From: LouisFors@aol.com
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Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 16:29:29 EST
To: emweb@fmgmt.mgmt.utoronto.ca
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Subject: Two powerful assessments of ED and her work
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This may be old hat to long-time students of EM, but I recently came upon two
powerful comments about ED and her poetry.  Because they spoke to me, I'm
passing them along.

Both appear on the dust jacket of a new collection of EM's poetry coming from
the New York Public Library via Doubleday.  (The collection itself adds
nothing new to
EM scholarship.  It is simply a choice of poetry, together with brief comments
about Dickinson's life, letters, etc.)  Here are the two statements that sang
to me:

"No lyric poet before or since has written of human emotions with Emily
Dickinson's blazing exactness.  She was one of the most intelligent of poets
and one of the most fearless.  If fearlessness ran out, she had courage, and
after that she had recklessness." ---Galway Kinnell

"Here is an American artist of words as inexhaustible as Shakespeare, as
ingeniously skillful in her craft as Yeats, a poet whom we can set with
confidence beside the greatest poets of modern times.  Out of hunger, pain,
anguish, powerlessness--the paradoxical abundance of art"  ---Joyce Carol
Oates 

I ran across Kinnell's statement, or something mighty close to it, in a
posting and discussion about ED in on the online magazine, Salon, late last
year.  I don't know enough of Joyce Carol Oates' work to recognize whether her
words came from another source or whether they were written as a blurb for
this publication.  Doesn't matter much, of course.  I just like the strong
assessments.

Louis Forsdale