Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of a Private Life

Emily Dickinson was long defined purely by her work, leaving the details of her personal life, beyond her reputation as a recluse, untouched. Cynthia Griffin Wolff was one of the first scholars to explore Dickinson’s rich inner world and connect it to her poetry, now documented in numerous books, films, and research projects. The Emily Dickinson we know today enjoyed cooking, gardening, and nature, was an avid letter writer through which she conducted grand romances, and confronted the core themes of her poems in her everyday life - conflicts of religion, belief, beauty, and death.

Poet and Dickinson scholar Carol Ciavonne will discuss the continual unfolding of Dickinson’s legacy, including the recent publication of her letters and original, unedited works, her personal rituals, and the impact of Griffin Wolff’s watershed biography Emily Dickinson on subsequent research. The program will include dramatic readings of Dickinson’s poetry. Womb House Books will curate a selection of Dickinson publications and related works for sale, including a first edition of Griffin Wolff’s subsequent biography, Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Professor Wolff taught English and American literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and M.I.T., and was credited with bringing long-overdue attention to American women writers. She was the author of Emily Dickinson, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, and Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century Puritan Character. Her works, and a plaque on her academic contributions, can be found on the 2nd floor of the Mechanics’ Institute library.

About the Speaker

Carol Ciavonne’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Interim, New American Writing, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. Essays and reviews can be found in Interim, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, Entropy, Parole and Pleiades. She is the author of Birdhouse Dialogues (LaFi 2013) (with artist Susana Amundaraín) and a collection, Azimuth (Jaded Ibis Press 2014).Ciavonne is an editor of the online journal Posit. She is an ardent admirer of Emily Dickinson.

About Womb House Books

Founded by Jessica Ferri, Womb House Books is an inclusive feminist bookshop amplifying writing by women and non-binary people, queer authors and writers of color, selling both new and vintage books.

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