ellauri014.html on line 1584: But some witnesses, who include both Marino´s detractors (such as Tommaso Stigliani) and defenders (such as the printer and biographer Antonio Bulifoni in a life of the poet which appeared in 1699) have firmly asserted that Marino, much of whose love poetry is heavily ambiguous, had homosexual tendencies. Elsewhere, the reticence of the sources on this subject is obviously due to the persecutions to which "sodomitical practices" were particularly subject during the Counterreformation.
ellauri082.html on line 284: Robert Frost is by no means the only poet in whom a hunger for recognition comes into conflict with a wariness, an inner reticence, a distaste for self-revelation. But I think in him the conflict was particularly acute. On the one hand he could be quite shameless in his pursuit of favourable reviews and his presentation to the public of a folksy and largely misleading image. On the other hand we have cryptic comments like in this poem it is not made explicit what the ‘things forbidden’ are that he has managed to preserve for himself but I take them to be his poems, or those things that his poems keep alive, and he is rightly confident enough in his own powers as a poet to feel that he has succeeded.
ellauri107.html on line 183: As [Arlin]Turner says in analyzing this letter, “[Melville] was aware, it can be assumed, of the inclusiveness and interwoven imagery of his letter, and no less aware of the meaning behind the imagery. The same awareness can be assumed on the part of Hawthorne”. Edwin Haviland Miller, who interprets Melville’s affection for Hawthorne as in part sexual, says that in this passage, “the most ardent and doubtlessly one of the most painful he was ever to write, he candidly and boldly laid bare his love”. Miller goes on to say that “when Hawthorne retreated from Lenox, he retreated from Melville. How Hawthorne felt his reticences keep us from knowing, but his friend wrestled with the problems and nature of the relationship almost until the end of his life”. Turner says only that “there is evidence through the remaining forty years of Melville’s life that he thought he had been rebuffed by Hawthorne, and that he felt a genuine regret for his loss.”
ellauri107.html on line 438: Myra Babbitt—Mrs. George F. Babbitt—was definitely mature. She had creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now, and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets. She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.
ellauri443.html on line 101: He often invited her parents to stay, as though by studying them he might decipher the mystery of their daughter. They would come to the ­island, where the ancestral home still remained, and would stay for weeks at a time. Never had he met people of such extraordinary blandness, such featurelessness: however much he exhausted himself with trying to stimulate them, they were as unresponsive as a pair of armchairs. In the end he became very fond of them, as one can become fond of armchairs; particularly the father, whose boundless reticence was so extreme that gradually my neighbor came to understand that he must suffer from some form of psychic injury. It moved him to see someone so injured by life. In his younger days he almost certainly wouldn’t even have noticed the man, let alone pondered the causes of his silence; and in this way, in recognizing his father-in-law’s suffering, he recognized his own. It sounds trivial, yet it could almost be said that through this recognition he felt his whole life turning on its axis: the history of his self-will appeared to him, by a simple revolution in perspective, as a moral journey.
xxx/ellauri068.html on line 221: I also said something about Borges’s love life, which is present in several places in his work, just like his reticence, yes, to go beyond “a certain point” (in the story “The Other,” for example, various critics have found a subtle reference to a brothel and a prostitute located almost in a blank space, between two French names that are almost identical).
xxx/ellauri128.html on line 542: In his memoirs, he calls his father “bashful” and his mother “reserved.” Between them, they filled the house with “melancholy reticences and unexpressed doubts.” Some of the silence surrounded a particular subject: the family’s Jewishness. This was not exactly hidden, but it was not brought to the fore, either. Maurois, who was born Émile Herzog on July 26, 1885, found out that he was Jewish at the age of about six, when a friend at the local Protestant church told him so. His parents confirmed it, but they also spoke highly of Protestantism.
xxx/ellauri261.html on line 255: He formed a close, fervent and life-long friendship with Gertrude Stein, but his shyness and natural reserve kept him from acknowledging their shared homosexuality. Writer Samuel Steward records the reticence which kept this close circle of friends deeply in the closet — even to one another. Six years after Wilder’s death, Samuel Steward wrote in his autobiography that he too had had sexual relations with him (and her):
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