Petrőczi Éva: Holt költők társaságában. A Puritanizmuskutató Intézet és a Medgyesi Pál Puritán Kiskönyvtár emlékére - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 9. (Sárospatak, 2014)
Emily Dickinson, the Poetess-Queen of the Webster Dictionary To Tamás Magay, the eternal lexicographer-theologian
PETRŐCZI ÉVA: HOLT KÖLTŐK TÁRSASÁGÁBAN »estate« more often than not. She used metaphors of eating and drinking - life-sustaining processes - to describe what book (among the the family Webster dictionary!) meant to her.”320 Sewall considers very wisely the double nature of this ardent bookishness, its being evidently rooted in her need of companionship and also of artistic impetus: “If Emily read competitively and for companionship, she also read for inspiration — but inspiration in her own special sense. In one phase of her reading, she seems constandy to have been on the lookout for the nugget, the germ, some striking word or phrase that would set her mind going.”321 On reading these important, but very unusually formulated ideas, and within it the medical-biological expression, germ, a great Hungarian Calvinist pastor-scholar’s, Lajos Fülep’s (a volunteer-tutor, a “sage” of Tamás Magays’s generation in his home, at the Széher street where he received groups of students longing for his wise words in the lunatic and brutal era of Mátyás Rákosi!) words can echo in our ears: “General direction: with her you can easily slip into a song and Easter rose-water, though this lady is: ether in the operation theatre, camphor, smell of medical alcohol, the sharp light of move of the lancet, scissors and needle.. .”322 Sewall and several other authors often quote Emily Dickinsons poems about the power, about the significance of words. As, for instance, poem No. 1212, written about 187?, No. 1409, about 1877 and poem 1261, about 1873. All these and many other related poems can be found in Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of her poems.323 Perhaps the strongest poem of hers on words and on the Word (the latter must be of special interest to Professor Magay, the theologian-lexicographer!) is the one based upon the Gospel according to St.John. Its second stanza is very remarkable as it shows that without getting any higher education, Emily Dickinson can be undoubtedly considered as a poet-philologist: “A Word that breathes distinctly Has not the power to die Cohesive as the Spirit 320 Sewall, Richard 1996. 321 Ibid., 43. 322 Dickinson-Károlyi 1978,32. 323 Dickinson, Emily 1984. 148
