A Look Into 'I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson'

At the New York Times Holland Cotter surveys "I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson," an exhibition of Emily Dickinson relics that opened last week at the Morgan Library and Museum and runs until May 21st. Cotter begins the article with a quote from Susan Howe, who contributed to the exhibition catalog, reminding us that Dickinson's poetry offers flashpoints of inspired resistance: "In the Trumpian sense of the term, she’s the ultimate ‘nasty woman.’ An inspiration. Volcanic. When I start to write about her, I always feel, uh-oh." Uh-oh indeed! More about the show:

The show is one of the largest gatherings ever of prime Dickinson relics, and it comes with an aura the size of a city block. It instantly turns the Morgan into a pilgrimage site, a literary Lourdes, a place to come in contact with one aspect of American culture that truly can claim greatness, which we sure can use in an uh-oh political moment.

The show has a mission: To give 21st-century audiences a fresh take on Dickinson. Gone is the white-gowned Puritan nun, and that infantilized charmer, the Belle of Amherst. At the Morgan we get a different Dickinson, a person among people: a member of a household, a village-dweller, a citizen.

Cotter examines the relics on display, from manuscripts to daguerreotypes, to see how each object fits into Dickinson's life. We'll pick up around the time of the Civil War:

Much of Dickinson’s poetry from this time has an experimental, incendiary flair; images of combat and violence occur. It’s as if she were experiencing the Civil War before it happened. And when it did happen, her production soared. Oddly, in the midst of the conflict, war was rarely her active theme. But like Walt Whitman, who began working as the equivalent of a psychiatric nurse in a military hospital in Washington, Dickinson seems to have been caught up in the emergency-room atmosphere that gripped the nation, a mood probably not entirely different from the one found in a divided America now.

Whitman was permanently shaped by the war and its waste. Whether Dickinson was, I don’t know. But when it was over, her life changed. She began to withdraw. Communication was through writing: letters as intricately composed as puzzles, notes as brief as tweets, poems sent out like gifts. The primary relics from this time forward are her manuscripts of poems. Nearly 1,800 survive; 24 examples are in the show, organized by Mike Kelly, head of archives and special collections at Amherst College, and Carolyn Vega, assistant curator in the Morgan’s department of literary and historical manuscripts.

This one is one to read in full at NYT.