Bloom's How to Write about Emily Dickinson

Priddy, anna. Bloom's How to Write about Emily Dickinson. New York, nY: infobase Publishing, 2008. $45.

In the 1980s harold Bloom launched his modern Critical Views series; today the series is well over 300 volumes (each a collection of reprinted articles or monograph chapters by noted scholars), including a 1984 volume on emily Dickinson. Now, Bloom has launched a new series, Bloom's How To Write About . . . , each volume offering basic instruction to students (whether high-school or college is unclear; in How to Write about Emily Dickinson, Priddy may be trying to target both audiences) on preparing critical essays that elucidate particular works of the writer in question-each a bona fide member (thus far) of the Western Canon, a Bloom prime directive.

Priddy, a poet and writer with a doctorate in english from Louisiana State University, is clearly concerned with making a difficult poet accessible to students with little or no training in literary study. The book opens with a brief reflection from Bloom on "How to Write about Emily Dickinson" (which, strangely, is little more than an account of the way Bloom approaches Dickinson in the classroom, using "Because i could not stop for Death - "[Fr479] as a case-inpoint). this is followed by "How to Write a Good essay," in which Priddy covers such elementary topics as writing about characters and themes; formulating a thesis; and structuring an outline-topics with which any high school student ought to be familiar and that college students would probably find simplistic and condescending, unless they were enrolled in remedial programs. The most useful part of this section is the...