“... 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 ...”

“... as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these more or less costive attitudes were fortified by a refusal to grant the poet any more licence than any other citizen; and they ...”

“... the most elusive long poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban Emily Dickinson: the unknown poet, walking the city streets, writing intense, seemingly matter-of-fact lyrics about things he saw and heard. And then, in the last decades of his life, devoting himself to two obsessional projects: the more than five hundred ...”

“... nothing too early and strange in Auden and nothing of Yeats and his gyres. It likes Wendy Cope and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Thomas Hardy and the lullabies of Housman. It prefers poets whose speakers say how they feel, and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes ...”

“... Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, and a study of the relationship between Emily Dickinson and the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The Impeachers is structured around brief, insightful sketches of the key actors in the titanic struggle over Reconstruction. It begins with the 43 ‘dramatis personae’, including high ...”

“... and dear brother.’ Perhaps Hazlitt as a portraitist had more gifts than he is credited with? Emily Dickinson is by far the most affected of these letter-writers: she must have made her admiring critic Colonel Higginson wriggle with her calculated and confiding archness (‘My eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves’), but she can ...”

“... and its moral and metaphysical project; it places Proust among other authors, from Dante to Emily Dickinson, and from Erasmus to Kierkegaard and Cole Porter, and it situates reading among a set of other activities, like listening to jazz or Mahler or looking at Rothko. How many other high-powered critical works, I wonder, have Buñuel next to Sir ...”

“... effectiveness as art. If the poem was what the American poetess Aline Kilmer, earnest disciple of Emily Dickinson, meant when she said in a poem that ‘things have a terrible permanence when people die,’ it would be banal. The world of the poem is so unusual that the platitude of death has no part in it. Platitudes are, in fact, used instead as a way ...”

“... be locked up? Things become less clear when we increase the differences between the two bodies. (Emily Dickinson in Winston Churchill’s body? Martin Amis in Joyce Carol Oates’s?) We can reduce the impact of a strange body by imagining that the overall chemistry of the transferred brain is essentially the same as in the old body (no strange hormonal ...”

“... petals spill out and over into billowy waves, and the improbably froufrou, frilly pink folds of Emily Dickinson. There is something at once ridiculous and touching about the work, the mismatch of its grandiloquent historical sweep and domestic place settings, where all these women are finally offered ‘a seat at the table’. And although it remains ...”

“... bears ‘no more resemblance to Diana or Ceres or Proserpina (or for that matter Lady Lazarus or Emily Dickinson or the Three Witches) than I myself do to Actaeon or Sir Gawain or Joseph Shapiro.’ Most stalkers, according to Reid Meloy, suffer from what he calls a ‘narcissistic linking fantasy’: intense admiration becomes an imaginary ...”

“... phone-booths of North America, in the hope and expectation that some phone-booth-using Ginsberg or Emily Dickinson will scrawl beautiful poems inside, and then pass the journal on – and the amazing thing is, they do. People go to make a telephone call, to cancel an appointment at the dentist’s, and instead, bam, inspiration strikes and they take up ...”

“... whom Bloom adored, but who seemed to shrink away from the forcefulness of his critical vocabulary. Emily Dickinson is the clearest instance. She was one of the relatively few women writers given a chapter in The Western Canon, and is praised here for her ‘cognitive strength’. The price of her inclusion in the canon is to be seen as another Bloomian ...”

“... Eliot and Robert Frost, went East, and not West – all the way to Europe. Others again, like Emily Dickinson, walled themselves up at home and refused to go anywhere. On these figures Kazin is at least judicious, and sometimes better than that. On Dickinson he is critically acute and very informative about her ...”