At Slate, Johanna Winant Argues AppleTV+ 'Gets Emily Dickinson Right'

There's a lot about Emily Dickinson that AppleTV+ gets wrong, Johanna Winant writes in her Slate assessment of the whimsical new series, Dickinson, which is "silly, horny, a little sad, and just a shade frightening." "[B]ut it gets the most important thing right," she observes, "because Emily Dickinson’s poetry is also, in quicksilver turns, silly, horny, sad, and frightening." More: 

Dickinson’s poems dizzy you and cut you up. They’re illuminating and gutting, virtuosic, strange, painful, utterly original, and surely among the very greatest poetry in the English language. The poems deal in awe; the show is totally awesome. These are closer than you might expect.

Only 10 of Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime; the rest were discovered after her death in 1886, leaving her work in the hands of competing heirs and her legacy in the hands of rival editors. In the decades following Dickinson’s death, she was packaged for readers as a reclusive figure who wrote pretty nature poems. The rise of modernism and close reading in the first half of the 20th century prompted a reconsideration of Dickinson’s poems, but while they were taken more seriously, she wasn’t. In 1956, the literary critic R.P. Blackmur famously wrote, “it sometimes seems as if … a cat came at us speaking English.”

It took the arrival of second-wave feminism for Dickinson’s genius to finally be recognized, arguably first by fellow female poets. Adrienne Rich, drawing on Dickinson’s own imagery in the essay “Vesuvius at Home,” described Dickinson’s poems as volcanic, overwhelming yet hidden, and in My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe reframed Dickinson not as an artistic recluse but as a formidable intellectual. Now there are countless versions of Dickinson...

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