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“... his novels confirm these claims, but none more clearly than the third, which takes its title from Emily Dickinson – ‘Sunrise – hast thou a flag for me?’ A Flag for Sunrise is set in the imaginary Central American republic of Tecan. US visitors might think they were in Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador. Like all three in the late 1970s, Tecan is ...”

“... of the 19th century were celibate – “spinsters and virgins”, as Ellen Moers calls them. If Emily Brontë and Jane Austen managed without having sex, why not Cather? Because we think she was homosexual?’ To appreciate a great book, she asserts, we need not gossip, like silly adolescents, over its author’s life between the sheets. To subject someone ...”

“... time. No capital letters, ‘w/’ instead of ‘with’ and ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’: Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do. Like many rock acts, she’d had years to dream up her world-shut-your-mouth arrival, then suddenly had no time at all to patch together a follow-up. Only ten ...”

“... But I went to visit him, my first time East. It was autumn and it was lovely, this town where Emily Dickinson wrote so many poems, including one of my favourite lines: ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes.’ David was housesitting for a former professor in a New England house with built-in cabinets and many, many books and the number of the ...”

“... Browning, Christabel LaMotte not the disliked Christina Rossetti (thanks to a healthy [–] of Emily Dickinson). They are entwined like her parents’ confabulations and facts, and thus somehow closer to real people. She wrote the poems herself.Contemporary reviewers pointed out that The Children’s Book contained a mathematically impossible number ...”

“... realised by any human instrument in time. I’ve never found Keatsian euphony quite as powerful as Emily Dickinson’s dissonance. Her distressed metres and slant rhymes enable you to experience both extreme discord and a virtuosic reaching for the music of the spheres. The status of a Dickinson composition is itself up ...”

“... to law reform, Elizabeth Blackwell to the medical profession, Florence Nightingale to nursing, Emily Davies to education, Josephine Butler to the attack on the double standard of morality, Margaret Sanger to birth control, and Emma Goldman to causes that anticipate the feminism of the 1970s. Forster offers no major reinterpretation, nor do all her ...”

“... published in 1941, which became the most influential book on the subject. (His omission of Emily Dickinson has, in recent years, damaged the book’s canon-forming status.) His essay on Whitman is more than a hundred pages long. He writes with great subtlety about Whitman’s language, the tension between the vernacular and the abstract, the ...”

“... of writers. Alongside Winnicott, they are mostly but not exclusively women: Rich, Woolf, but also Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. The book is a textual collage. It is through fierce verbal and textual contestation that the narrator’s struggle with her mother takes place: ‘Language was our field of contest.’ When Alison was 11, her mother ‘took ...”

“... disruptive, terrifyingly rude sorceress, whose ‘conflicting drives and priorities of Medea and Emily Post’ reached an apotheosis during a holiday Sylvia and Ted spent at the Merwin farmhouse in France. I don’t question the authenticity, the truthfulness, of any of this, and no one can read Dido Merwin’s contribution without feeling both terror and ...”

“... vignettes, with examples that range easily from Job to Jakobson, Hillel and Horace to Dickens and Dickinson, Plato to Wittgenstein, Aeschylus to Ashbery. And he returns to the essay’s origin by adopting georgic digression as his structural principle. Philosophers’ questions lead to questions answered by questions; self-questionings lead on to closure by ...”

“... delectable quotations. It draws not only on family documents, but on the writings of Macaulay, Emily Eden, Lady Canning, Bishop Heber, Kipling, Diana Cooper and Forster; and it comments, sometimes with disfavour, on films like Gandhi, The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown. If a book on this scale had been written by an American it would have carried ...”

“... fully uncovered until 20l9 (Gordon’s date; Mrs Eliot says 2020) are the letters Eliot wrote to Emily Hale. He had known her since 1912, but most of the letters were written between 1927 (Gordon’s date; 1932 according to Valerie Eliot) and 1947. We learn from Mrs Eliot that in the Sixties the poet, ‘in a private paper’ whose privacy has now gone the ...”

“... once lived. Alvarez had told her she was the first woman poet he’d ‘taken seriously since Emily Dickinson’, and she visited him and read him her new poems. She also intended to go to ‘a literary party to celebrate a poetry anthology I am in, & which Ted was one of the three editors of. He will probably be there, and with someone else, but I ...”

“... the signature of the institutional, the establishment’s individual voice. It makes one think of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’ How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog! Writing anonymously, you could be ‘nobody’ precisely because you ...”