Word: dickinsons
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...Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard, Lowes Dickinson inquired "Is immortality desirable?" Ferris Greenslet, a biographer of the Lowells, has stated that he almost thought it was, if only to get at the truth of the Sacco-Vanzetti case...
...Cody takes Emily Dickinson's biographers, and there is a profusion of them, to task for their inexactness, their apologies, their kitchen table psychology, and mainly for reading into her life what they wanted from her, and not what was there. Biography stands firm when it simply chronicles a person's life. But, the urge for non-professionals to interpret behavior is irresistible...
...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 He uses her letters and poems and previously unpublished family letters in lieu of what, if she were alive, would be her dreams and free associations.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...