It is well known that there were bellfounders at Reading in the sixteenth century, and probably much earlier.

A passive relationless identity excludes love and action, but this larger and richer oneness fulfils itself by works and by a pure emotion...

To be a virgin in high school wasn't, even in the omnisexual milieu of the Pioneer Valley, such a social black spot.

A strain in Dickinson’s letters and some—though by far a minority—of her poems was a self-diminutization, almost as if to offset and deny—or even disguise—her actual dimensions as she must have experienced them. And this emphasis on her own “littleness,” along with the deliberate strangeness of her tactics of seclusion, have been, until recently, accepted as the prevailing character of the poet […]