finished. It was interesting and lively, drawing out the connections among half a dozen or more interesting nineteenth-century American characters, but it did not -- nor I think did it really try to -- prove that they all came to understand life as unfixed and evanescent, and to take the hummingbird as symbol of that mutability.
over 3 years agonbm's Notes // view everyone's notes
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A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scanda...
nbm
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A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scanda...
Traces connections among Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Heade, among others, with the hummingbird (a New World exclusive) representing "a brave new world of instability and evanescence" that (Benfey argues) they all come to accept. Ties into J C Oates' WILD NIGHTS, which I just read, in which Dickinson and Twain are both characters; and Heade is a favorite painter of mine, though I've always liked his New England and New Jersey landscapes better than his tropic scenes, flowers, and birds.
over 3 years ago