Mary Elizabeth Marshall

Letters from a Young Poet: a Conversation with Emily Dickinson Mary Elizabeth Marshall

This book documents a poet's coming to writing via the influence of Emily Dickinson. The Emily muse guides the young poet through a town called Bay du Vin, where a terrible storm kills many fishermen. The storm introduces death into the world of art, the world created by the poet and her muse as a kind of placeless heaven. Titled, "Much Madness is Divinest Sense/Letters from the Asylum," the following section makes of its setting a significant symbol: a cage, a prison, an asylum and figures finitude and limitation as a response to the tragedy written from the perspective of the fisherman's wives. The end of the journey, "Circumference, "deals with the Dickinsonian idea of limitation and expansion,the I and the not ? I, and how one negotiates the distance between the self and other, self and God. These final poems investigate the world of Bay du Vin as seen through the poet's eyes, there is a movement away from Emily and towards the poet's plotting of her own circumference. This dialogue sheds light on the "stuff of poetry" and should be useful to teachers, professors, writers and critiques, or anyone interested in the poetic process.