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“... in light clouds. It is one of Larkin’s rain-ceased evenings.22 July. Reading in the LRB about Emily Dickinson, whom I’d always thought of as a shy little mouse. Shy she may have been but no mouse, and one who got her own way, in this lining up with Kafka and Simone Weil, all three of whom mobilised assistance by seeming helpless.30 ...”

“... A LOT TOGETHER & MOST OF IT WAS YOUR FAULT.’ Haunting enough, this message. A kind of oracular, Emily Dickinson-style ‘Letter to the World’. (A complaint letter, at that.) Like something you might find in a sadistic fortune cookie. I love the self-conscious – and very English – effort to appear fair and sporting, even when not, embedded in the ...”

“... spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American.By this time Hughes was in a difficult relationship with Assia Wevill, which produced a daughter, Shura, and then another tragedy: Assia killed herself and Shura seven years ...”

“... Feathers insists on its status as a literary artefact from the title onwards, with that nod to Emily Dickinson, both homage and correction, since in her poem feathers accompany and denote hope. To be explicitly literary in this context is to be secondhand, insistently, even aggressively secondhand, and to disavow the raw subjectivity, unshaped by ...”

“... literature was emotionally candid, also ‘performed secular masculinity’. Here is Hardwick on Emily Brontë:Wuthering Heights is a virgin’s story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Cathy is as hard, careless and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an ...”

“... of travestying its opponents and of verbal affectation. ‘That hyphen-hymen persephonates Emily’: except for the word ‘that’, every word of this sentence is insulting to Emily Dickinson, and to Persephone come to that. Similarly there is a good deal of the twinkling play with names which has been gravely ...”

“... twenty pages the presiding genius is in any case not strictly speaking Victorian at all, being Emily Dickinson: who for Davie represents those qualities which in the earlier part of the anthology shine in Herbert and Vaughan, Watts and Wesley, Smart and Cowper. That none of these writers has the obvious ‘scale’ or bulk of a Browning is perhaps to ...”

“... and devoted to things as they are ... crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson ... and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot’. Only with maturity did he ‘make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous’.‘Crediting Poetry’ is most impressive when it links murders ...”

“... and mentions of Wim (William), and a Mad Hatter’s tea party attended by Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Myrtha from Giselle and Kundry from Parsifal. The back and forth of the opening dialogue between Alice and Nurse – ‘can’, ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘can’t’ – plays out a Jamesian dilemma about the invalid’s ...”

“... picture.Lots of cavalier things are done with portraits. Images of Charlotte are used to represent Emily and Anne. The surviving part of a group painting by Branwell that almost certainly depicts Anne is often claimed to show Emily. George Richmond’s drawing of Charlotte, taken from life, was later copied by ...”

“... Austen wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? Why should a woman not ...”

“... is a retreat from resonance, as if the spirit of A.A. Milne successfully vied with the spirit of Emily Dickinson.’ Reading Will May’s capacious new edition, I didn’t detect any such retreat. Some of Smith’s best poems are the fantastical, slightly longer ones like ‘The Blue from Heaven’, ‘Fafnir and the Knights’, ‘The Frozen ...”

“... One of Anthony Thwaite’s poems, ‘Tell it slant’, swerves from Emily Dickinson’s line ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’ to settle upon an aesthetic procedure she would have been too nervous to enunciate: Truth is partial. Name the parts But leave the outline vague and blurred. Dickinson thought the truth should dazzle gradually, and that the best ploy was ‘circuit ...”

“... hotel – ‘distraught’ and ‘in wet clothes’. My italics. The prodigality reminds me of Emily Dickinson: As if I asked a common Alms, And in my wondering hand A Stranger pressed a Kingdom, And I, bewildered, stand – Then there is the little, optionally extra dog taking ‘rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf’, or ...”

“... a future life among the ‘supreme’ poets. Such witty intricacies are a match for anything in Emily Dickinson, who knew all about what might happen to a great and as yet unrecognised poet as he or she approached ‘the ambushed womb of the shadows’. But when they occur in Whitman, intricacies of this sort are apt to be missed, for the obvious ...”