Prof. Cristanne Miller (University of Buffalo, SUNY): "'Accept a loving Caw': Dickinson’s Letters and Letter-Poems"

Wednesday, June 07, 04:15 p.m. – 05:45 p.m., online lecture

Zoom-Call ID: 683 4521 7373

Prof. Miller talked about the range of Dickinson’s correspondents, particularly toward the end of her life, when she is writing to many friends and neighbors, and engaged in active exchange of flowers, food, and small gifts with these friends. A few correspondents (primarily Susan Dickinson, but also Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Bowles) have absorbed most scholarly attention in relation to Dickinson’s letters. While Miller talked briefly about this trio, her focus was on the broader range and particularly on the range of people to whom Dickinson sends letter-poems—again, primarily to Susan but also to at least 18 other correspondents, most rarely discussed. An animated discussion followed the lecture, including questions about the forthcoming edition of letters.

Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She has published extensively on Dickinson, and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century female poets. Among her books on Dickinson are Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987) and Reading in Time: Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2010). She edited Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016, winner of the MLA Best Scholarly Edition award) and is completing a new edition (with Domhnall Mitchell) of Dickinson’s complete letters—forthcoming with Harvard University Press, 2024. She has served as president of the Emily Dickinson International Society and of the Modernist Language Association, and she founded and directs the Marianne Moore Digital Archive, which is publishing all 122 of Moore’s working notebooks in facing-page editions online.