SOURCE: “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 37, No. 4, Winter, 1996, pp. 586–601.

In the following essay, Nicholls explores Howe's critiques of American history as well as the treatment of women in historical narratives.

The growing critical interest in Susan Howe's poetry and prose may be one indication of a turn against a now familiar postmodern aesthetics of surface and pure “style.”¹ For Howe's development of an exploratory poetics has been closely bound up with her passionate rereadings of American history in works like My Emily Dickinson (1985) and The Birth-mark (1993).² It is that relation which I want to pursue here: what might connect a radical approach to American history with an innovative poetics?

Howe regards herself as first and foremost a poet, but she is also a freelance historian in a long and distinguished line which includes writers such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson...