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“... semi-absent presences (‘a kind of half-free verse, I suppose’).Wright’s aim is to create ‘Emily Dickinson on Walt Whitman’s open road, kinetic compression within a more open-ended space’, and this led him to experiment with a split-level line (‘the low rider’, he has sometimes called it): ‘In the world of dirt, each tactile ...”

“... a small coastal town in New England, she chafed against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she ...”

“... the performance can begin, but it can continue only if the audience’s attention is held. Like Emily Dickinson, Hughes aims to push writing beyond writing, towards free expressive performance, but unlike Dickinson he doesn’t – at least in this study – know how to employ formal brevity as the ground of ...”

“... is not incidental that Muldoon has chosen to write about poets – Yeats, Hughes, Frost, Bishop, Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Montale, Pessoa, Marianne Moore, H.D., Tsvetaeva, Arnold, Auden, Graves, Heaney, Day-Lewis – whose idiom is peculiarly distinctive (Day-Lewis being the possible exception, but Muldoon, characteristically tricky, chooses to write ...”

“... of their magic seems to depend on tantalising the reader with the tacit suggestion that they do. Emily Dickinson made quite a speciality of this, in lines which often have something of the giggle in them of an affectedly self-conscious children’s game: ‘I love to hide and hear ’em hunt.’ Hearing them hunt becomes the poet’s pleasure, and a ...”

“... we can imagine that at bus-stops and lunch counters she found the time and place to do so – like Emily Dickinson in collaboration with Henry James.    Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere ...”

“... Montaigne and Molière, Milton, Johnson, Goethe (Aristocratic Age); Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen (Democratic Age); and Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf (Orlando), Kafka, Borges, Neruda and Pessoa, Beckett (Chaotic Age). As you might expect, these essays are opinionated, sometimes contrary, and often very good. On ...”

“... compounded from (but again, not reducible to) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson. (Byatt lectured on all these writers in the days when she taught in the English Department of ‘Prince Albert College’ where Roland is a postgraduate – a place instantly recognisable to current members by ‘the pantry where the bulk of ...”

“... in home and office – were not possible for Plath as a poet, any more than they had been for Emily Dickinson. Their art, in Hawthorn’s unexpected words, was ‘not granted the luxury of a double life’. In fact, I suspect that in art as in living we have made progress in the conscious recognition and acceptance of the dualities within us. Modern ...”

“... sit, to an adult eye, in uneasy juxtaposition with real poetry like that of Lear and Eliot and Emily Dickinson and de la Mare, but this is surely a good thing: the eye can wander from ‘Deborah Delora, she liked a bit of fun’ to the Gumbie Cat, and enjoy both. Lucky dips are always good sport, even if, as I did aged six on the hottest day of the ...”

“... There are opportunities to renew acquaintance with half-forgotten authors. What are we to think of Emily Dickinson hiding even from the restricted society of Amherst, New England, in love for ever with a man she had met twice, drawn to Christ only by his grief, and sombrely aware that Time reduces sorrow to routine but never heals: ‘After great pain a ...”

“... apparently narrow world may be, to the child, as wide as the universe. Dr Clay produces a line of Emily Dickinson that – oh dear – could have been the novel’s epigraph: ‘The Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door’. Why, she even capitalises her nouns, like Jack! But the universality of this vision is problematic. On the one ...”

“... achieved at the cost of characterisation. Herakles’ grandmother, an eccentric cross between Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, all gnomic utterances and cryptic reminiscences, is entirely convincing, as are Herakles, a casually sadistic playboy redeemed by moments of real tenderness, and the suffering Geryon himself. Carson writes in Eros the ...”

“... into the story. One of the doctor’s books is called Wider than the Sky, a quotation from an Emily Dickinson poem which Powers takes in full as his epigraph to Galatea 2.2. ‘The brain is wider than the sky,’ it begins, For, put them side by side, The one the other will contain With ease, and you beside. Surely she means mind, or is ...”

“... or a great degree of hard-headedness, and the best descriptions of both kinds come from women. Emily Dickinson characteristically produces the most electrifying phrases: I felt a Cleaving in my Mind – As if my Brain had split – I tried to match it – Seam by Seam – But could not make them fit Or: After great pain, a formal feeling comes ...”