EMILY DICKINSON: AN INTERPRETIVE BIOGRAPHY.

Thomas H. Johnson '23.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. 276 pp. $4-50.

This book is not a definitive life of Emily Dickinson, nor is it intended to be. As an outgrowth of Mr. Johnson's labors on his fine edition of the poems, it attempts to present the life as a guide to the poetry; and it does this admirably.

Mr. Johnson has organized his material in three parts: on local and family background, on the poetic career, and on important themes in the poems. The keynote of the first section is authority: Mr. Johnson had at his disposal all the important materials released in the past ten years, and he quietly puts us straight on the personal relationships in Emily Dickinson's life. He does not bother to attack misguided speculations by other writers, simply telling us the facts and letting them stand for themselves.

The second section traces the development of Emily Dickinson's career as a poet, from the early experiments to the floodtide of mature artistry in the sixties and the tapering off in the seventies and eighties. As a critic Mr. Johnson is generally good at analysis: he demonstrates how the poet developed her metric patterns from English hymnology, makes some pertinent comments on diction and punctuation, and even suggests in many cases the relation between form and content. But he seldom achieves that final synthesis which completes the act of criticism; he is, in other words, better on the part than the whole.

In the third section Mr. Johnson examines three dominant themes in the poetry: nature, death, and immortality. And here he amplifies a crucial point made in the first section, that Emily Dickinson was deeply indebted to the Edwardsian orthodoxy of the Connecticut Valley. The implication emerges that the resulting "tough-mindedness" is a major factor in the enduring quality of Emily Dickinson's poetry.