SOURCE: Harris, Peter. “Four Salvers Salvaging: New Work by Voigt, Olds, Dove, and McHugh.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 64, no. 2 (spring 1988): 262-76.

In the following excerpt, Harris finds similarities between the poetry of McHugh and Emily Dickinson and briefly describes the development of McHugh's verse.

The epigraph to Heather McHugh's To the Quick is a brief blues lyric from Emily Dickinson about the desire to flee from “the mind of man.” Although many American women poets, most notably Adrienne Rich, celebrate Emily Dickinson as an important precursor, few have actually matched wits with Dickinson or have tried to put as much pressure on language to perform feats of association. Heather McHugh provides an exception. She shares with Dickinson a penchant for the use of wit as an anodyne for anguish; a heterodox bent for metaphysics; and, most importantly, a compulsively playful language gift that constantly refreshes the terms of...