Carl Dennis – Lyric Point of View: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (January 1993)

“The variety in Emily Dickinson’s work,” says Carl Dennis, “issues almost entirely from a variety of approach, a function of the degree of distances she chooses to take toward her material.”  Dennis offers alternate versions of a few of Dickinson’s poems to illustrate the effectiveness of her modulations of distance and intimacy in first-person, second-person, and omniscient speakers, each of whom welcomes the reader into their society.