“Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.”

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.”

“I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.”

“Craft is something you learn by studying models. When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

“She saw in his eyes defeat of her wild dreams, her mad desires.”

“This," Adrian said grandly, "is Blake Lazar."
"It's nice to meet you," she said.
Blake smile radiantly. "May I call you Vasilisa?"
"You can call me Lissa."
"You can also," added Christian, "let go of her hand now.”

“If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.”

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”