Emily Dickinson, Accidental Buddhist

Book Description:
Emily Dickinson, at an early age, became enlightened. Ego-transcendence awakened her to the Higher Self, and this unleashed a torrent of creative energy that sustained her for 35 years, producing hundreds of poems dealing either 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 on the form of a soul. Hence the secrecy of her poetic enterprise. Over the years she wrote her poems and stashed them away, to be discovered posthumously. Dickinson's work view 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 provided the cognitive framework of Emily Dickenson: 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. This 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.