第16页 The Emily Dickinson wars

Deployed as a weapon against the political, ideological, and popular approaches to literature associated with the Left, the masses, and the thirties, in the criticism of Tate, Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and others, Dickinson's poems became both the exampla and the occasion for modernist and New Critical definitions of the literary-grounded in distinctions between poetry and history, aesthetics and politics, high art and mass culture, form and feeling-that  came to dominate academic criticism and literary studies in the United States during the Cold War period.