Emily Dickinson is an unlikely patron saint for all who seek or wrestle with God. Looking closely at twenty-five poems, this intimate portrait and personal reflection shows how Dickinson can guide us, through belief and doubt alike, toward God. Many have thought that Dickinson, one of America's greatest poets, rejected religion. Yet the poems that unfold her soul can inspire ours, offering fresh answers to ultimate questions about life and death, faith and doubt, Jesus and God. In chapters on belief, prayer, mortality, immortality, and beauty, Kristin LeMay traces the dimensions of Dickinson's spiritual life and tells the story of her own search for God between the lines of the poems that Dickinson called "hymns." Praise for I Told My Soul to Sing “Exuberant and captivating. A shimmering jewel of a book.” –Dinty W. Moore “Through her deep engagement with Dickinson’s poems—by turn prayers, partners, revelations, songs—LeMay has written a book that is, in Dickinson’s words, ‘the Heart’s portrait – every Page a Pulse,’ every page a kind of faith.” – Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking Up with God: A Love Story “Part spiritual autobiography, part homage to Dickinson’s inexhaustible poetic genius, and part exuberant close readings of the astonishing poems in which she wrestles with questions of faith and belief, I Told My Soul to Sing is a valuable study of the poet’s heterodox imagination. LeMay does not shackle Dickinson to a procrustean bed of doctrine and piety, dilute the poet’s astringent ironies, or flatten the provocative ambiguities. She has a gift for choosing unfamiliar poems from the canon and for judiciously quoting and interpreting them. A smart, seriously playful, winning, and readable commentary on a quintessentially elusive, thorny, and linguistically daring American poet.” – Herbert Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Poetry in Review “LeMay’s implied reader is someone attracted to religious faith, but even an atheist can enjoy this book’s provocative illuminations of spiritual longing, fear, and anger, in which questions cut deeper than answers.” – Mark Halliday, poet, author of Keep This Forever and Stevens and the Interpersonal “A brilliant analysis of the bond between life and poetry, written with sensitivity and talent.” – François Bovon, Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion Emeritus, Harvard Divinity School

The 19th–century American poet’s uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law and childhood friend. For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson’s thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson’s life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet’s life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. Praise for Open Me Carefully “With spare commentary, Smith . . . and Hart . . . let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters’ genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page.” —Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review

Music is a vital element in the poems and prose of Emily Dickinson but, despite its importance, the function of music as a literary technique in her work has not yet been fully explored; what information exists is scarce and scattered. The significance of the musical terminology and imagery in Dickinson's poetry and prose are thoroughly explored in this book. It considers the music of Dickinson's life and times and how it influenced her writing, how she combined music and poetry to create her own style, several important nineteenth century reviews for what they reveal about the musical quality of her work, and her use of Protestant hymns as a model for her poetry. It also provides insights into musical interpretations of her poetry as related to the author by some fifty modern-day composers and arrangers, and discusses musical reflections of her poems and letters.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, this engaging, insightful portrayal of Emily Dickinson sheds new light on one of American literature’s most enigmatic figures. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, “All things are ready” and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely “at home” (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson’s interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render an “enjoyable and absorbing” (Scott Bradfield, Washington Post) portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.

Examining contemporary poetry by way of ethnicity and gender, Kenneth Lincoln tracks the Renaissance invention of the Wild Man and the recurrent Adamic myth of the lost Garden. He discusses the first anthology of American Indian verse, The Path on the Rainbow (1918), which opened Jorge Luis Borges' university surveys of American literature, to thirty-five contemporary Indian poets who speak to, with, and against American mainstream bards. From Whitman's free verse, through the Greenwich Village Renaissance (sandwiched between the world wars) and the post-apocalyptic Beat incantations, to transglobal questions of tribe and verse at the century's close, Lincoln shows where we mine the mother lode of New World voices, what distinguishes American verse, which tales our poets sing and what inflections we hear in the rhythms, pitches, and parsings of native lines. Lincoln presents the Lakota concept of "singing with the heart of a bear" as poetry which moves through an artist. He argues for a fusion of estranged cultures, tribal and émigré, margin and mainstream, in detailing the ethnopoetics of Native American translation and the growing modernist concern for a "native" sense of the "makings" of American verse. This fascinating work represents a major new effort in understanding American and Native American literature, spirituality, and culture.