A Postmodern Emily Dickinson: On Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson

Through a close reading and careful analysis Jed Deppman presents Dickinson in his work Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson not as a mysterious poet but as a serious thinker and a postmodern Dickinson who attends "the weakening of authoritative Western narratives of history, God, nature, the self," and plays many postmodern roles such as an accomplished nihilist, a liberal ironist and a poet of weak thought. His work is a philosophical conversation with Dickinson' s oeuvre that makes it possible for readers to see her clearly as "a conversational poet" and "a valuable interlocutor and companion thinker for postmodernity" whose poems are open and dialogical, "capable of meaningful conversation".