Scholars Are Here for the New Emily Dickinson, Says the New York Times

For the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler reviews Dickinson, a half-hour television series starring Hailee Steinfeld that's just been released on Apple's new streaming service. This Emily Dickinson "takes midnight carriage rides with Death (the rapper Wiz Khalifa), and denounces the patriarchy as — to use a genteel paraphrase — bunk," writes Schuessler. More:

...It’s also one who throws raging parties (complete with a hip-hop playlist and twerking), experiments with opium, makes out with her bestie (and future sister-in-law) and gets her period.

Alena Smith, the show’s creator, describes it as “a coming-of-age story about a radical young female artist who was ahead of her time.” It’s also one whose anachronisms and other liberties are intended to underline a serious point. 

“She wrote nearly 2,000 poems which are one of the greatest bodies of work ever written in English, almost none of it published and recognized in the way we think of as being recognized in the time she lived,” said Smith, a Yale School of Drama graduate who has written for “The Affair” and “The Newsroom.”

“I use that as my excuse,” she said. “If she wasn’t that well understood in her time, can we understand her better in ours?”

“Dickinson” arrives on the heels of two recent feature films about the poet. But if Apple’s loosened-up, and sexed-up, young Emily takes things way over the top, scholars say they are here for it.

Read on at the NYT.