![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He had asked me who my favorite poet was as a conversation starter, and I lied- Allen Ginsberg. People thought she was a ghost, a high school boyfriend said about her, the night we met. She only wore white, and she only came out at night. Where Plath is a Medea-like monster rising from the grave to take revenge, Dickinson is a solitary ghost. This paradox of the locked room as a place for transcendent creativity is the epitome of Dickinson’s life, which, like Sylvia Plath’s, we mythologize. Dickinson insisted during her lifetime that only she got herself, reportedly telling her niece, as they stood in her small bedroom which doubled as her writing study, “Mattie-Here’s freedom!” and made, with an imaginary key, to lock the door from within. Dickinson famously eschewed marriage, and died single, making the question of who inherited her work exactly that-a question. In researching my book-in-progress, Loving Sylvia Plath, I came upon a 2019 article in the Los Angeles Review of Books called “Who Gets Emily Dickinson?” Not, as the title suggests, a piece about who has the privilege of understanding the enigmatic poet’s work and life it was instead a complex treatment of ownership. ![]()
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