Most Americans, whether poets, scholars or simply readers, may think they have a handle on Emily Dickinson. After all, she is, on all counts, our best-loved poet. But she is also our most trivialized—the Shut-In, the Lady in White, the Rejected Lover, the Clandestine Lesbian, the Writer Who Never Published.

RC Allen puts Emily Dickinson’s work in an entirely new perspective, looking less at the historical personage named Emily than at the cosmic self she cherished, “ED.” To do so, he reexamines characteristic examples of her work, including many poems that may come as surprises to those who have read Dickinson only in anthologies.

This is a brilliantly argued approach that looks at her poetics direct from the author’s transcendentalist vantage point, not from the heavily trodden route of biography or hagiolatry.

RC Allen taught at the University of Arizona for a quarter-century. His critically acclaimed books on Federico García Lorca and Pedro Salinas were followed by Yin-Yang Journal and Yang-Yin Journal, studies of the Tao Te Ching and the Maxims of Han Shan. He is also the author of Ambidextrous, a book of poems. This volume is the first of two studies of Emily Dickinson. The second, to be entitled Accidental Buddhist, will appear in 2006 from SARU Press International.

ISBN 0-935086-37-4
Paper $15.00
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