Emily Dickinson: Bloom's BioCritiques, Harold Bloom, c. 2003. 811EMI.
Introduction to the series.
Attempts to explain the challenge of writing bio-critiques, how to separate the "works" from the writer.
Of course, Harold Bloom starts with Shakespeare: it's all about his works. We know nothing about the writer ... unless one knows / accepts the Shakespeare plays / sonnets were written by Sir Henry Neville. Then we know everything.
From Shakespeare, Bloom goes to Goethe, about whom we know everything.
I digress: actually Bloom began with James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, a biography that spoke both of Boswell's life and his works, though, if I recall, it seemed more about the lives of the two men much more than Johnson's works.
From there, Harold Bloom mentions other examples of modern instances of literary biography: Richard Ellman's lives of W. B. Yeats, Joyce, and Oscar Wilde -- which essentially follow in Boswell's pattern.
After Shakespeare and Goethe, Bloom turns to Virginia Woolf, known more for her works and her boring life.
On the other hand, those with lives more livid than their works: Byron, Wilde, Malraux, Hemingway.
To that list, I would add F. Scott Fitzgerald, except for The Great Gatsby, of course.
Writers who struggled to be real heroes but never succeeded; their work outlived them: Tolstoy, Milton, Victor Hugo.
Others with "work in the work," and not "work in the person": Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Willa Cather.
The extreme instance of the latter group: Emily Brontē.
And then the Emily Dickinson bio-critique begins.
Introduction
Holy mackerel. Three-page introduction, and what an introduction!
Religion was a big, big deal in those days and poets were struggling to absorb / reject "man's religion," but not one's personal faith.
Everything I've read suggests that Dickinson's life was one of unrequited love:
- Judge Otis Phillips Lord, of her father's generation, in 1880, Judge Lord, 67 and Emily, 49, both quite old for that generation;
- Judge Otis Lord: a Massachusetts Supreme Court judge
- Samuel Bowles, a despairing love
- Lord's wife died in December, 1877; Bowles dies the next month
- from the summer of 1880 until Judge Lord's death in 1884, Dickinson and the Judge appear to have had a love affair or intimate relationship (again, 1880: he, 67; she, 49)
- about all they had in common: a mutual passion for Shakespeare, whom the Judge regarded as the god of common sense;
- sister-in-law Susan, Austin Dickinson's wife
Kay Cornelius
Biography of Emily Dickinson
The Myth of Amherst
a
"Puritans All"
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"Improving the Mind"
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"Home Sweet Home"
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The Homestead and the Evergreens
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My Business is Circumference
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The War Between The Houses
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Sandra McChesney
A View from the Window: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
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Background: Family History and Early Years
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Awakening of the Poet
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Themes and Symbols: Dickinson as Visionary
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Life
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Love
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Renunciation
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Death and Immortality
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Symbols
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Dickinson's Language and Style: Forging Tools to Construct Meaning
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Life Informing Art, and Vice Versa
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Nineteenth Century Reception of Dickinson's Poetry
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Dickinson and World Literature: Why and How Her Influence Continues
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Adrienne Rich
Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson
Allen Tate
New England Culture and Emily Dickinson
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