Personality and Poetic Election in the Preceptual Relationship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862-1886

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-387
Author(s):  
Jason Hoppe
1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-197
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Shea

Occasionally, even the student of American culture grown accustomed to its odd couples — Thomas Morton and lasses in beaver coats, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mark Twain and the Reverend Joseph Twichell — is brought up short. One does not, after all, expect to encounter the language and cadences of Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in a Walt Disney production of Pollyanna, a film in which the heroine's gladness has come to fulfill roughly the function of divine grace. And it is only slighdy less improbable to encounter in the New Yorker for 31 July 1978 the disembodied, dialectical voices of Donald Barthelme's The Leap, agreeing to postpone the leap of faitli to another day, setting aside their awareness that “We hang by a slender thread. — The fire boils below us — the pit. Crawling with roaches and other tilings. — Torture unimaginable.”The use and misuse of Jonathan Edwards, or less moralistically, the observable process of advocacy, condemnation, adaptation, and creative redefinition focussed on his life and work, has a long and instructive history. In October of 1903 an important stage in that process had been reached when bicentennial celebrations of Edwards' birth resulted in a flourishing of tributes to die Edwards legacy and assessments of the permanent and the passing in his diought, as one writer put it. We may now, three quarters of a century later, have reached a stage of comparable significance, with a potential both for summing up and for speculating on what lies ahead.


Author(s):  
Linda Freedman

Blake’s religious dissent made him a natural ally for reformers whose works were driven by personal religious quest. This chapter looks at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist reading of Blake, Lydia Maria Child’s reprinting of ‘The Little Black Boy’ in the context of Abolitionism, the appearance of several of the Poetical Sketches, and a commentary on The Little Vagabond in the context of social utopianism. It exposes the irony as well as the importance of the kinship liberal Americans felt with Blake. By the end of the century, Blake was becoming known in literary circles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson drew a comparison between Blake and Emily Dickinson in his introduction to the 1890 edition of the latter’s Poems and Amy Lowell turned to Blake as a master of poetic form, with a brilliant pictorial imagination and a sensitive ear, but most importantly, a great mind.


2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-22
Author(s):  
Brenda Wineapple

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 533-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Glenney Boggs

E. DickinsonWould you instruct me now?—Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Johnson 449)In 1866 Emily Dickinson Ended a lapse of eighteen months in her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson by sending him three lines that connect the major concerns of her work: death, subjectivity, and the conditions of knowledge. When Higginson later published these lines in “Emily Dickinson's Letters,” he explained that the poet would on occasion include “an announcement of some event, vast to her small sphere as this,” the death of her dog who had been her companion for sixteen years (450). In measuring Dickinson's loss biographically by the “small sphere” of her life, Higginson sets aside her ability to “wade grief” (Franklin 312) and situates her letter within the sentimental culture of pet keeping, which had transfigured a predominantly agricultural practice (pet initially referred to a lamb) into a staple of genteel domesticity and bourgeois subjectivity (Mason; Grier; Kete; Ritvo; Thomas). Far from participating uncritically in the roles and relations Higginson projects onto her, Dickinson interrogates the formation and gendering of sentimental subjectivity (Dillon; Blackwood) by placing “Carlo died” in relation to the other two lines—the signature and the call for instruction. “E. Dickinson” refers ambiguously to Emily or to her father, Edward Dickinson (Holland 146). The signature pluralizes the subject; it doubles and ultimately obscures “E.”'s gender. This ambiguous subject hinges on the animal's death as a scene of pedagogy: it stands in the liminal space between the announcement of Carlo's death and the request: “Would you instruct me now?”


Paleobiology ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 6 (02) ◽  
pp. 146-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Oliver

The Mesozoic-Cenozoic coral Order Scleractinia has been suggested to have originated or evolved (1) by direct descent from the Paleozoic Order Rugosa or (2) by the development of a skeleton in members of one of the anemone groups that probably have existed throughout Phanerozoic time. In spite of much work on the subject, advocates of the direct descent hypothesis have failed to find convincing evidence of this relationship. Critical points are:(1) Rugosan septal insertion is serial; Scleractinian insertion is cyclic; no intermediate stages have been demonstrated. Apparent intermediates are Scleractinia having bilateral cyclic insertion or teratological Rugosa.(2) There is convincing evidence that the skeletons of many Rugosa were calcitic and none are known to be or to have been aragonitic. In contrast, the skeletons of all living Scleractinia are aragonitic and there is evidence that fossil Scleractinia were aragonitic also. The mineralogic difference is almost certainly due to intrinsic biologic factors.(3) No early Triassic corals of either group are known. This fact is not compelling (by itself) but is important in connection with points 1 and 2, because, given direct descent, both changes took place during this only stage in the history of the two groups in which there are no known corals.


Author(s):  
D. F. Blake ◽  
L. F. Allard ◽  
D. R. Peacor

Echinodermata is a phylum of marine invertebrates which has been extant since Cambrian time (c.a. 500 m.y. before the present). Modern examples of echinoderms include sea urchins, sea stars, and sea lilies (crinoids). The endoskeletons of echinoderms are composed of plates or ossicles (Fig. 1) which are with few exceptions, porous, single crystals of high-magnesian calcite. Despite their single crystal nature, fracture surfaces do not exhibit the near-perfect {10.4} cleavage characteristic of inorganic calcite. This paradoxical mix of biogenic and inorganic features has prompted much recent work on echinoderm skeletal crystallography. Furthermore, fossil echinoderm hard parts comprise a volumetrically significant portion of some marine limestones sequences. The ultrastructural and microchemical characterization of modern skeletal material should lend insight into: 1). The nature of the biogenic processes involved, for example, the relationship of Mg heterogeneity to morphological and structural features in modern echinoderm material, and 2). The nature of the diagenetic changes undergone by their ancient, fossilized counterparts. In this study, high resolution TEM (HRTEM), high voltage TEM (HVTEM), and STEM microanalysis are used to characterize tha ultrastructural and microchemical composition of skeletal elements of the modern crinoid Neocrinus blakei.


Author(s):  
Leon Dmochowski

Electron microscopy has proved to be an invaluable discipline in studies on the relationship of viruses to the origin of leukemia, sarcoma, and other types of tumors in animals and man. The successful cell-free transmission of leukemia and sarcoma in mice, rats, hamsters, and cats, interpreted as due to a virus or viruses, was proved to be due to a virus on the basis of electron microscope studies. These studies demonstrated that all the types of neoplasia in animals of the species examined are produced by a virus of certain characteristic morphological properties similar, if not identical, in the mode of development in all types of neoplasia in animals, as shown in Fig. 1.


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