In this inventive work on Emily Dickinson's poetry, Cristanne Miller traces the roots of Dickinson's unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style, finding them in sources as different as the New Testament and the daily patterns of women's speech. Dickinson writes as she does both because she is steeped in the great patriarchal texts of her culture, from the Bible and hymns to Herbert's poetry and Emerson's prose, and because she is conscious of writing as a woman in an age and culture that assume great and serious poets are male.

Miller observes that Dickinson's...

Not confessional or autobiographical, not openly political or gender-conscious: all that Marianne Moore's poetry is not has masked what it actually is. Cristanne Miller's aim is to lift this mask and reveal the radically oppositional, aesthetic, and political nature of the poet's work. A new Moore emerges from Miller's persuasive book--one whose political engagement and artistic experiments, though not cut to the fashion of her time, point the way to an ambitious new poetic.

Miller locates Moore within the historical, literary, and family environments that shaped her life and work,...

"Words for the Hour" presents a readable and illuminating account of the Civil War, told through the words of poets North and South. From bathos to profound philosophical meditation and sorrow, the range of these poems illuminates the complexity of their era while also revealing the continuing power of this turning point in American history to speak to readers in the present day.

The volume is divided into three parts, each offering a different perspective on the poetry generated by the war. Part I samples the extraordinary range of poems written immediately preceding and during the war...

Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them is a major new edition of Dickinson's verse intended for the scholar, student, and general reader. It foregrounds the copies of poems that Dickinson retained for herself during her lifetime, in the form she retained them. This is the only edition of Dickinson's complete poems to distinguish in easy visual form the approximately 1,100 poems she took pains to copy carefully onto folded sheets in fair hand--arguably to preserve them for posterity--from the poems she kept in rougher form or apparently did not retain. It is the first edition...