Shimmering With Stories

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Amherst, Mass.

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...

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