Emergence: Emily Dickinson “Reawakening of the ‘Myth of Amherst’”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ In his book My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, Alfred Habegger writes that “Dickinson assembled two collections in her lifetime. The second, her bundles of poems found after her death, has become deservedly famous. The first, her sixty-six-page book of pressed flowers, has been all but ignored by her biographers…. Closely associated with particular seasons, flowers helped articulate the seasons of spirit. Pressed between the pages of a letter, they became a medium of exchange between her and her friends, those of her sex especially. Cultivated indoors, especially after a conservatory was added to the Dickinson Homestead, they became a consuming avocation.” Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 154, 156.

² Quoted in Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, p. 373.