Emily Dickinson

By Art Winslow Christopher Benfey, a scholar of Emily Dickinson and Gilded Age America, would not have his book "A Summer of Hummingbirds" had Dickinson not responded to a small floral painting sent to her in 1882 by writing an eight-line poem in...

Alfred Kazin By Richard M. Cook Yale University Press, 452 pages, $35 'I love to think about America," Alfred Kazin, 26, recorded in his journal in February 1942. He was finishing his canonical study of modern American literature, "On Native Grounds,"...

Bisexuality certainly increases the geometric possibilities of the romantic comedy, completing its triangles and allowing for quadrangles and other, more amorphous layers of amorous involvement. The primary vertex of "Puccini for Beginners," writer-...

At The Homestead, where Dickinson spent nearly her entire life, you can walk the same flagstone path she followed across the east lawn, stand under the massive white oak tree that dates from her time, then pass peony and lilac bushes she may have passed....

by Mark Silva and updated with service President Barack Obama, his wife and two daughters attended Easter service this morning at St. John's Church, a favorite chapel of presidents past situated just across a sun-splashed, flowering park from the White......

Hospitality is the way of life in Key West. The generous reception of guests dates back to the 1820s when ship salvagers and Cuban cigarmakers settled on the island. In more recent times, Key West has been both a sanctuary for aging hippies in...

The Connecticut River snakes through the Pioneer Valley, through historic towns (Deerfield and Montague) and bustling cities (Holyoke and Springfield). The heart of the valley is considered to be Northampton and Amherst, site of the five colleges that...

It has been more than two decades since Amy Dickinson left the upstate New York dairy farm where she was born and raised, but for a few minutes a few days ago she might as well have been a little girl again. She was visiting Lincoln Park's Farm in the Zoo...

My theory is that God created winter so we would actually look forward to housework. About this time every year, I'm ready to put a hose into my living room window and turn the nozzle to full blast. The place is full of tracked-in grit, stale air,...

Far from a liberal screed, the documentary "Voices in Wartime" is a thoughtful, provocative exploration of the ways poets have dealt with the experience of battle throughout history. The words of Homer, Emily Dickinson, Wilfred Owen and Langston Hughes as...

On Mother's Day, mother was away. For a 17-month-old boy, it is evidently an inconvenience to be the child of two poet-parents. On any given holiday, one of them can stray from Trenton's leafy capital neighborhood to give a reading in a place called New...

More than three weeks after its opening, the celebrations at Walt Disney Concert Hall have not ceased. Sunday night was the Los Angeles Master Chorale's turn. As a resident company of the Music Center family, the chorus is the only other company besides...