’Tis Terror as consummate as Legions of Alarm did leap

June 11, 2008 in News | No comments

In the Boston Review, Maureen McLane explores the intriguing possibility of Emily Dickinson as a poet of terror:

Terror as perspectival experience. A “War on Terror” necessarily lodges itself within. Duct Tape. Code Red. Enriched Uranium. We are called to feel a general, perhaps fraudulent, fright, an ecstasy of alertness:

It sets the Fright at liberty—
And Terror’s free—
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!

Weaving in strands from Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, and Colonial-era “captivity narratives,” McLane casts Dickinson as an ironic critic of assent and fear. Her wry observations on the power and attraction of fear–”‘Tis so appalling–it exhilarates”–seem ready-made for today’s world of Code Red warnings and the “ecstasy of alertness.”