Branching Out Kansas City: Eamon Grennan on Emily Dickinson

“This talk, ‘Identity to Seek: The Selves of Emily,’ engages with a number of the poems of Emily Dickinson, in order to think about her as a poet who reveals to us, in her nature as a fragmented or multiple self, something about what lyric poetry is and means. I connect her work with some of the remarks Keats makes about the character of the poet, as well as placing her in a lyric context containing such poets as Yeats, Whitman, and Stevens. By closely attending to a few of her poems, I try to see how her extraordinary imagination “works” with language to act out or embody the serious, risky play of consciousness itself.” — Eamon Grennan

A joint initiative with the Poetry Society of America, Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.