and perceptive biographical sketch of Dickinson, and applaud the years of painstaking research lovingly recapitulated in her acknowledgments.

Extended analyses of more than 150 individual poems (what Leiter identifies as “the heart of the book” [xiv]) appear in “Part II (Poems A-Z).” She includes poems most often anthologized or subjected to critical analysis, many of those flagged by Charles Anderson as among Dickinson’s greatest, and others that appear as happy surprises. one finds “Because I could not stop for Death - ” (Fr479) and “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers - ” (Fr124), of course, but also “Grief is a Mouse - ” (Fr753). Fear not that Leiter is providing lazy or intimidated students with all-purpose explications that will be plagiarized; what she offers instead are models of richly contextualized, open-minded, and actively engaged readings that reflect Leiter’s interpretive gifts as poet and scholar. Depending on the challenges each poem presents, she highlights issues of artistic choice, searches Dickinson’s dictionary for lexical insights, introduces elements of biographical and cultural context, considers manuscript evidence and editorial/publication history, and calls attention to contending ideas raised by literary critics. In her citations of scholarship, Leiter draws on ground-breaking new contributions without ignoring the heritage of the critical and biographical conversations that have preceded them. Entries conclude with cross-references to related poems along with research advice. Leiter’s insightful commentaries reflect her own poetic sensitivities, however, and go far beyond a mere recapitulation of other critics’ thoughts.

Readers will be grateful for Leiter’s attentive reading of “A Pit - but Heaven over it - ” (Fr508) in light of R. W. Franklin’s drastic reconstruction of manuscript evidence, and they are likely to appreciate her special interest in poems like “I reckon - When I count at all - ” (Fr533) and “The Poets light but Lamps - ” (Fr930) that best reflect Dickinson’s awareness of poetic vocation. A pairing that shows her gift for approaching each poem in its own terms is that of “Remorse - is Memory - awake - ” (Fr781) with “Renunciation - is a piercing Virtue - ” (Fr782), which follow in alphabetical sequence just as they do in Franklin’s and Thomas H. Johnson’s chronological editions. Although Leiter begins both entries by classifying these among Dickinson’s “definition poems” (cross-referencing the entry on that topic in the next section), she focuses her attention on each one’s distinctive points

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 1

112

of interest. For “Remorse - is Memory - awake - ,” there is the possibility of autobiographical reference, so she considers Richard Sewall’s linkage of the poem to Emily’s troubled relationship with Susan Dickinson, but she shows even greater interest in Robert Weisbuch’s focus on how the poem reveals its creator’s processes of thought. She also considers the way that Dickinson disassociates remorseful memories from guilt. Leiter’s experience as a writer leads her to speculate on alternative possibilities for how Dickinson might have treated her theme. She looks at personifications, punctuation, use of passive voice, the establishment of scene in the first two stanzas and its obliteration in the third. With “Renunciation - is a piercing Virtue - ,” by contrast, she begins with issues of poetic form and moves to observations on the imagery of blindness and self-mutilation before considering the counter-effect of the sunrise imagery. It is only at the end of this entry that Leiter calls attention to critics’ speculations on what “Renunciation” meant for Dickinson, and she ends with the observation that the poet’s characteristically “slant” approach to truth-telling accommodates multiple possibilities.

It is this bountiful section of illuminating poem analyses that will make this book important to Dickinson scholar-teachers as well as to the audience Leiter’s publisher intends. At present, we have no such compendium of readings but must rely on Joseph Duchac’s Annotated Guide[s] to Commentary (1979, 1993) and the few entries on individual poems in An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia, which i edited (1998). Leiter herself has obviously searched through much of the existing hoard of Dickinson scholarship (much of which is documented in her lightly annotated, selective bibliographies of editions and secondary sources), and she draws thoughtfully on this legacy for her interpretive readings.

She also bases her biographical sketch and entries for “Part III: Related Persons, Places, and Ideas” on this scholarship and accurately represents areas of both uncertainty and knowledge in current thinking about Dickinson. Some of these entries strike me as admirably informative, especially Leiter’s commentaries on Dickinson’s family members and friends. There is also an impressively developed entry on “Letters” to acquaint readers with the richness of Dickinson’s prose. The book features a wealth of illustrations (some of the photographs are taken by the author’s husband, Darryl Leiter), and the cover image of Emily Dickinson is Guillermo Cuellar’s new portrait.

As is inevitable with any reference work subject to limitations of space and series format, there are also regrettable omissions. Having spotted the entry on “Capitalization,” I confidently flipped through the book to look for one on the dash but found no such entry until it occurred to me to look for “Punctuation.” There is

Book Reviews

113

a well-developed entry on “Hymn form,” but none specifically devoted to meter or rhyme. Fascicles (or manuscript books) get remanded to a broadly inclusive entry on “Publication and editorial scholarship.” Many topics treated in An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia are missing here (figures of speech, relationships to other authors, responses to Dickinson in the arts and in various parts of the world, major critical approaches to her work)—no doubt because this reference is intended for a different audience. A few proofreading lapses are almost unavoidable in an information-packed work of this scope (misrepresentation of Bright’s disease as “a liver ailment,” references to “Robert” Sewall and “Doris” oberhaus and to “an unrequired earthly love”), but overall Leiter has blessed us and our students with a work of exceptional amplitude and understanding.