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 ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com