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November
2005
Understanding Emily
Pomona College is the new home for The Emily Dickinson
Journal, devoted to scholarly inquiry into the life and work of the
famous 19th Century poet. |
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Story and photos by Mike Bernstein '08
She died in 1886 with all but a handful of her poems unpublished, but
today Emily Dickinson’s poetry and personal life are the subjects of
intense academic inquiry. And Pomona College holds an important place in
this discussion as the new home for
The Emily Dickinson Journal, a
preeminent journal in Dickinson literary criticism.
Pomona English Professor Cristanne Miller is the new
editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. |
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English
Professor Cristanne Miller recently became editor of the Journal, and completed the first issue produced at Pomona
in spring of 2005. Andrea Carter
Brown, who also will teach an advanced course in poetry writing next
year, serves as managing editor.
“As editor I get to see the most recent work that people around the world are doing,” says
Miller, who has been at Pomona since 1980. Miller notes that for the
forthcoming Journal she has received entries from Japan, Italy, Canada
and Poland.
Miller reads each entry as part of the peer-review process.
She decides whether the entry meets the Journal’s standards and then sends
the entry out to other prominent Dickinson scholars for review.
Dickinson wrote over 1,800 poems on a wide variety of subjects, and the
scholarly work that appears in the Journal also has tremendous breadth,
pursuing multiple angles on Dickinson’s poetry and life.
One such topic is the relationship between Dickinson’s handwritten
manuscripts and formally edited presentations of her poems. Since
Dickinson’s work went largely unpublished in her lifetime, it was left
up to editors after her death to interpret how to publish her marked-up,
hand-written manuscripts. Dickinson sometimes would write her poems on a
slant, write multiple versions of poems or add additional words at the
end of poems. Dickinson’s quirky style has bred debate about how to
faithfully represent her work in print.
 Another topic of interest for scholars is the biographical study of
Dickinson. Because Dickinson didn’t write a lot about her life, there
are still many questions left open.
Dickinson wrote two-thirds of her poems during the Civil War and lived
in the North -- Amherst, Mass. to be precise. Scholars are interested
in her feelings about the war, her ideas about slavery and to what
extent she thought of herself as an American as opposed to a citizen of
Amherst or a member of a particular well-to-do family. Scholars debate
the relationship of Dickinson’s very short, often quite personally
couched lyrics about psychology and philosophical questions to political
and national issues that occurred at the time of their writing.
“Although Dickinson has traditionally been viewed as a recluse who was
isolated from political and social questions in the world,”
Miller says, “more and more scholars are arguing that she was
keenly engaged with these questions.” Miller includes herself among
these scholars.
Dickinson’s sexuality is another matter of scholarly debate. Dickinson
was never married and never had children. There is clear evidence that
she was in love with a man late in her life but turned down his offer of marriage. On
the other hand, Dickinson wrote passionate letters to her sister-in-law
Susan Huntington Dickinson both before and after Susan married her brother. Scholars pay attention to
the relationship between Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Miller says,
“to understand a variety of poems as well as (Dickinson’s) sense of her
own life and world.”
 As editor, Miller is particularly interested in expanding
the Journal to encompass Dickinson’s relations to 19th-century American
studies as well as Dickinson’s impact on 20th-century poets.
In addition to multiple articles, Miller has written two books on
Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar and Comic Power in Emily
Dickinson, the latter co-authored with Suzanne Juhasz and Martha
Nell Smith. She also was an editor of The Emily Dickinson
Handbook.
The Emily Dickinson Journal, founded in 1992, is published twice
each year by
Johns Hopkins University Press for the
Emily Dickinson International
Society.
More about Emily
Dickinson
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