Abstract

The Mind of Emily Dickinson

The article presents an overview of the books "Emily Dickinson: The Human Background of Her Poetry," by Josephine Pollitt and "Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson," edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. The proprietary attitude of Mrs. Martha Dickinson Bianchi toward Emily Dickinson and her poems has been both objectionable and unwise. Each devoted reader of Emily Dickinson's poems has his own conception of the mind in which those poems originated. Miss Pollitt offers no substitute for that conception, but she does provide-for it a useful framework- of fact. Her biography is not an altogether polished piece of work. The results of her ingenious research are not always held together in an organic fashion, and at times she introduces material the relevance of which is not apparent.