Lynne Feeley Reviews Martha Ackmann's These Fevered Days

At Boston Review, Lynne Feeley places into context Martha Ackmann's latest, an "an episodic look at the life of Emily Dickinson." More: 

Ackmann was a member of the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College until 2016, and for two decades taught a seminar about Dickinson in the poet’s historically preserved house in Amherst (the Emily Dickinson Museum). Ackmann writes that the structure of her book—not a “cradle-to-grave biography” but an illumination of key moments in the poet’s life—grew out of her teaching. “Sitting around that seminar table, the students demonstrated that they understood Dickinson’s life and work more deeply when our conversation centered on an important moment in the poet’s life,” she explains. Ackmann has selected moments that she believes “changed” Dickinson, and she acknowledges that another writer might have chosen a different set. But Ackmann’s selections are not random moments of general or personal change. They are moments of deliberate artistic becoming.

These Fevered Days begins with a fourteen-year-old Dickinson skipping church to write her friend a letter, in which she includes the mysterious but decisive phrase, “all things are ready.” Four years later, Dickinson, a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, cannot profess her faith in God, an ambivalence that will fuel much of the poetry. Soon Dickinson, twenty-one, publishes her first poem, a valentine, in Springfield’s Daily Republican. She decides, in 1859, “to be distinguished,” after which she enters a period of great poetic output, 1862–65, during which she writes over 800 poems. A tiny fraction of these poems will be published during her life (fewer than a dozen in total), and all of them anonymously, but Dickinson does have something of a publishing streak in 1864, when five of her poems appear in magazines whose combined circulation numbers in the tens of thousands. “Although they did not realize it, thousands of people were reading Emily Dickinson in the spring of 1864,” Ackmann writes.

Read on at Boston Review.