Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours
by Marta Werner.
Amherst College Press,
125 pp., $35.00 (paper); available for free download at fulcrum.org/amherst
“‘It is finished’ can never be said of us,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, and certainly there is nothing finished about Emily Dickinson. Since her death in 1886, an army of poets, playwrights, biographers, filmmakers, cartoonists, editors, and literary gumshoes have celebrated her singular, heart-stopping poems while trying to decide what her intentions must have been and how we should read her.
It’s not easy. Without a definitive (“finished”) corpus of her work, she’s a perfect candidate for speculation, polemic, presumption, and fantasy. Famously she said that being published was “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.” As a result, only a handful of her poems were…
