The Belle of Amherst [antikvár]

Vreface/first became acquainted with Emily Dickinson's poetry when I was a boy in sophomore English. Years later, a friend gave me a gift of Emily's collected letters. When I read those letters, I saw more clearly into the heart of the shy woman whose poems I had loved and admired for so long. I came to know her way of balancing richness and spareness, ecstasy and despair. There is a mystical energy, an inner tone in her writings. Emily's poems and letters radiate an invisible light. It is much like looking obliquely at a star in order to see it.When I undertook the writing of The Belle of Amherst, it was my hope to depict the humanity and reasonableness of Emily Dickinson's life. I say reasonableness, because I believe that she consciously elected to be what she was a voluntary exile from village provincialism, an original New England romantic, concisely witty, heterodox in faith, alone but not lonely, "with Will to choose, or to reject.""And I choose," she said.In recent years, Emily's choice has been the subject of psychoanalytic studies, some of which have portrayed her as a social isolate possessed of disordered impulses and mentally alienated from reality. The strange faces of genius are enigmatic to the structured mind, probing for final answers. Causation seems as elusive as "melody or witchcraft." Emily wrote.Much Madness is divinest Sense To a discerning Eye