Word: dickinson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Biographers have played Halloween with the ghost of Emily Dickinson. They Trick or Treat her remnants and if the treat proves not sweet enough, the trick is to corner her ghost and shake the memory of her until it faints into their already rattling paper bags. The truth is coated in coconut, and chocolate, and pistachio to satisfy the historical sweet tooth. (Her unidentified lover has been said to be Judge Lord, T.W. Higginson, her brother Austin, and her father, Edward Dickinson.) The ghost is unable even to say Boo. Emily Dickinson's grave has been a raucous place compared...
...John Cody is a tender and meticulous exhumer. Dr. Cody, a practising psychiatrist, has written Emily Dickinson's psychobiography; (a psychobiography is a psychoanalysis of a deceased person). He uses her letters and poems and previously unpublished family letters in lieu of what, if she were alive, would be her dreams and free associations. Dr. Cody is circumspect in his postulations; he comes to no conclusions without the corroboration of repetitive allusion in the poet's work, which he cites constantly. Frequency of allusion, symbol and metaphor is the key he uses to understand the dimensions of the problems...
...seems that Emily Dickinson suffered an irreparable lack of affection from her mother and that she feared her father terribly. Her mother, from the wisps of evidence that remain, seems to have been a nonentity and herself, emotionally stunted. She brought her children up by a Victorian Dr. Spock that would have been enough to curdle any child's blood, let alone the extraordinarily sensitive, intelligent children that were hers. Edward Dickinson, Emily's father, was a severe and joyless Puritan, more interested in politics than his family, a conflict which he could never resolve...
...concluding, Dr. Cody proposes that had Emily Dickinson had a more loving mother, she most probably would have been a housewife who scribbled poetry in her spare time. He puts us in the uneasy position of being thankful for her pain. He seems to be relegating the notion of vocation to the busywork of sick souls. He seems also to be saying that housewifery is the luxury of the resolved and art the rack of the demented. Beyond anything that Dr. Cody could touch in Emily Dickinson is the fact that she was an artist...
...poems, "Witch Burning," one of the better works in the collection, and "Whitsun", an unimpressive piece, she sees herself as an American heroine with a Scarlet Letter on her breast. At times she rings of Emily Dickinson, "A bodiless soul could pass another soul. In this clear air and never notice it--", from the "Widow" a poem of the fantasies of grief clearly about her mother. A much less proficient poem "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" recalls in tone and subject to Robert Frost's "Dust of Snow" about the crow and the saving of a day he had rued...