Another American poet whose criticism is entangled with psychobiography is
Emily Dickinson, a recluse who once wrote to a friend who had suggested he
might call, "I had hoped to see you, but have no grace to talk, and my own
Words so chill and burn me, that the temperature of other Minds is too new
an Awe" (_Letters_, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, no. 798). Probably the most
influential psychiatric study of the last half-century is John Cody's
_After Great Pain_, a piece of Freudian analysis which suggests that
Dickinson's poems about apparently unmotivated suffering (such as "After
great pain a formal feeling comes") are descriptions of psychotic episodes
originating in maternal deprivation during early childhood. However, Cody's
book was published in 1971, and a great deal of interesting work has been
done in the years since then. For a recent study with a bibliography that
may be useful for this aspect of Pound's biography, see John McDermott,
"Emily Dickinson's 'Nervous Prostration' and Its Possible Relationship to
Her Work," _Emily Dickinson Journal_ 9 (2000): 71-86.

Jonathan Morse