Christopher Benfey

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His book A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade was published in April. (June 2008)

From the Review

June 26, 2008: Melville's Second Act

Melville: The Making of the Poet by Hershel Parker

Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine by Robert Milder

March 6, 2008: The Unpacific Pacific (letter)

December 6, 2007: The Shock of Intrusion

Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853 by George Feifer

March 29, 2007: Three Ways of Looking at Thomas Eakins

Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist by Henry Adams

The Revenge of Thomas Eakins by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick

Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins by William S. McFeely

February 15, 2007: The Convert

Emma Lazarus by Esther Schor

Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems edited by John Hollander

August 10, 2006: The View from the Bridge

Brookland by Emily Barton

February 23, 2006: The Making of a Poet

Summer Doorways: A Memoir by W.S. Merwin

Present Company by W.S. Merwin

October 20, 2005: Patriotic Gore

The March by E.L. Doctorow

September 22, 2005: American Jeremiad

The American Classics: A Personal Essay by Denis Donoghue.

April 28, 2005: The Art of Consolation

Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats by Helen Vendler

April 29, 2004: Their Ignorance and Majesty

Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son by John Jeremiah Sullivan

December 4, 2003: The Art of Disaster

Goya by Robert Hughes

September 25, 2003: A Tale of Two Iliads

De l'Iliade by Rachel Bespaloff

On the Iliad by Rachel Bespaloff, translated from the Frenchby Mary McCarthy, with an introduction by Hermann Broch

Lettres à Jean Wahl, 1937–1947 by Rachel Bespaloff, edited by Monique Jutrin

The Iliad or The Poem of Force by Simone Weil, translated from the French by Mary McCarthy

January 17, 2002: Emily Dickinson's Secret Lives

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger

May 25, 2000: Tea with Okakura

Okakura Tenshin and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston October 23, 1999-March 26, 2000. an exhibition at Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan,, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Saeko Yamawaki, by Nobuko Sakamoto, by Makiko Yamada, by Hitomi Sato

The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura

October 21, 1999: 'The Poet Position' (letter)

April 8, 1999: The Mystery of Emily Dickinson

The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition edited by R.W. Franklin

Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson edited by Ellen Louise Hart, by Martha Nell Smith

The Emily Dickinson Handbook edited by Gudrun Grabher, by Roland Hagenbüchle, by Cristanne Miller

March 4, 1999: Unreliable Source (letter)

March 16, 1989: The Courage of Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry edited by J.C. Levenson

The Correspondence of Stephen Crane edited by Stanley Wertheim, edited by Paul Sorrentino

March 26, 1987: Lady in the Dark

Emily Dickinson by Cynthia Griffin Wolff

January 30, 1986: Inconstant Anderson

Letters to Bab by Sherwood Anderson, edited by William A. Sutton

Kit Brandon by Sherwood Anderson

October 10, 1985: Advertising Counsel (letter)

May 9, 1985: Poet in the Sun Belt

Randall Jarrell's Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection edited by Mary Jarrell

November 22, 1984: A Long-Suppressed Episode

The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion by Leo Steinberg

From New York Review Books

War and the Iliad These essays do more than prove the permanent relevance of Homer's great poem. They analyze the logic of war itself, and explore how intoxicating violence defines the human condition.