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Dickinson Criticism 1963-1965

• Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. "Emily Dickinson's Intruder in the Soul." American Literature 37.1 (1965): 54-64. The theme of intrusion into a house in a cluster of ED poems. Despite its substance, a piece that is oddly relegated to the "Notes" section of its issue; perhaps this is because it's by a rare female contributor to the journal in the mid-1960s.

• Curtis, Jared R. "Edward Taylor and Emily Dickinson: Voices and Visions." Susquehanna University Studies 7 (1964): 159-167. Taylor as ED's "spiritual ancestor."

• Emblen, D.L. "A Comment on 'Structural Patterns in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson." American Literature 37 (1965): 64-65. Argues that the topic-elaboration-conclusion structure noted by Wilson is so common in all poetry as to be uninteresting.

• England, Martha Winburn. "Emily Dickinson and Isaac Watts: Puritan Hymnodists." Bulletin of the New York Public Library 69 (1965): 83-116. ED parodies Watts, but with serious intent: "she used her most un-dear preceptor as a monolith from which to slant." See also Davidson (1954).

• Gelpi, Albert J. Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Centrifugal and centripetal impulses; influences on ED; her "preceptors"; her rebelliousness; her thematics.

• Griffith, Clark. The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson's Tragic Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. "Out of the grotesqueness of her private situation, there was wrested the insight she had into man's tragic lot in a tragic world." Her greatest contemporary affinities were with Melville.

• Lindberg, Brita. "Emily Dickinson's Punctuation." Studia Neophilologica 37 (1965): 327-359. Defines ED's repertoire of marks and discusses the critical commentary on them; takes exception to Stamm's theory of rhetorical punctuation, making the famous observation that even ED's gingerbread recipe is "rhetorically" punctuated. Later incorporated into The Voice of the Poet.

• Manierre, William R. "E.D.: Visions and Revisions." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5.1 (1963): 5-16. Critique of the continuing practice of quoting ED from the "old" texts in use before the 1955 variorum.

• Schlauch, Margaret. "Linguistic Aspects of Emily Dickinson's Style." Prace Filologiczne 18.1 (1963): 201-215. Oddities & difficulties of ED's sentence structure and syntax. Tributary to Lindberg-Seyersted (1968).

• Sherwood, William Robert. "Circumference and circumstance: stages in the mind and art of Emily Dickinson." DA 26 91965): 2193. [Columbia] Revised as a book in 1968.

• Stamm, Edith Perry. "Emily Dickinson: Poetry and Punctuation." Saturday Review 46 (30 March 1963): 26ff. Controversial theory that Dickinson's punctuation marks were conventional symbols for rhetorical declamation. Incorporated into The Last Face (1971). Answered by Lindberg (above) and Ward (below).

• ---. "The Punctuation Problem." Saturday Review 46 (25 May 1963): 23. Answers Ward's objections (below), saying that the punctuation of the Dickinson manuscripts is more subtle than Ward allows, and extends into the letters as well.

• Ward, Theodora. "Poetry and Punctuation." Saturday Review 46 (27 April 1963): 25. Reply to Stamm (above), arguing that ED's use of punctuation is inconsistent, not systematic and rhetorical.

• Wilson, Suzanne M. "Structural Patterns in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson." American Literature 35 (1963): 53-59. ED's poems typically use a topic statement-elaboration-conclusion pattern, one that she learned from homiletics. Answered by Emblen.