Emily Dickinson, Accidental Buddhist

Emily Dickinson, at an early age, became enlightened. Ego-transcendence awakened her to the Higher Self, unleashing a torrent of creative energy that sustained her for 35 years, producing hundreds of poems dealing with the phenomena of cosmic awareness. This also made her a heretic, for she (like the Buddhists) recognizes no creator god, much less a deathless ego-self in the form of a soul; hence the secrecy of her poetic enterprise. Over the years she made booklets of her poems and stashed them away, to be discovered posthumously. Dickinson's worldview was first described by the Buddha, and has been examined at length in countless Buddhist commentaries, which makes the dharma accessible to rational understanding. This provides the cognitive framework of Emily Dickinson: Accidental Buddhist. It consists of lucid close readings demystifying man of Dickinson's most "enigmatic" poems. The author, RC Allen, is a retired humanities professor, and a veteran student of the Spanish transcendentalist poets. His experience and familiarity with archetypal discourse are now devoted to the Dickinson oeuvre. His previous book, Solitary Prowess: The Transcendentalist Poetry of Emily Dickinson (Saru Press International), appeared in 2005.