While some authors' reputations ebb and flow according to the times and critical caprice, the reputation of Emily Dickinson has only grown stronger since the posthumous discovery of her poems. Most critics would agree with Dickinson's recent biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff, who (in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature) calls Dickinson "certainlyAmerica's greatest woman author and possibly its greatest poet of either gender." Generally, critics are fascinated byDickinson's ability to present various states of mind through the use of different images that convey complex mental processes to her readers. Writing in the Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Emily Dickinson, Harold Bloom, one of the twentieth century's most preeminent critics, states thatDickinson presents her readers with "the most authentic cognitive difficulties" formed in "a mind so original and powerful that we scarcely have begun, even now, to.....
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