Sunset in a Cup

It is not surprising that the moderns discovered a kindred spirit in Emily Dickinson. For someone who came to be called the New England Nunn. And the Reclusive Bride of Silence, she spoke with the tough-mindedness of a modern in her later poetry. By charging her words with the original etymological meanings she brought about a “semantic rejuvenation” in the language, as one can observe in the following lines:
Essential oils are wrung
The Altar from the Rose
Is not expressed by Suns alone
It is the gift of Screws (emphasis mine)
The tension set up between her desire to believe and her incipient disbelief has endowed her poetry with a tautness and poignance that have rarely been achieved in poetry.
Dr. Priyamvada Anantharaman offers in this book is close textual analysis of some of the important poems off Emily Dickinson. The mythopoeic element in her poetry receives special attention of the author, as also the “what” and “how” of the imaginative experience the poet has recreated in her poems. Death as even and dying as process have elucidated with the help of very competent analyses of the poems. In her nature poetry, Dickinson’s perceptions become more and more centralized, and the mythopoeic consciousness of the poet encompasses the circumference which surrounds nature, and in the end becomes one with it. The development of the poet’s sensibility has been traced in the chapter on the experience of love with a discussion of the “duo-consciousness,” and the drama of “centre” and “circumference.” Dickinson’s intolerable wrestle with belief and words is set forth in the discussion on religious experience. The poet’s celebrated non-conformism receives full treatment in a separate chapter. The author once again returns to a discussion of style in the conclusion. She marks the poet’s preference for “oracular associative rhythms” in the Northrop Frye connotation of the phrase, and attempts to come to terms with, what Frye again would call, the poet’s “spectroscopic band of imagery,” with the “modulating,” “episodic,” and “isolated” images used.