April 16, 2004

Shimmering With Stories

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Emily Dickinson's poems have what Christopher Benfey likes to refer to as "a Gothic sensibility." They are peopled by the fear-struck and the lost, crisscrossed by funeral processions. It's "a time-wrought sensibility" as well, says Mr. Benfey, a Dickinson scholar at Mt. Holyoke College -- a sensibility of forgetfulness, of austerity and days of judgment.

More to the point, it's a sensibility that Mr. Benfey and others say is almost entirely missing from the big brick house here