The Belle Of Amherst Quotes

Oh phosphorescence. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to... To find that phosphorescence, that light within — is the genius behind poetry.

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.

Hold your parents tenderly, for the world will seem a strange and lonely place when they're gone.

Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime that are striking in their originality of thought and their intensity of feeling. Most were not even published until after her death, and her works only very slowly gained the widespread critical acclaim and appreciation that they enjoy today. When did the act of creation occur? When she was actually writing the poems? Or only after they were discovered, published, and admired by society?

Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime that are striking in their originality of thought and their intensity of feeling. Most were not even published until after her death, and her works only very slowly gained the widespread critical acclaim and appreciation that they enjoy today. When did the act of creation occur? When she was actually writing the poems? Or only after they were discovered, published, and admired by society? Vincent van Gogh produced hundreds of paintings throughout his life. Yet no one, except a few friends, purchased any of his paintings, and he died an apparent failure. Only later did critical acclaim make his work widely sought after, and now his paintings sell for millions of dollars when auctioned at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Most of John Donne’s songs and sonnets, satires, and religious and secular love poems circulated in a handwritten underground form during much of his life. For three centuries they remained largely underground and appeared infrequently in anthologies until the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot rediscovered the metaphysical poets and held them up as ideal models of what poetry should be like.