What makes Emily Dickinson such a fascinating poet? Although
she left no personal poetics, she did define her own response to poetry
as an immediate sensual reaction: "If I read a book and] it makes
my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If
I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that
is poetry" (L. 342a). Presumably, her own poetry is most significant
not in what it communicates to a reader, but in what it does to a reader.
Is the continued popular success of that poetry not conclusive evidence
of...