These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson
- ISBN-10
- 0393609316
- ISBN-13
- 9780393609318
- Category
- Biography & Autobiography
- Pages
- 304
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-02-25
- Publisher
- W. W. Norton & Company
- Author
- Martha Ackmann
Description
An engaging, intimate portrait of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest and most-mythologized poets, that sheds new light on her groundbreaking poetry. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, “All things are ready” and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely “at home” (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson’s interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2020-02-25
- - pages
- Paperback
- National Geographic Books
Similar books
-
The Passion of Emily Dickinson
By Judith FarrIn a profound new analysis of Dickinson's life and work, Judith Farr explores the desire, suffering, exultation, spiritual rapture, and intense dedication to art that characterize Dickinson's poems, deciphering their many complex and witty ...
-
The World of Emily Dickinson
By Polly LongsworthPhotographs trace the people and surroundings of Emily Dickinson's life, including her family's influential and active public life, the friends and relatives closest to her, and the growth of the town of Amherst
-
Positive As Sound: Emily Dickinson's Rhyme
By Judy Jo Small15 Mount Holyoke did have an instructor of vocal music, Harriet Hawes, and Dickinson sang for a half hour each day in Seminary Hall, probably with all or most of the student body A Musical Aesthetic 49.
-
The Music of Emily Dickinsonês Poems and Letters: A Study of Imagery and Form
By Carolyn Lindley CooleyLeonard Meyer amplifies this theory of the a›ective power of major and minor modes in his study Emotion and Meaning in Music. Here, Meyer confirms that from Plato down to the most recent discussions of aesthetics and the meaning of ...
-
Wider Than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson
By Barbara Dana, Cindy MacKenzieA revealing perspective on how Emily Dickinson helps readers cope with suffering Emily Dickinson is known as a poet who presses at the limits of perception and expresses in...
-
Emily Dickinson: A Biography
By Connie Ann KirkUsing updated scholarship and never-before-published primary research, this new biography takes a fresh look at a genius of American letters.
-
Religion Around Emily Dickinson
By W. Clark GilpinReligion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining ...
-
Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method and Meaning
Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method and Meaning
-
The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight
By Martha AckmannFor the first time, Martha Ackmann tells the story of the dramatic events surrounding these thirteen remarkable women, all crackerjack pilots and patriots who sometimes sacrificed jobs and marriages for a chance to participate in ...
-
The Value of Emily Dickinson
By Mary LoeffelholzThis is the first compact introduction to Emily Dickinson to focus principally on her poems and their significance to readers.