Debra Allbery: “My” Emily Dickinson (January 1996)

Exploring how Emily Dickinson’s poetry can feel both intimate and unreachable, how it resists any single interpretation, Debra Allbery draws on Emily Dickinson’s correspondence and biography, and on contemporary poems that pay homage or “refract” her. Allbery then looks closely at Master Letters and at “My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun,” offering a fresh reading of “master,” and showing how, through this amalgamation of readings over time, we get a sense of the lasting power and mystery of her work.