Sarah-Jane, your description of ED as "external" is interesting to me since I always loved her for being precisely the opposite. It seems to me that almost all her poems take place in her mind. She is all about describing what it's like to be inside her own head, and by extension what it's like for anyone to be inside their own head. Her poems (it seems to me) are largely about introspection. She thought about her own thoughts and what it was like to be thinking them, and she tried very hard (and often succeeded) to draw us a little schematic of precisely what the thinking was like. I think she did this to an extent that hadn't previously been seen in poetry. It's why her poems are so hermetic and coded at times, because it's the nature of her subject matter and the challenge she sets herself to reveal what is generally sealed off. You'll notice that she didn't tend to write many poems in which other people appeared. She was her own main character, though without a trace of narcissim, just an earnest sort of exploration of experience. She's sort of the opposite of Whitman in this regard, since Whitman was almost manicly about reaching out to others and didn't tend to delve deep within himself per se.
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