Blessed Relief

Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $4.50

We should be deeply grateful for such a book as this in days like these, when the literary vegetation of criticism, elucidation and interpretation has so dwarfed the meager creative output on which it originally started feeding. Criticism. like the cannibalistic and parasitic trees and creepers of the Madagascar jungle, now preys upon itself, and we have books of criticism of criticism, then books of criticism of criticism of criticism, and so on ad in- finitum . … This parasitic literature, moreover, has a polysyllabic official- ese jargon of its own which reminds me o.f the official language of the va- rious papers and forms issued by the Ministries of the Welfare Socialist State in England-a language calcu- lated rather to intimidate and over- awe the poor wretched reader than to enlighten or instruct him.

RC

About the Author

Roy Campbell

Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $4.50

We should be deeply grateful for such a book as this in days like these, when the literary vegetation of criticism, elucidation and interpretation has so dwarfed the meager creative output on which it originally started feeding. Criticism. like the cannibalistic and parasitic trees and creepers of the Madagascar jungle, now preys upon itself, and we have books of criticism of criticism, then books of criticism of criticism of criticism, and so on ad in- finitum . … This parasitic literature, moreover, has a polysyllabic official- ese jargon of its own which reminds me o.f the official language of the va- rious papers and forms issued by the Ministries of the Welfare Socialist State in England-a language calcu- lated rather to intimidate and over- awe the poor wretched reader than to enlighten or instruct him.