What the Dickinson?

     Streaming services have been rushing to endear themselves to cloistered potential customers during this pandemic, offering free access to many movies and TV shows. Let's be grateful that Apple TV+ is one of them, for that means we poetry afficionados can now revel, at no cost, in the sumptuously singular style of Dickinson.

     That's right, it's a sitcom about America's favorite willful, wacky teenaged girl...Emily Dickinson?
     Yep. The show is as idiosyncratic as ED's verse. The sets and costumes are perfectly in-period for the mid-1800s, but the soundtrack is full of 21st century bangers. Emily is taken seriously as a character and as a poet but she's also portrayed as a spoiled child of privilege. (Expected to do chores, she pouts: "This is such bull****.") The first episode takes its title from this famous stanza:

     Because I could not stop for Death -
     He kindly stopped for me --
     The carriage held but just Ourselves --
     And Immortality.

     That episode isn't kidding: it actually shows Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) hanging out with Death (Wiz Kalifa), whom she finds kinda dreamy.

Immortality not pictured.

 
     The whole thing is anachronistic and weird. Yet it does a great service by portraying Dickinson as a full human being, not just the half-cracked recluse we learn about in school. And it presents us with an Emily who had a passionate (and sexual!) relationship with her sister-in-law...a relationship that scholars have only recently come to acknowledge. The Belle of Amherst had some hot blood. Great poets often do.