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A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Jo by Christopher Benfey
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Cultural Reconstruction After the Civil War
A Review 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 return, which spoke of "A Route of Evanescence" in describing the essence of a hummingbird.

"The exchange of gifts had lasting repercussions for American literature," Benfey asserts well into his book -- not a case he has made by that point, despite putting forth some related and imaginative other propositions -- but he is referring to the fact that the sender of the painting, Mabel Loomis Todd, was an early champion of Dickinson's work and would become one of her posthumous editors. "Almost alone among her contemporaries, Mabel Todd recognized the genius of Dickinson's poems and shepherded them to a wider public," Benfey points out.

Todd, although married, was having an affair with Dickinson's brother, Austin, who was also married, when she sent her...
 
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