Wider Than the Sky : Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson

by MacKenzie, Cindy

• ISBN13: 9780873389532
• ISBN10: 0873389530
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-30
• Publisher: Kent State Univ Pr

Summary

Emily Dickinson is known as a poet who presses at the limits of perception and expresses in brilliantly compact, memorable language extremes of both anguish and ecstasy. Her frequent attention to pain and death, like her reclusive tendencies, has led many to dismiss her as "morbid." Biographers and critics, however, have shown how she used her writing and her own acquaintance with pain to reach out consolingly to sufferers. In a widely varied collection of personal reminiscences, tributes, and scholarly essays, editors Cindy MacKenzie and Barbara Dana offer richly revealing perspectives on how the exquisite language in the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson helps readers cope with suffering. The essays featured in Wider than the Sky range from fresh scholarly analyses to highly personal essays and meditations, each offering thoughts on the emotional, spiritual, and physical healing power gained from reading Dickinson. MacKenzie and Dana invite readers to reflect on how we respond to poems, how they enter into the core of our consciousness, and how we draw strength from what Dickinson called "the Art of Peace." Wider than the Sky, a resource for Dickinson fans as well as anyone coping with pain, is an important addition to the Literature and Medicine Series.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. xiii
"The Might of Human love": Emily Dickinson's Letters of Healing	p. 1
From the Province of the Saved: Emily Dickinson and Healing	p. 11
"There came a Day at Summer's full-"	p. 27
"This Consciousness that is aware": The Consolation of Emily Dickinson's Phenomenology	p. 33
"If I can stop one Heart from breaking"	p. 44
"It ceased to hurt me": Emily Dickinson's Language of Consolation	p. 47
Broken Silence: The Healing Power of Emily Dickinson's Poetry	p. 60
Hope and the Flight of United Airlines 232, July 1989	p. 65
May the Circle Be Unbroken: Reading Emily Dickinson after 9/11	p. 69
Emily Dickinson: The Other That I Am	p. 83
"Will there really be a 'morning'?" A Lamp on the Journey through Pain	p. 91
"An Element of Blank": On Pain and Experimentation	p. 107
Elements of Blank, Formal Feelings, and an Autobiography of Chronic Pain	p. 115
Life Portals	p. 122
"A crescent still abides": Emily Dickinson and the Work of Mourning	p. 129
"Myself - the Term between -"	p. 141
Contributors	p. 145
Index to Poems Cited	p. 148
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