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So the so-called "enigma of Emily Dickinson" is not an enigma to me at all. Everything we need to know about her is in those 1789 poems. They are a spiritual autobiography more comprehensive than any possible narrative. They are both the product and practice of a lifetime act of love on her part, if love can be a necessary action ("My business is to love," she declared. "My business is to sing."). Definition poems, observation-of-nature poems, arresting-moment-dramatized poems, declaration-after-experience poems, working-what-she-thinks-of-the-experience-in-the-poem poems, lyric cries, locked-up aphorisms, arguments and narratives, purposeful inconsistency, jazzing the placeholders, banging and angling language until it renders the otherwise inarticulate human feeling: the variety of the poetry she extracts from a single limited form—a liturgical form (the hymn stanza)—is astonishing. I would like to have a fraction of her focus: the most intense focus ever of any writer I know. She is a model of devotion to the practice of poetry. Writing poems for her was life-sustaining, even life-creating. It created the place in which she fully experienced her experience. What she made in her poems she used in her life. The process of writing and all it involved grew her soul. It was a spiritual discipline, the lifelong practice of a craft, and an entertainment.

Excerto de "My favorite poet: Emily Dickinson" , de Michael Ryan. A versão integral encontra-se disponível aqui.