Neither the feeling nor the style of Miss Dickinson belongs to the seventeenth century; yet between her and Donne there are remark...able ties. Their religious ideas, their abstractions, are momently toppling from the rational plane to the level of perception. The ideas, in fact, are no longer the impersonal religious symbols created anew in the heat of emotion, that we find in poets like Herbert and Vaughan. They have become, for Donne, the terms of personality; they are mingled with the miscellany of sensation. In Miss Dickinson, as in Donne, we may detect a singularly morbid concern, not for religious truth, but for personal revelation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although there was a great deal of invention in Whitman's revolutionary work, he built upon a foundation that was already clear, d...irect, available, and acceptable: the ordinary language of the "common man," the working man and laborer--the man of the street. Whitman transformed the language with which he began, but he had something to begin with. Dickinson would have found Whitman's call for a "common" language in poetry entirely congenial--even, perhaps, compelling--for he gave formal utterance to many attitudes that lie behind her work; however, she faced a serious challenge in attempting to implement such a proposal. "Direct" language in a woman was always "domestic" language: there were no women of the street (save for prostitutes), no workingwomen or women laborers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An illustrious individual remarks that Mrs. [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton is the salt, Anna Dickinson the pepper, and Miss [Susan B.] A...nthony the vinegar of the Female Suffrage movement. The very elements get the "white male" into a nice pickle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hawthorne--like Poe--became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as E...merson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the "tale," was really a convert to aesthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of "grotesques and arabesques" who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt. Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You who desired so much--in vain to ask-- Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,... Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest-- Achieved that stillness ultimately best,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are told to maintain constitutions because they are constitutions, and what is laid down in those constitutions?... Certain gre...at fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and ... all laws of man's making which trample on these ideas, are null and void--wrong to obey, right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States recognizes human slavery; and makes the souls of men articles of purchase and of sale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »