Dickinson Criticism 1966-1967

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Dickinson Criticism 1966-1967

DiSalvo, Leta Perry. "The arrested syllable: a study of the death poetry of Emily Dickinson." DA 27: 1816A (1966). [U of Denver] ED transformed the sentimental rhetoric of Victorian death writing into objective art.

Higgins, David J.M. "Twenty-five Poems by Emily Dickinson: Unpublished Variant Versions." American Literature 38 (1966): 1-21. From both manuscripts and transcripts that were unavailable to Johnson in 1955.

---. Portrait of Emily Dickinson: The Poet and Her Prose. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967. Argues for ED's painstaking composition of prose; centers study of her work on her letters. Never definitively surpassed as the major book on the letters, though much work has been done on them since in articles and in other books.

Franklin, R.W. The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Systematic discussion of the process of editing from the first three volumes through the 1955 variorum. The study marked the beginning of an editorial process that culminated in Franklin's own revision of the variorum in 1998.

Lair, Robert Leland. "Emily Dickinson's Fracture of Grammar." DA 27: 3052-53A. (1967) [Ohio State: Julian Michaels and Francis Lee Utley] ED's idiosyncractic bad grammar is related to "her anxiety at being forced to live in a world so utterly devoid of certainties." Does not explain how Pascal managed to write in good grammar under the same conditions.

Laverty, Carroll D. "Structural Patterns in Emily Dickinson's Poetry." The Emerson Society Quarterly 44 (1966): 12-17. ED uses such patterns as statement, parallelism, analogy, &c. Cf. also Wilson and Emblen.

Lind, Sidney E. "Emily Dickinson's 'Further in Summer than the Birds' and Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Old Manse'." American Literature 39 (1967): 163-169. Repr. Cady & Budd. A passage in Hawthorne's essay may be a source for ED's poem.

Moldenhauer, Joseph J. "Emily Dickinson's Ambiguity: Notes on Technique." The Emerson Society Quarterly 44 (1966): 35-44. ED's "calculated irresolution" results from conflicting attitudes toward the subjects of her poetry.

Porter, David T. The Art of Emily Dickinson's Early Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Irony, tension, and their "audible correlatives" characterize Dickinson's early work. Porter would later greatly revise his chronologically-based approach to Dickinson, but this early study is well in the idiom of its time.

Stephenson, William E. "Emily Dickinson and Watts: Songs for Children." English Language Notes 3 (1966): 278-281. Suggests the influence of Watts's Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language, a children's hymnal.