Christopher Ricks has something to say about Freud and Emily Dickinson in
his essay on Lowell's translation of Racine's Phedre in Essays in
Appreciation. I forget the point, but you might like to follow it up.

Richard Edwards




>From: Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
>  <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Psychiatric disorders
>Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 05:03:44 -1000
>
>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

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