Emily Dickinson is probably the most famous female poet in the world. And yet – at least according to Dickinson mythology – her work could easily have gone unpublished. She wrote 1800 poems but published only 10 in her lifetime. Instead, she bound them into little bundles of paper, tied with kitchen string. These were found after her death by her sister Lavinia and after many stops and starts the first collection was published in 1890 by her friend and mentor, the critic and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was an instant hit with 11 editions in less than 2 years.

The spontaneity and freshness of the poems appealed to readers, as well as their fragmentary, transient, unfinished quality, as though they were moments of thought or feeling, grabbed out of thin air.

She wrote about death and life, ordinary objects, the natural world, light, air, love and god with a kind of improvisational vim that proved timeless.

The legend of Dickinson is more flamboyant than the writing, which is precise, miniaturist and modest. In this episode Sophie and Jonty talk about the relationship between Dickinson’s world in Amherst and her world on the scraps and fragments of paper she wrote on; the tensions between her reclusive persona and her prolific and highly professional writing life; her disdaining publication and her making sure that it would happen, and the ambiguities of her most intimate relationships. How has such a quiet and unforthcoming poet destined to become one of the most relatable, personal and confessional voices in the history of world poetry?

Books etc referred to in this episode:

Martha Ackmann These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

Diana Fuss The Sense of An Interior

Lisa Brooks The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, “No Coward Soul Am I”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod

Isaac Watts, Hymns

Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department.

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Richard III is one of the OG villains of English literary history, the usurper king who killed his brother, nephews (the infamous “Princes in the Tower”) and seduced his brother's wife all in the space of about six months. Richard III is also known as “Crookback,” or the hunchback of Windsor Castle, because of his curvature of the spine, which prompted the great historian and Tudor apologist Thomas More to describe him as “little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crooked-backed,” a condition that made him “malicious, wrathful and perverse.” Shakespeare used Richard’s villainy and disability with unprecedented skill and daring, creating a character whose deformity and appetite for evil became assets and sources of charm.

Richard III is Shakespeare’s first masterpiece. He probably wrote it in 1592 or 93, after warming-up with Taming of the Shrew, Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus. With the psychological depth of these characters and his analysis of relationships under the strain of political volatility and anxiety, Shakespeare accessed a new kind of writing, influenced by Marlowe’s hit Tamburlaine. In Richard III we see the cruelty and misogynistic violence of Shrew reappear, along with the lust for blood that Shakespeare front loaded in Titus Andronicus. And we see the sit-com like return of the royal family from the Henry VI plays – all of whom would have been familiar to Elizabethan audiences. Richard III is like the season finale of Succession, when we find out what’s going to happen to all the scheming, unpleasant, entitled nepo babies and their underlings.

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