Italian Americans on Emily Dickinson

Abstract. Italian Americans on Emily Dickinson. Besides their culture, migrants to the New World carried across their character, disposition, virtues and vices, the memory of what they were leaving, and their hopes in the future; they carried across themselves, and, once in loco, they longed, or just happened, in many cases, to become acquainted, or even identify with personalities of the new land. One of them was Emily Dickinson with whom the Italian writers who loved her and her poetry shared – mutatis mutandis – a complex familiar interconnectedness, a sense of [geographical] distance to come to terms with, an effortlessly conquered independence of mind and spirit, a love for life, and a life of love. This essay focuses upon a number of Italian-Americans - among them, Sandra Gilbert, Helen Barolini, Daniela Gioseffi, and Paul De Filippo -- who wrote critical essays and fictional works on the Amherst poet, thus highlighting the connections existing between Dickinson’s and Italian/American poetry