In near obscurity and artistic isolation, Emily Dickinson produced a paradise of poetry quite unlike her contemporaries. Through poems, letters, and critical articles, we will examine her philosophical temperament and aesthetic strategies. We’ll look at the historical and social context in which her work was created. We’ll pay special attention to the editing, defacement, and partial recuperation of the body of work for which she left no specific instructions. We’ll analyze how she experiments with voice, persona, syntax, rhyme, meter; how she appropriates from and corresponds with a variety of literary masters; how irony, humor, ambiguity, multiplicity, and ellipsis are the well-spring of her aesthetic. And how she deliberately constructs an anti-career in the service of her genius.

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