A Book About What Emily Was Reading

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe: this was both an worthwhile and frustrating read. I would describe it as meditative, fractured scholarship because it's not organized in the classical sense. By design it's more scattered, anecdotal. That I didn’t mind. It was a poem-like weaving of scholarship on Dickinson’s mindset according to Susan Howe, what she was reading, what intellectual ideals she was exposed to, focusing heavily on Calvanism, Robert Browning, and Shakespeare.

I most enjoyed Howe’s sometimes cryptic scholarship. What I didn't enjoy after a time were the corpulent quotations, sometimes given without any context.

In the end, it felt as much like this was a private correspondence as it was some unfinished and messy intellectualism. Not accessible but not entirely a bad thing.