If I could spend an afternoon with any 19th century American poet, it would be with the incomparable Emily Dickinson. I picture us sitting in her sunlit Amherst flower garden drinking tea. This woman in her white dress had a huge and hungry mind. I could learn so much from her. She would have much to say but would not say much. She would say – Read the poems. I would try not ask too many questions although I would have many questions to ask.
-The first question, was her self-confinement in her father’s home necessary for her poetic liberty?
-Surrounded by a culture of male rhymers and reasoners, where did she find the freedom for her off-rhymes and no rhymes?
–How did she keep her broken heart from bleeding sentimentality into her poems?
-Where did she find the courage to smash words together like subatomic particles in a cyclotron releasing intense flashes of insight?
-How did she concentrate her laser focus on the enormous matters examined in her brief poems?
-How was she able to gain the wide latitude of thought we discover in her 576 poems?
-Who did she long for on her famous “Wild Night”?
She worked words like a potter works clay, molding, breaking down, reshaping until her poems became containers carrying fuel to fire our minds.