Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

Originality must compound with inheritance.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket