I tend to agree with Roger and think that is--to beat a dead horse--why it is so important to read her poems as she wrote them. What we see when we read her poems is her mind working and she is often thinking in snaps. There has been much speculation about whether ED had a mental illness, which is something I don't think is necessary to pursue, but she was often focused on how her mind worked and her poems serve as a record. There is more there of course, but it is this inwardness turned external that helps to make her a revolutionary poet and why her reputation was dependent on the restoration of her original poems. I think this also may be why she could remind someone of Clare. We know he was mentally ill and some of his poems have that quality of objectifying how his mind is working. One of the other things I like so much in her poems is how ED clung to nature. She doesn't merely describe nature, she wraps herself around flowers and birds and such with an almost desperate need to hold onto them. A sort of Wordsworth 2.0. It is this intensity that her original poems reveal and is why she is not Bronte reborn but the indicator of where so much twentieth-century poetry would go. I certainly see her all through Berryman's Dream Songs, for example, and in a manner that is not merely influence.
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