My Emily DickinsonSusan Howe For Wallace Stevens, 'Poetry is the scholars art.' Susan Howe embodies that art in her My Emily Dickinson. Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinsons intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well known poem, 'My Life had stooda Loaded Gun', Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Bront, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley