SOURCE: Bertholf, Robert. “Lorine Niedecker: A Portrait of a Poet.” Parnassus 12-13, no. 2-1 (spring-winter 1985).

In the following essay, Bertholf discusses Niedecker's role in the legion of isolated folk poets such as Emily Dickinson.

Susan Howe writes in her discussion of Emily Dickinson that when Ralph Waldo Emerson came to Amherst, Massachusetts, to lecture for the second time, Emily Dickinson did not attend. Far from being the inability of a fragile, intimidated lady to seek out one of the most articulate minds of her time, she, by that time, had read enough of Emerson, and heard enough about him, to know she did not want to hear any more. She chose not to go to the lecture. Her fellow Puritan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, shared her sentiments, as he scoffed at the camp followers of Emerson in his preface to Mosses from an Old Manse. Dickinson wanted her way of...