as flip sides of a coin: "The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all." By mapping these contradictions so scrupulously, Wineapple allows Dickinson and Higginson their full measure of humanity. Covering some of the same ground, Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds isn't, properly speaking, a biography. It is an account of a cultural moment, the summer of 1882, when the literati were breaking sexual taboos and finding a metaphor for this liberation in hummingbirds, which had been popularized by early-nineteenth-century naturalists.
from The Nation: Her Nature Was Future: Emily Dickinson's White Heat
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