A Poet's Parents

The courtship letters of Emily Dickinson’s parents identify issues of vital importance to the poet’s parents which influenced Dickinson’s subsequent development. In her introduction, Pollak places the letters within the context of nineteenth-century American society and argues that the poet’s disturbed relationship with her mother forms part of a larger pattern of troubled same-sex bonding that can be observed in the lives and works of other major artists of the era.

Originally published in 1988.

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