May 28-June 3, 1862: Illness and Health

This week’s post situates Dickinson’s health and illness, especially her eye troubles, in the work of two of her contemporaries and influences, Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s editorial on “The Health of Our Girls,” and Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking,” both published in the June 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Giavanna Munafo

Sources

This week’s post takes its inspiration from the June 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, which printed two articles related to health and illness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s editorial on “The Health of Our Girls” and Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking.” In April, Dickinson began a correspondence with Higginson in which she invoked illness both explicitly—“I was ill – and write today” (L261) and “I felt a palsy” (L265)—and implicitly in her language about her writing, with medicalized terms like “Balm” and “spasmodic” (L265).

Pointing out that editor Thomas Johnson dated 366 poems to 1862, biographer Richard Sewall considers Dickinson’s remarkable poetic inspiration and production during a time when she was in “such a deplorable emotional condition as is often hypothesized.” He observes, it

is hard to see how she could have had the strength to put mind to matter or pen to paper, let alone write poems of much coherence and power.

In fact, many scholars have attempted to figure out just what was going on in Dickinson’s life health-wise, while “the difficulty with her eyes is still a mystery.” Explanations range from John Cody’s psychosomatic Freudian prognoses and Lyndall Gordon's hypothesis of epilepsy to investigations by Sewall and an ophthalmologist, who noticed in “the famous daguerreotype of Dickinson taken at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary,” that her right cornea “deviated as much as fifteen degrees from true.” James Guthrie notes that Dickinson traveled twice to Boston two years later to see Dr. Henry Williams, an ophthalmologist. Though a diagnosis is now impossible, Guthrie speculates that

in this struggle, poetry functioned as an extension of herself, an alternative mode of perception that took the place of her injured eyes and which was equally capable of revealing the truth to her.

Interest in Dickinson’s health persists in contemporary circles. Director Terence Davis gave it ample screen time in his 2016 biopic A Quiet Passion. This week’s post situates Dickinson’s health in the commentaries of two contemporary writers, Higginson and Thoreau, and in her own poems from around 1862 about illness and health.

“The Health of Our Girls”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Springfield Republican, May 31, 1862, page 1
Progress of the War.
This has been the most extraordinary week of the whole war—a week of needless defeat and retreat, and of sudden panic and quick reassurance. Under the misapprehension that the capital was again in danger there has been another outburst of popular patriotism scarcely less vehement than that of April of last year, and the two hundred thousand volunteers needed to fill up the ranks of our decimated armies will come forward at once, and the government be obliged to say, “Hold, enough!” almost before its new summons to arms has been proclaimed through the country.

Springfield Republican, May 31, 1862, page 1
Cotton and Consumption.
Dr. Alfred Booth of Lowell, formerly of this city, has published an article broaching the novel theory that the wearing of cotton next the skin is a cause of consumption. If this should be confirmed the destruction of King Cotton may prove a great blessing instead of an evil. Dr. Booth’s theory is at least ingenious.

Springfield Republican, May 31, 1862, page 2
Books, Authors and Art.

Max Muller (1823-1900), a German philologist

Dogs and horses receive a great many ideas, both detached and associated, but they are incapable of generalizing; so that Max Muller is substantially right when he says: “No animal thinks and no animal speaks, except man. Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.”

Springfield Republican, May 31, 1862, page 3
Emancipation at War.
A letter from Gen. Fremont’s camp in Western Virginia relates the following significant incident:

The presence and passage of our army in the country is having the effect of settling the slavery question here, for emancipation follows its path. I have talked with many of these poor negroes, and find them singularly intelligent … They are of great value to us in many ways, especially as guides, and the scouts tell me that there has never been an instance of false or even incorrect information derived from them.

Springfield Republican, June 7, 1862, page 3
The poetry of the June Atlantic is all good with one exception; very good, with two. Of its prose, the first essay, on Walking, does more to unfold the characters and habits of its author, the late gifted eccentric Henry D. Thoreau, than any ordinary biography would have done;—Thoreau, who was emphatically a man of today, a student of “that newer testament, the Gospel according to the present moment;” and who after sauntering through a brief but happy life, has passed a la Sainte Terre, and will return no more. … Mr. Higginson’s article upon feminine health provokes a feeling of antagonism. He seems to ignore the fact that the brute vigor of the peasant woman is absolutely incompatible with culture and refinement, and that the scimitar of Saladin must keep to its graceful feats, and not attempt to deal the sledge-hammer blows of the heavy battle-ax of Richard. Moreover, physiologists are wont to confine themselves to material agencies, and yet there is an immaterial hygiene that affects, more vitally than we are fond of admission, “the health of our girls.”

Hampshire Gazette, June 3, 1862, page 2
The Emancipation and Confiscation Acts.
These two most important measures of the government came up in the House of Representatives last week, and the confiscation bill was passed by a majority of twenty, while the emancipation bill was lost by four votes. Both bills are published in another column. The people of Massachusetts are anxious that measures should be adopted by which some sort of punishment shall be meted out to the rebels, and they regret exceedingly that the bill for the emancipation of the slaves of rebels has failed.

Hampshire Gazette, June 3, 1862, page 2
Amherst.
The Selectmen have appointed Daniel Converse for the South part, and Marquis F. Dickinson for the North part, Special Police, to enforce the dog law. Mr. Converse canvassed the South Parish Wednesday and had 10 dogs licensed on his route, and all but four in that parish are now registered, and those were allowed three days grace, on account of the absence of the owners. … [Marquis F. Dickinson (1840-1915) was born in Amherst, graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Law School, and was a prominent Boston attorney, but does not seem to be directly related to the Dickinsons of the Homestead.]

Thomas M. Brown has been lecturing on temperance in Amherst, North Amherst, and other places adjoining—Dodge had a large audience at his concert in Amherst.

“Thoreau and Higginson on Health”

“I wish to speak a word for Nature …” -Henry David Thoreau, Atlantic Monthly, June of 1862

The June 7th printing of the Springfield Republican directs its readers’ attention to the Atlantic Monthly, reviewing columns by Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (page 3). “Walking,” by the “late gifted eccentric” Thoreau, is said to “unfold the characters and habits of its author.” “The Health of Our Girls,” Higginson’s piece, on the other hand, “provokes a sense of antagonism.” The contemporary reader might also take issue with Higginson’s anachronistic arguments about women’s health, though writing about the topic at all was considered progressive for his time. Whatever the Springfield Republican has to say in review of this month’s Atlantic, it was certainly an issue to pique Dickinson’s interest, both for her focus on nature and her newfound relationship with Higginson.

In “Walking,” Thoreau makes a case for

Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

He feels there are “enough champions of civilization” and too few of Nature. He notices the “subtle magnetism of Nature,” a force that Dickinson has documented well. He does not, however, share her love for gardens, but instead, for walking:

yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that every human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.

Thoreau, perhaps unlike Dickinson, places the garden on the order of “civilization,” the management and pruning of “Nature,” and is therefore surpassed by the wild, untouched swamp.

Around the same time that Higginson was in correspondence with Dickinson, he published his editorial, “The Health of Our Girls,” in the Springfield Republican, addressing what he saw as a decline in the vigor of New England women. Notably, Dickinson’s first three letters to Higginson (on April 15th, 25th, and June 7th) make use of the metaphors and metonyms of health.

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

she writes in the first, as if to put her poetry on the hospital bed (L260). In the second, she thanks him for his “surgery,” writing from her pillow because she is “ill” (L261). In the third, she claims that his “Balm, seemed better” because he “bled her first” (L265). That her rhetoric affords him the role of a poetic doctor becomes all the more relevant when he publishes his piece on the health of women. His all-knowing assertion of what’s best for women’s health is reflected in his correspondence with Dickinson and his editorial comments on her poetry. At the same time that he performed surgery on her poetry, she was “ill” and found some relief in writing.

Higginson frames his argument within an American context, asserting that “Nature is aiming at a keener and subtler temperament in framing the American” due to a “drier atmosphere” which might produce a “higher type of humanity.” Female health, however, is determined largely by changing social conventions. He then cites the obstacles:

What use to found colleges for girls whom even the high-school breaks down, or to induct them into new industrial pursuits when they have not strength to stand behind a counter? How appeal to any woman to enlarge her thoughts beyond the mere drudgery of the household, when she “dies daily” beneath the exhaustion of even that?

The “disease” of American women, as he calls it, is deeply embedded in the social, the “elevation of the mass of women to the social zone of music-lessons and silk gowns” such that they forgo the “rustic health” of field-labor and agriculture. Like Thoreau, he privileges “walking,” which he sees as a “rare habit among our young women.” He offers a panorama of possible solutions—forms of exercise that he finds well-suited to women—such as swimming, rowing, and riding horses. Of the condition of women’s health in the US, he concludes:

Morbid anatomy has long enough served as a type of feminine loveliness; our polite society has long enough been a series of soirées of incurables. Health is coming into fashion.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Giavanna Munafo

This week’s post and poems invite us to consider the complex ways that Dickinson’s health, especially her “chronic optical illness," influenced her poetry, is made visible or evident there, and/or might inform our understanding of her work from this period.

In response, I was called back to a poem very much of our current time and concerned with one of the greatest health crises of modern life, the AIDS epidemic. In “Heartbeats,” the poet and novelist Melvin Dixon asserts through poetic utterance his own stuttering process of coming face to face with illness and suffering. Dixon died at 42 of complications from AIDS. Every step of the way “Heartbeats” insists, in recurring imperative commands, on the tending of the body and its fitness while simultaneously cataloguing the determined, ever-escalating throws of its failure in the face of a persistent, fatal disease.

The battery of the poem’s repetitive two-syllable sentences in relentless couplets, along with the poem’s guttural rhythmic music, hammer home its story of ever-persistent symptoms and the speaker’s equally stubborn drive to fend them off. The final couplet, starting with a reprieve from the poem’s headstrong anti-sentimentality — “Sweet heart.” — introduces a tension similar to the one Guthrie notes in Dickinson’s work, giving possibility with one hand while taking it away with the other.

Lastly, another connection across the years worth noting, and one that remains a pressing matter today, is concern about public health in the specific context of subjugated populations put under medical scrutiny, populations to be managed or controlled. In Dickinson’s day (and, of course, sadly too often still), women were to be diagnosed and managed, and in our time those most devastated, and for far too long abandoned, by private and public neglect of the AIDS epidemic — gay men, intravenous drug users, and the poor — were and remain under the microscope, literally in medical terms and metaphorically in terms of their rights as citizens and fully human members of our communities.

Heartbeats
by Melvin Dixon

Work out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.

Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.

Eat right. Rest well.
Sweetheart. Safe sex.

Sore throat. Long flu.
Hard nodes. Beware.

Test blood. Count cells.
Reds thin. Whites low.

Dress warm. Eat well.
Short breath. Fatigue.

Night sweats. Dry cough.
Loose stools. Weight loss.

Get mad. Fight back.
Call home. Rest well.

Don’t cry. Take charge.
No sex. Eat right.

Call home. Talk slow.
Chin up. No air.

Arms wide. Nodes hard.
Cough dry. Hold on.

Mouth wide. Drink this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.

Black out. White rooms.
Head hot. Feet cold.

No work. Eat right.
CAT scan. Chin up.

Breathe in. Breathe out.
No air. No air.

Thin blood. Sore lungs.
Mouth dry. Mind gone.

Six months? Three weeks?
Can’t eat. No air.

Today? Tonight?
It waits. For me.

Sweet heart. Don’t stop.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

Bio: Giavanna Munafo teaches in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. She is also a volunteer crisis counselor and advocate and does consulting work focused on diversity and equity. Giavanna’s poems have appeared in E.Ratio, Redheaded Stepchild, Slab, Talking Writing, The New Virginia Review, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and The Nearest Poem Anthology (Ed. Sofia Starnes). She holds a BA and PhD from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Giavanna lives in Norwich, Vermont.

Sources:

Overview
Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980, 606.

Gordon, Lyndall. Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds. Little Brown, 2011.

Guthrie, James R. Emily Dickinson's Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998, 8-9.

History
Hampshire Gazette, June 3, 1862

Springfield Republican, May 31, June 7, 1862

Biography
Guthrie, James R. Emily Dickinson's Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998, 8-9.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “The Health of Our Girls,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1862.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1862.

May 21-27, 1862: “Eastern Spirit”

This week, following on several posts exploring Dickinson’s garden politics, we explore her engagement with Eastern thought, especially the ancient Chinese philosophy of Daoism and Chan (also spelled Ch’an or Zen) Buddhism, which developed from it, and the aesthetics that flow from them.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Chin Woon Ping

Sources

“Dickinson's Eastern Spirit”

It still seems important to recognize and celebrate the boldness and courage of Emily Dickinson in the face of persistent mythologies that reduce her to the status of a quaint, reclusive, heart-broken spinster. And so, in some of our first posts, we examined Dickinson’s explorations of themes of agency and power, like entitlement and choosing. This week, however, following on several posts on Dickinson’s garden politics, we explore her engagement with Eastern thought, especially the ancient Chinese philosophy of Daoism and Chan (also spelled Ch’an or Zen) Buddhism which developed from it, and the aesthetics that flow from these schools of thought.

Coincidentally, May is Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPIHM) in the United States, so this theme seems even more appropriate. The influence of an “Eastern spirit” on Dickinson produces a different, though not, we would argue (in the feminist spirit of both/and), incompatible kind of ontology, which to Western eyes can look like “blandness,” the opposite of boldness.

Scholars have begun to investigate Dickinson’s involvement with Eastern thought and how she learned about it. In the Biography section, we will detail several trips she made to Boston in the 1840s and 1850s, a town with a long history of trade with China. There, she visited the newly opened Chinese Museum and even met a recovering opium eater! As Cristanne Miller shows and we discussed several weeks ago, New Englanders were fascinated with the Orient and things eastern, which began in the 1840s as translations of Buddhist texts in English appeared, and peaked in the 1850-60s. Several of the magazines that the Dickinson family read regularly carried stories about the East and introductions to Buddhist thought.

Another possible source of influence was the homegrown Transcendental writers, Emerson and Thoreau, who read Eastern works, like the Bhagavad Gita, and borrowed and adapted some of their core ideas about the centrality of contemplation, stillness, receptiveness, nature as a model, self-denial, detachment, and non-possession.

However Dickinson absorbed the ideas of Eastern philosophy, she applied them to her poetic explorations about selfhood, nature, theories of language and representation, and formal, aesthetic choices. It is easy to see how her short poems and habitual compression resemble the Japanese poetic form of haiku. But it is more startling to realize that we can understand her many poems about renunciation, for example, not only in terms of romantic heartbreak but as a stage in the Buddhist journey towards “liberation.” A summary of Eastern thought, which Dickinson might have read, called this state “annihilation:”

that all things originated in nothing, and will revert to nothing again. Hence annihilation is the summit of bliss; and nirupan, nirvana, or nonentity, the grand and ultimate anticipation of all.

We can only imagine how thrilled Dickinson would have been to find a philosophy and practice that could deliver her from the world of illusion!

“The grand struggle of the war has not yet come off.”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Springfield Republican May 24, 1862, page 1

Review of the Week: “Progress of the War.”

The march to Richmond has been found more difficult than it had been popularly estimated. Continued rains have made the usually bad road almost impassable, and as our army nears the confederate capital it enters the region of miserable swamps with which the city is environed, and through which a great deal of road has to be actually built. … The rebels thus seem to have the ability to concentrate at Richmond all their forces in Virginia, and to meet Gen McClellan with superior numbers. Notwithstanding this, the known demoralization of a large portion of the rebel army, and the assured caution and skill of our commanders, give great confidence of success in the approaching contest.

“The General Situation:”

The special agitation of the week has grown out of an order by Gen Hunter, of the department of the South, declaring all the slaves free in his department—South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The only reason stated by him for this order was that slavery is inconsistent with martial law in order to prevent certain government agents from abusing the negroes. … It was manifest, however, to all sane men that the president could do no otherwise than recall and annul Gen Hunter’s order, which he did in a proclamation, in which he stated that he reserves to himself as commander-in-chief, the decision of the question whether he shall resort to this measure, and when and how.

New England Affairs: “A warm term, a cool morning and showers of rain have diversified the weather and considerably benefited vegetation in general. The country looks as beautiful as the most blooming bride.”

FROM BOSTON. From Our Own Correspondent. “The publishers of the Atlantic give their readers twelve extra pages of reading matter in the June number; so they may be pardoned for printing Mr. F. G. Tuckerman’s sonnet, which is probably the worst sonnet ever written, and liable to be printed among the curiosities of literature as such. I have read the conclusion of “The South Breaker” [by Harriet Spofford], which is very fine. “Walking” by Henry Thoreau, is natural and breezy … There is no risk in praising Mr Higginson’s essay, “The Health of our Girls.” There is a piece by Whittier, commemorative of the abolition of slavery at the national capital; a fine poem by Alice Carey, entitled “An order for a picture,”one by Rose Terry,—whose stories are so good—and Mr Lowell’s Biglow paper, entitled “Sumthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” which is far better than anything he has given us before, in the present series. … the conclusion, being the sound and salutary advice communicated to Hosea [the speaker of the poem] by the old Pilgrim father, who came to him in a dream …” Signed Warrington.

Original Poetry, page 6
“The Burial at Sea,” in the ballad measure by F. H. C.
“The Conflict of Ages” by B. Hathaway in 6 line stanzas of iambic tetrameter rhyming abbaab. [We found this title in The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, Volume 4].
“The Old Story” by Chauncey Hickox (1837-1905) in iambic tetrameter couplets. [Hickox, originally from Ohio but married in Connecticut, enlisted with the Union forces in October 1862.]

Tribute to a Massachusetts Woman.— Mrs. Dall, in her admirable book entitled “Historical Pictures Retouched,” pays tribe to the patience and thoroughness of a lady astronomer” Maria Mitchell: “Women are also more patient, thorough, and observant of small facts than man. …”

Genius and Labor. This short piece mentions three people, all male: Alexander Hamilton, Mr. Webster and Demosthenes.

“Daisies” reprinted from the Boston Transcript

Hampshire Gazette May 27, 1862, page 1

Leads off with three poems:
Written for the Gazette and Courier, “Prayer for the Union,” Tune—Old Hundred, and signed Newbern, N.C. April. E. W. F.

“New England’s Dead” by Isaac McLellan:

On every hill they lie;
On every field of strife, made red
By bloody victory.

Written for the Gazette and Courier, “Passing Away” by E. A. W. also about the war dead, and written from “Hospital, Northampton, May, 1862.”

“Facts about Manure.”

Farmers are beginning to appreciate the value of manure. Only a few years since, it was difficult for keepers of horses in this and other cities to sell a load of manure, or even get it drawn from their stables without charge. … but now … it is with the greatest difficulty we can obtain enough in the spring to make hotbeds, while for other purposes we are compelled to resort to guano.

Page 2, Notes of the Week: “The grand struggle of the war has not yet come off.”

How Massachusetts Responds. “Great Enthusiasm.” A dispatch from Boston says the call upon the volunteer militia of Massachusetts for active service is being gloriously responded to. The enthusiasm of April, 1861, is renewed.”

“Slavery, as viewed by Great Southern Statesmen.”
Jefferson— “I tremble for my country, when I reflect, that God is just.” In his Ordinance of 1787, approved by Congress unanimously, it was declared there should be no “slavery” in the United States after the year 1800.
Washington—“There is no man living, who wishes more sincerely, than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.”
Madison—“This evil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union”
Randolph—“I envy neither the heart nor the head of that man from the North, who rise here to defend slavery on principle.”
Clay—“Never will I aid in admitting one rood of free Territory to the everlasting curse of human bondage.”

“The Chinese Museum”

According to Hiroko Uno, when Dickinson was fifteen, she visited the Chinese Museum in Boston in Fall 1846, while staying with her beloved Norcross cousins. The museum opened in 1844, after the signing of the Wanghsia Treaty, the first official trading agreement between the US and China, negotiated and signed by Caleb Cushing, the US congressman from Massachusetts, who was an acquaintance, if not friend, of Edward Dickinson, then a State Senator.

Based on the museum’s catalogue, Uno describes in some detail what Dickinson would have seen there, and we also have Dickinson’s own account of this trip from a letter she wrote to her good friend Abiah Root dated September 8, 1846:

The Chinese Museum is a great curiosity. There are an endless variety of Wax figures made to resemble the Chinese & dressed in their costume. Also articles of chinese manufacture of an innumerable variety deck the rooms. Two of the Chinese go with this exhibition. One of them is a Professor of music in China & the other is teacher of a writing school at home. They were both wealthy & not obliged to labor but they were also Opium Eaters & fearing to continue the practice lest it destroyed their lives yet unable to break the "rigid chain of habit" in their own land They left their family's & came to this country. They have now entirely overcome the practice. There is something peculiarly interesting to me in their self denial (L13).

A bit later in the letter, Dickinson brings up the question of Christian conversion, which, she says, somewhat tartly, that Root has “so frequently & so affectionately called my attention [to] in your letters.” Dickinson will face and insistently resist increasingly intrusive pressure to convert when she enters Mount Holyoke Seminar the following year and comes within the purview of its redoubtable headmistress, Mary Lyon. To Root, Dickinson responds:

But I feel that I have not yet made my peace with God. I am still a s[tran]ger – to the delightful emotions which fill your heart. I have perfect confidence in God & his promises & yet I know not why, I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die.

This letter reveals Dickinson’s early exposure to Chinese culture and religion, which had a lasting effect on her thinking and her poetry. Uno asserts that for Dickinson:

Those experiences in the Chinese Museum were so impressive that images of the East resonated for decades in her adult imagination [and were also] deeply connected with her own religious conflicts of faith, especially her difficulty accepting Christ.

The letter reveals her fascination with a central tenet of Buddhism—self-denial—as well as her unwillingness to give up the world in a Christian evangelical sense, and to find her ultimate “reward” in the afterlife. Exploring poems on these themes will allow us to see how Dickinson managed these seemingly competing feelings in 1862, a time in her life when her struggles with conversion (though not belief) were settled, she had accepted a deep form of renunciation, and was in the midst of an immense period of poetic productivity.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Chin Woon Ping

Recluse

She wears white, the color of Death.
Tight-laced, hair pulled back,
Her Mind roams all realms.

The rhythm a regular hymn—
The form a joy to punctuate—
With dashes.

Success is never counted
By one who practices
Non-attachment.

CWP

bio: Chin Woon Ping has published books of poetry, essays, translations and plays. She has performed her work in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, China and Southeast Asia and recorded her songs with Scratch and Bite Records. She teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

Sources:

Overview

Uno, Hiroko. “Emily Dickinson’s Encounter with the East: Chinese Museum in Boston.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, 17, 1 (2008): 43-67, 52.

Takeda, Masako. “Emily Dickinson and Japanese Aesthetics.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, 22, 2 (2013): 26-45.

Kang, Yanbin. “Dickinson’s Allusions to Thoreau’s East.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. 29:2, 92-97.

—–. “Dickinson’s ‘Power to die’ from a Transcultural Perspective.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, 22, 2 (2013) 65-85.

History

Hampshire Gazette, May 27, 1862

Springfield Republican, May 24, 1862

Biography

Uno, Hiroko. “Emily Dickinson’s Encounter with the East: Chinese Museum in Boston.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, 17, 1 (2008): 43-67, 61-62.

May 14-20, 1862: Hot Beds

This week, we reprise the theme of gardens, which we began at the beginning of the month, but in a different mood. We take our cue from the second batch of essays written by students in Melissa Zeiger’s Spring 2018 course at Dartmouth College that explore the effects of moving away from an anthropocentric understanding of nature to a landscape that is active in its own right.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Melissa Zeiger

Sources

“Hot Beds”

This week, we reprise the theme of gardens, which we began at the beginning of the month, but in a different mood. New England is burgeoning, and the Dickinson women are digging “hot beds,” a technique we will explain below. But there is trouble in paradise. We take our cue from the second batch of essays written by students in Melissa Zeiger’s Spring 2018 course at Dartmouth College entitled “Garden Politics: Literature, Theory, Practice.” This group of papers explores the effects of moving away from an anthropocentric understanding of nature to a landscape that is active in its own right. Students read a cluster of Dickinson poems presented in the poems section that includes one of her most striking poems, “Four Trees – upon a solitary Acre.” What happens when God becomes–simply–a “neighbor,” and concepts like “Providence,” which undergird a Christian/religious set of beliefs, and any idea of human control over nature are called into question?

In our visit to Meli’s class, we talked about Dickinson’s gardens in particular, and how her representations of plants and the denizens of nature like birds, bees and butterflies, are shockingly radical, even for her time, in which prominent scientists advanced theories of plant sentience that help to topple humans from their pedestal of species dominance. We referred to the work of Mary Kuhn, summarized in the post for April 30-May 6, who argues that

Dickinson finds in the plant realm another possibility: life whose very nature is collaborative, decentralized, and communicative with other environmental agents in ways that human actors cannot anticipate or control.

These might be welcomed models for humans, but as Kuhn observes, it's hard to give up “the neat rhetoric of cultivation and human control.”

Though these thoughts are sobering, we all still have some things very much in common. In the class on “Garden Politics,” we explored the poem “I taste a liquor never brewed” (F207B, J214), discussed in the first post on gardens. Below is an imaginative rendition of the moment in that poem “When Butterflies renounce their ‘drams’–” by Anna Reed, a student in the class.

“Gardens are being made”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Springfield Republican, Saturday May 17, 1862

Review of the Week. Progress of the War, page 1

There is no pause in the march of events. If they do not keep pace with popular impatience, they at least fulfill reasonable expectation. Norfolk has been abandoned by the rebels, being untenable after the retreat from Yorktown peninsula, and is now occupied by our troops. The Merrimac was blown up by the rebels, and the navy yard destroyed. But Norfolk was spared from destruction, and Suffolk has since been occupied by our advancing forces. Gen McClellan was still moving towards Richmond, at last accounts, and is probably in possession of the rebel capital by this time. … there are good reports of growing Unionism at the South, and in all respects the military and political situation is rapidly improving. We see the end of the great peril.

Foreign Affairs

The rumor that France and England are going to interfere to stop the war in the United States is again started, and repeated by every arrival from Europe. But this report can hardly excite much apprehension or command much credit at this late day. The time for European intervention has passed forever.

New England Matters

The most remarkable feature of the week … is the terrible conflagrations that have raged, extending from Troy and Long Island, on the borders of New England, to Boston and the rural villages of Maine, and devastating large tracts of woodland. … The shad fisheries are in successful operation, gardens are being made, vegetation is rapidly advancing, the fruit trees blossom liberally, the birds sing sweetly, the sunshine is warm enough for summer, and the moonlight charming beyond description; so we may consider the vernal season as fully inaugurated.

Rose and Grape Culture, page 2

A choice coterie of ladies and gentlemen, under the auspices of the Hampden Horticultural Society, anticipated the season somewhat, Friday evening, by discussing, in this city, topics of bloom and fruitage.

“The Style of Women for Army Nurses,” page 5

“Not every tender-hearted and patriotic girl is fit for a nurse in an army hospital. An Illinois surgeon at Pittsburg Landing writes:–”

The duties required of an effective nurse are not the administering a spoonful of wine, nor bathing an officer's temples with a sponge. … but combing matting hair, washing dirty faces, hands and feet, binding putrid wounds, and numbers of things which cannot be described. The lady who cannot, with a smiling face, roll up her sleeves, go on her knees amongst the black boilers and wet straw to wait upon an unfortunate private soldier, repulsive in his manners and words, is here sadly out of her proper sphere. It is a noble sight to witness one who bears the impress of nature’s nobility in every movement and every expression, a highly educated lady, accustomed to every indulgence that wealth can furnish, thus employed, with disordered hair, hoopless, in a soiled calico dress, bespattered with blood, coal smut and grease, forgetful of every feeling but the one of seeking and helping the most wretched and neglected. … Send us ladies of this caliber, or send us negro servants.

“Books, Authors and Art.” page 7

This column has a long and very positive review of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s serial novel, now in book form, Agnes of Sorrento:

And now that we review it collectively, we are more and more convinced that the work is not a novel but a poem. Its frequent passages of marvelous descriptive beauty are bathed in poetry as flowers are bathed in dew. Its very plot is laid in dreamland and not in the actual world … Indeed, that [central] romance discloses itself as an allegory, typical of the highest truths … Viewed in this light, we can safely place the book in the hands of our questioning daughters …

Hampshire Gazette, May 20, 1862.
The paper leads off with a poem, “Bury me in the Morning” by Mrs. Hall, a ballad in 12 line stanzas and loose meter rhyming abacadaeabac. It is an affecting poem spoken in the voice of a dying child to its mother, which can certainly represent the growing number of young men dying in the war. It was set to music by A. C. Farnham in sheet music published in St. Louis 1855, with the lyricist recorded as “S. C. Hale.”

Another poem graces the front page, column 3:

The following humorous description of their Bill of Fare, was composed by the prisoners taken at Bull Run, while imprisoned in Richmond, and brought home by Philander A. Streeter of the 2d Vermont Regiment, he being held there five months and fourteen days.

The poem is in rhyming couplets and quite hilarious. At its conclusion is a column titled “Literary” that reports the publication of The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, Part 16 of the record of the Rebellion, a diary with photographs and “many important documents,” edited by Frank Moore and published by G. P. Putnam, New York. Also,

Blackwood’s Magazine, for April has its usual spiteful, prejudiced and provoking article on American affairs, but its other papers are of unusual attractiveness.

It includes notices about George Eliot and Mrs. Browning’s poems.

A short piece by “Louise S.” on “How to Avoid a Bad Husband,” which begins: “Never marry for wealth. A woman’s life consisteth not in these things that she possesseth.”

News from Amherst:

The four members of the sophomore class in Amherst College, who disgraced themselves by “rowing” a freshman a few days since, having been removed from the college, the freshmen have unanimously pledged themselves not to “row” or “haze” the next class.

“The Heart Wants What it Wants”

In our post from two weeks ago, we quoted a letter Dickinson wrote in early May to Mary Bowles, wife of the editor Samuel Bowles, who was abroad at the time (L262). Her first line discloses how highly she valued Samuel’s friendship:

When the Best is gone – I know that other things are not of consequence – The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care– … Not to see what we love, is very terrible – and talking – doesn’t ease it – nothing does – but just itself. … I often wonder how the love of Christ, is done – when that – below – holds – so –

How do we love God, Dickinson questions, when our earthly loves are so powerful? She then suggests anodynes for the “pain” of separation: hoping the Bowles’ little boy “coos away the pain – Perhaps your flowers, help – some–.” It is revealing that Dickinson offers flowers and gardening as possible modes of alleviating the pain of absence. She goes to say:

Vinnie and Sue, are making Hot beds –but then, the Robins plague them so – they don't accomplish much –

The Frogs sing sweet – today – They have such pretty – lazy – times – How nice, to be a Frog! Sue – draws her little Boy – pleasant days – in a Cab – and Carlo – walks behind, accompanied by a Cat – from each establishment –

These comments give us a glimpse into the gardening techniques used at the Homestead. “Hot beds” were popular in Victorian times. People dug a bed about 2 ½ feet deep and lined it with fresh, uncomposted horse manure, which was plentiful in this era and which is rich in nutrients. This formed the nitrogen layer, which would soon heat up, providing warmth and fertility for the roots of plants. This layer could be covered by straw, wood chips, branches or shredded paper, forming the carbon layer, with a cold frame placed over it and tender plants placed in it. As soon as the manure “composted” or broke down, the bed would lose its warmth, but creating hot beds gave gardeners at least two months of additional growing time in the spring. Using this technique, people in colder climates could also grow cold hardy plants like lettuce through the winter.

The mention of “hot beds” dates this letter to early spring, as does Dickinson’s reference to the song of the frogs, “spring peepers,” Pseudacris crucifer, whose chirping calls at night announce the beginning of spring and the mating season. Her exclamation here suggests one of her most famous poems, which Franklin dates to 1861: “I’m Nobody! Who are you? (F260, J288), with its memorable lines in which Dickinson comically disparages existence as a frog:

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To Tell your name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Note that spring peepers vocalize between March and June and their songs are indeed “pretty” and “lazy.” Dickinson might be thinking in this poem of the American bullfrog, whose vocalizations last until July in the Northeast and sound much more like the self-promoting “roaring” she conjures here.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Melissa Zeiger

The name of our course, “Garden Politics,” may seem counterintuitive; what could more perfectly represent refuge, haven, retreat than a garden? When you think about it, however, gardens have been packed with ideology since their beginnings. In Egypt, Sumeria, Alexandria, Rome, and onward, they formed monuments, in trees and flowers, to empire, religious belief, rulers, and ruling classes. In the Old Testament, God’s commandments to Adam license human dominion over the rest of nature, causing a great deal of trouble down the ages—in very beautiful language.

Our class on “Garden Politics” considered other questions of meaning and belief suggested by gardens, beginning with some postcolonial gardens and critiques that explicitly comment upon the politics, ethics, and power relations encoded in these topics, and moving to other examples. Ivy’s White Heat blog provided a perfect, and exciting, extension of our discussions thus far. Our look at Dickinson and her poems about gardens also created a context for thinking about the way twentieth century female poets reacted against traditional poetic representations of women as like garden flowers, constricted and conventional.

In response to the Dickinson poems for this week, Ivy’s visit to our class, and the readings we assigned them, the students in the course wrote the varied comments she has posted here. Broad in their range of concerns, they pick up on certain repeating themes: erotic feelings, transgression of accepted conventions, and innovation in garden writing in the first set. In the second set, prevailing themes are the attraction to and embodiment of estrangement in Dickinson’s poetry, doubts about poetry’s usefulness or aliveness, the isolation of gardens and humans, and a move away from anthropocentric understandings of nature. Perhaps bringing the strands together, one paper on “Four Trees – upon a solitary Acre” suggests that the trees’ solitude and removal from ordinary human concerns, like that of Dickinson’s poetry, allows for poetic autonomy.

bio: Melissa Zeiger is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. She teaches courses and writes on: garden literature; ecocriticism; immigrant writing; Jewish women’s writing; feminist criticism and theory; queer poetry; politics of the love lyric; modern poetry; women's poetry; Elizabeth Bishop; the poetry and politics of illness; cultural memory theory. Her first book was a feminist analysis of elegy (Beyond Consolation, 1997); she recently published an article on romance novels about heroines recovering from breast cancer and mastectomy; and she is currently writing a book on the poetics and politics of garden writing, one chapter of which appeared in 2017 as "Derek Jarman's Garden Politics" in a special issue of Humanities Journal on "Crisis."

Sources

Overview
Kuhn, Mary. “Dickinson and the Politics of Plant Sensibility.” ELH, vol. 85 no. 1, 2018, pp. 141-170, 142, 151.

History
Hampshire Gazette, May 20, 1862

Springfield Republican, May 17, 1862.

May 7-13, 1862: Wanderlust

During the month of May, Dickinson mourned the absence of her dear friend, the Springfield Republican editor, Samuel Bowles, who had embarked on a long European tour to improve his faltering health. This week, we explore Dickinson’s complex, intense relationship with Bowles, and the pressures placed on it, through the theme of foreign travel and Dickinson’s fascination with the East.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Joe Waring

Sources

“Telescoping Places”

We shall give you a gossiping personal letter occasionally, but a tour for health will not cheat its purpose with writing the oft repeated story of foreign travel.

—Samuel Bowles, from a letter printed in the Springfield Republican, May 10th, 1862

During the month of May, Dickinson mourned the absence of her dear friend, Springfield Republican editor Samuel Bowles, who had embarked on a long European tour to improve his faltering health. This week, we explore Dickinson’s complex, intense relationship with Bowles, and the pressures placed on it, through the theme of foreign travel. Though Dickinson didn’t stray far from the Homestead, she eagerly consumed news from abroad in the Republican, in her readings, and in her correspondences. She looked forward to letters from Bowles, some of which she read in the Republican, where he offered rich and sharply observed descriptions of England, Ireland and the Continent.

Their relationship and correspondence underscore a fascination with travel, otherness, and foreign places that Dickinson exhibited in much of her writing, which is often expansive, reaching far beyond the narrow confines of Amherst life. Mary Kuhn points out that Dickinson frequently compresses vast distances into short lines or tight stanzas. For example, in 1860, Dickinson wrote:

If I could bribe them with a Rose
I’d bring them every flower that grows
From Amherst to Cashmere! (F176A)

We are swept from the Homestead to the Kashmir Valley near the Himalayas on the Indian subcontinent in one line. That flowers are the means of such compression points to Dickinson’s consciousness of the international mobility of plants, a theme we explored last week.

Cristanne Miller is particularly interested in Dickinson’s images of Asia and the East and finds that her “use of the idioms of Orientalism and foreign travel” in her poetry reaches a peak between 1860 and 1863. Miller explains:

Such images were not unusual at the time; Orientalism was in its heyday during the 1850’s in the United States. Dickinson both extended this discourse and critiqued it in her poems. She was part of a community that perceived its material pleasures, religious obligations, and republican principles, if not identity itself, in relation to global exchange, including commerce with … the “Orient” or “Asia.”

Dickinson read about the East, Asia, and the lands of the Bible in essays in the Atlantic and Harper’s, and her family library had copies of The Koran and several accounts of expeditions to places in the East. In her letters to her brother Austin, Dickinson teased him about his passionate reading of the Arabian Nights, which was immensely popular at the time and fostered a stereotypical and colonialist image of the East as a land of luxury and sensuality (see Letters 19, 22)

Dickinson’s fascination with places and her ability to “telescope” space, in the words of Christine Gerhardt, has opened a new direction in Dickinson scholarship that unfixes her from a narrow confinement to the small town of Amherst and her local surroundings, instead highlighting her global and even planetary dimensions.

“The Wounded Heart”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Springfield Republican, May 10, 1862, page 3
“Rev. Mr. Green, a colored local Methodist preacher, was five years ago sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Maryland, for having in his possession a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Numerous efforts have been made to secure his pardon, but without success until a few days since, when Gov. Bradford set him at liberty. He is required, however, to leave the state, and is already on his way to Canada.”

Springfield Republican, May 10, 1862, page 5
Williamsburg Evacuated. Details of Monday’s Operations. Advance Near Williamsburg, Monday evening, May 5th—To the Associated Press:—

my dispatch was sent last evening that the indications were that our troops would occupy Williamsburg without much opposition.

Springfield Republican, May 10, 1862, page 5
Gen. McClellan Overtakes the Enemy.
The following was received at the war department Monday noon:—

Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, May 4th, 7 o’clock, p.m.—Our cavalry and horse artillery came up with the enemy’s rear guard in their entrenchments, about two miles this side of Williamsburg. A brisk fight ensued. … The enemy’s rear is strong, but I have force enough up there to answer all purposes. … The success is brilliant, and you may rest assured that its effects will be of the greatest importance. There shall be no delay in following up the enemy. The rebels have been guilty of the most murderous and barbarous conduct in placing torpedoes within the abandoned works, near wells and springs, near flag-staffs, magazines, telegraph offices … Fortunately, we have not lost many men in this manner—some four or five killed, and perhaps a dozen wounded. I shall make the prisoners remove them at their own peril. G.B. McClellan, Major General.

Springfield Republican, May 10, 1862, page 6 Poetry: “The Wounded Heart.”

Sweet, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there’s a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.

Thou only hast stepped unaware,—
Malice, no one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman’s foot?

It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
’Twas merely the heart of a friend.

And yet peradventure one day
Then, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,

And seeking around thee in vain,
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, “Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, but more!”

Thou’lt sigh, very like, on thy part,
“Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that heart
I trod upon ages ago!”

—Mrs. Browning

Springfield Republican, May 10, 1862, page 7: On A Rose.—Be An Epicure

I thank thee, fair maid, for this beautiful rose,
Fresh with dew from the favorite bowers;
In the bloom of the garden no rival it knows,
For the rose is the beef-steak of flowers.

“The Heart Wants What it Wants”

By April of 1862, Samuel Bowles had embarked on his trip to Europe, and on May 10th, Emily Dickinson—who was keenly affected by his absence—caught wind of his whereabouts in the Springfield Republican. His remarks, written from off the coast of Liverpool while en route to Paris, were printed alongside a set of letters from passengers aboard the Steamer China.

Bowles had entered Dickinson’s life four years earlier, in 1858, and became an important presence in Dickinson’s poems and correspondences. As biographer Richard Sewall notes, his place in her life is difficult to determine:

whether Bowles was at the exact center of it, or whether he was only a part of it, a catalyst in a mixing of many elements, cannot yet be said with certainty.

At any rate, Bowles was certainly someone to whom Dickinson addressed poems. Somewhere between 1861 and 1862—scholars disagree due to her shifting handwriting during this period—Dickinson wrote, “Dear Mr. Bowles,” accompanied by the following verse:

Victory comes late,
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To mind it!
How sweet it would have tasted!
Just a drop!
Was God so economical?
His table’s spread too high
Except we dine on tiptoe!
Crumbs fit such little mouths –
Cherries – suit Robins –
The Eagle’s golden breakfast – dazzles them!
God keep his vow to “Sparrows,”
Who of little love – know how to starve! (F195A, J690)

The last line, Sewall points out, could indicate Dickinson’s willingness, even her desire to “exist on whatever bit (crumb) of love he chooses to bestow on her.” Hungry for such a crumb, Dickinson would have read the correspondences published in the Republican, pleased to hear the descriptions of Bowles’ journey:

We land at Liverpool this noon, and the end of our 18th day. The Irish and English shores in sight yesterday and today are a contrast in their rich green verdure and advanced cultivation to those we left behind us in America, dotted even in New Jersey and on Long Island with snow, or the barrenness and deadness of winter. The season here seems like the last of our May. We spend but a few days in England now, going over to Paris for May, and returning to Britain for the riper and richer June. We shall give you a gossiping personal letter occasionally, but a tour for health will not cheat its purpose with writing the oft repeated story of foreign travel. S. B.

Interestingly, the letter closes a temporal gap, as if to reduce the geographic distance between Bowles and his reader. “The season here seems like the last of our May,” he writes, likening England in late April to New England’s May. Thus, he and Dickinson occupy the same clime despite being separated by continents, and because the letter wouldn’t be published until May in the Springfield Republican, the “now” and the climate of the letter converge with the “now” and the climate of Amherst, upon Dickinson's reading.

Around the same time the Republican printed Bowles’ letter, Dickinson wrote to his wife, Mary Bowles, expressing sympathy for her husband’s absence.

When the best is gone I know that other things are not of consequence. The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care (L262).

Notably, the letter reads as if in two voices. Dickinson refers to “the heart” in general, as if to imply Mary’s, but also her own. The doubling continues and intensifies when she writes,

Not to see what we love, is very terrible – and talking – doesn’t ease it – and nothing does – but just itself.

The peculiar use of “we” in a letter ostensibly about another woman’s husband stands out, as Dickinson co-opts Mary’s longing for her husband as her own.

As we discuss in the poetry section for this week, one indication of Bowles’ influence is Dickinson’s fascination with “foreignness,” place names, and “exotic” references during this period. Cristanne Miller points out that Dickinson had some knowledge of Asia, and often criticized Western attitudes of racism and colonialist “Orientalism.” Miller observes that, as exemplified by Bowles’ letter from the steamer China,

news about foreign lands was delivered daily to the Dickinson household through the pages of the Springfield Republican.

Miller speculated that Dickinson’s isolation in Amherst, intensified by Bowles’ departure for Europe, was, perhaps, partly remedied by identifying “ontologically” with “epistemologies of foreignness” that brought her ever closer to him.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Joe Waring

By the time Dickinson was writing in the year of the “white heat,” interest in “Orientalism” had reached its peak in the American cultural imagination (Miller 118). The “Orient,” as Edward Said notes in Orientalism, his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, is the

place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring image of the Other

—and an interest in identity-formation in opposition to those images played out throughout the West (Said 1). Moreover, Said considers “Orientialism” to be not only a set of oppositions and ideas, but a

mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles,

all of which would become fodder for Dickinson’s poetic lexicon (Said 2). In fact, Miller locates about seventy different references to the “Orient” in Dickinson’s poetry, as she played her role in a long-established tradition of evoking “Oriental” tropes in writing—a discourse she ultimately perpetuated as well as criticized (Miller 118-119). Understanding “Orientalism” in this way, as a discourse, Said contends, allows us to trace the

enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.

Dickinson’s poetry—in its frequent references and deep interest in the “Orient”—urgently calls to be understood as part of this process (Said 3).

Why was Dickinson so interested in the “Orient” in the first place? To start, she voraciously consumed the literature, news, and culture that she came into contact with. As Miller points out, “news about foreign lands was delivered daily to the Dickinson household through the pages of the Springfield Republican,” and she would have developed a deep interest in “foreignness” as her close friend, Samuel Bowles, set out for Europe in 1862, leaving her behind in Amherst. She also occupied a social milieu in which everyone else was fascinated by the “Orient” too. New Englanders were constantly filling their homes with “knickknacks, the fine china dogs and cats, the pieces of oriental jade, the chips off the leaning tower of Pisa” (Tate 155). What’s more, Dickinson visited Peter’s Chinese Museum in 1846, which documented the Anglo-Sino Opium War, spurring great interest in the use of narcotics (Hsu 9).

Among American writers, Dickinson was not alone in her invocation of “Orientalism.” Miller notes that “Emerson, Whittier, Bayard Taylor, Lydia Maria Child, and Whitman” were all deeply interested in “Asian scripture and literature” in a way that surpassed Dickinson (Miller 129). The transcendentalists in particular looked to “Asian philosophy and religion as a source of spiritual inspiration or knowledge” (129). Whitman, even more problematically, viewed “Asia as a natural partner to or goal of American westward expansion”—a form of U.S. imperialism that Dickinson largely avoided (130). Where the transcendentalists sought to incorporate the “Orient” both into their spirituality, philosophy, and—imperialistically—their geography, Dickinson saw Asia as an “unknown” that could inspire insight into her understanding of her own context.

While Dickinson’s use of “Orientalist” references was in line with historical trends and interests, what she read and learned about the “Orient” may have expanded her ability to think about contemporary issues at home, thus participating in what Said sees as a trend of oppositional identity formation. Dickinson’s 1864 poem, “Color – Caste – Denomination” (F836), which in its title alone addresses three pressing issues of American society, makes use of “Oriental” imagery to comment on contemporary social and political issues:

Color – Caste – Denomination -
These – are Time's Affair -
Death's diviner Classifying
Does not know they are -

As in sleep – all Hue
forgotten -
Tenets – put behind -
Death's large – Democratic
fingers
Rub away the Brand -

If Circassian – He is careless -
If He put away
Chrysalis of Blonde – or Umber -
Equal Butterfly -

They emerge from His Obscuring -
What Death – knows so well -
Our minuter intuitions -
Deem unplausible

Race, socioeconomic status, and religion—topics that are well-documented in Dickinson’s poetry, as well as in the blog posts for several of the weeks in 1862—were important to Dickinson’s understanding of the “Orient,” just as they were in the United States; they are, universally speaking, “Time’s Affair,” unified across continents insofar as “Death’s diviner Classifying / Does not know they are.” Death’s “large – Democratic / fingers” are democratic precisely because they touch everyone, everywhere. “If Circassian,” she seems to ask, the effect is the same as if the question were, “If from Amherst?” The poem makes frequent reference to skin tone and race: “color,” “Hue,” “Blonde,” “Umber”—a lexicon that maintains its urgency whether in reference to American abolition or the Circassians.

What, then, do we make of these references? As Said points out, the academic and literary traditions of “Orientalism” are not innocuous; “European culture,” he points out, “gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said 3). The natural consequence of identity formation that opposes itself to an “other,” Said continues, is a “flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand” (7). As such, there is much to be criticized, examined, and understood about conceptions of “otherness” and “foreignness” in Dickinson’s frequent evocation of the “Orient.” Miller offers some consolation in that, though Dickinson certainly participated in a troubling and long history of “Orientalism,” she did so with her characteristic empathy:

Instead, Dickinson’s Orientalism borrows from and rewrites the symbolic geographies of her era. While popular geographies portrayed people in relation to stereotyped coordinates of the South, North, East, and West, her representations of Asians were without exception sympathetic, even if romantically or ambivalently so (Miller 130).

Sources

Hsu, Li-hsin. “Emily Dickinson's Asian Consumption.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1-25,135.

Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012, 118-146.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Tate, Allen. "New England Culture and Emily Dickinson." The Recognition of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism Since 1890. Ed. Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1965.

bio: Joe Waring is a Dartmouth ’18, who studied English, Italian, and Linguistics. He came by Dickinson like most, in his high school classroom, where he memorized “It Feels A Shame To Be Alive,” and was happy to revisit Dickinson in Professor Schweitzer’s class, “The New Emily Dickinson: After The Digital Turn.” His favorite Dickinson poem is, unquestionably, “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” (J1298, F1350).

Sources
Overview
Gerhardt, Christine. “Often seen–but seldom felt”: Emily Dickinson’s Reluctant Ecology of Place.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 15.1 (2006): 73.

Kuhn, Mary. “Dickinson and the Politics of Plant Sensibility.” ELH, 85:1 (Spring 2018), 143-44.

Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012, 118-20.

This week in History:
Springfield Republican, Sat May 310 1862.

This week in Biography:
Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012, 119.

Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980, 492-93.

April 30-May 6, 1862: Gardens

References to gardens, gardening, and the denizens of gardens pervade Dickinson’s work. For some readers, she is pre-eminently a “nature” poet. As spring ripens into summer, we thought we would explore Dickinson’s “garden politics”––that is, the power of gardens literal and rhetorical in her writing.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection - Ivy Schweitzer

Sources/Further Reading

“Garden Politics”

References to gardens, gardening, and the denizens of gardens pervade Dickinson's work. For some readers, she is preeminently a “nature” poet. As spring gets underway, we thought we would explore Dickinson's “garden politics”– that is, the power of gardens literal and rhetorical in her writing.

New York Botanical Gardens' recreation of Dickinson's gardens, 2010 — New York Botanical Gardens’ recreation of Dickinson's gardens, 2010

Thinking about Dickinson’s gardens and gardening has undergone something of a revolution since our recognition of the Anthropocene, the present geological age in which humans have had a dominant effect on the earth—and not for the good. This recognition has produced a “post-human” turn in thinking, a reconsideration of human subjectivity, species superiority, and materiality that has consequences for local and global ethics and ideas of scale. Several thinkers find a consciousness of these ideas in Dickinson’s famous garden poetry, and they are changing the way we read it.

The conventional consensus has been that Dickinson’s nature writings are inordinately detailed and informed because of her study of natural history at Mount Holyoke Seminary and her deep experience in nature and with gardening. Scholars, like Joanna Yin, see gardens as often standing for something else in Dickinson's work,

microcosms of nature, analogies of heaven, and representations of her soul, home, and New England culture … a setting for musing on the sublime and fallen mortal world and imagining the immortal.

They also recognize that Dickinson often reversed this metaphor, finding Eden here on earth. In 2004, Judith Farr produced the first substantial study of Dickinson’s gardening, in which she linked the poet’s passion for horticulture to her equally strong passion for poetry: in essence, Farr argued, the garden gave Dickinson her metaphors, language, and symbols.

More recent scholarship asks different questions about the literal gardens in Dickinson’s life, her representation of plants that move and act and feel, her birds that seem to possess a higher intelligence past human capabilities and ask philosophical questions, her cultivation of exotic species in her conservatory, the circulation of such species globally through the horticultural imperialism of the West, even her brother Austin’s habit of “bioprospecting,”—that is, digging up trees from the wild and bringing them back to plant in his yard or meadows.

This week, we post the results of our collaboration with my colleague Melissa Zeiger’s Spring 2018 course at Dartmouth College titled “Garden Politics: Literature, Theory, Practice.” We visited the class to talk about Dickinson’s gardening and garden politics, read some exciting recent critical work, and asked her students to write short essays about garden poems Dickinson wrote around 1862. The results are fascinating.

“May-day has come”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Springfield Republican, Review of the Week. Progress of the War: “The capture of New Orleans [on Monday, April 28] is the most important of our recent successes. It had been so long and confidently expected that the announcement of the event made no great sensation, yet the dismay it has carried throughout the South, too great to be concealed, and the renewed confidence it has produced in the loyal sections of the country, manifested especially in a remarkable appreciation of government securities, show the estimate placed upon the event in all parts of the country.”

The General Situation. “Rumors have been in circulation in respect to an armistice and compromise, but they were doubtless weak inventions of the northern allies of treason, who see the fate impending over the heads of their friends, and would gladly avert it. But neither the government nor the people will listen to any propositions until the rebels lay down their arms and make an unconditional submission, and that they are unlikely to do till their armies in Virginia and the Southwest are defeated and destroyed.”

Foreign Affairs. “The question of iron armored ships still continues to be the prominent topic in Europe.”

Local Matters. “May-day has come in the guise of a damp and chilling atmosphere, quite discouraging to out-of-doors recreations.”

The Educational Commission at Port Royal. “Very ungenerous, not to say malignant, attempts have been made to prejudice the people against the efforts made under government supervision to plant the deserted plantations on the South Carolina islands, and the men and women who have gone from New England and New York to direct the labors of the negroes and educate their children have been ridiculed and their efforts pronounced a failure in advance. But so far as we can judge from the most reliable accounts they are doing the difficult work of their mission with great tact and energy and with every prospect of success.”

“The government mail service has been thoroughly revised and improved this season, by placing new routes in operation, increasing the frequency of trips on the old and infusing additional vigor into every part of the system.”

Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons (1817-1887). Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=389373

The New Slave Trade Treaty. “The new treaty negotiated by Mr. Seward and Lord Lyons for the prevention of the slave trade, is published. … [it] will be hailed with joy by all true citizens.”

School-Girls, Ideal and Actual. —

An ideal school-girl is one of the very loveliest things on earth. Personally so fair, so fresh, so hopeful, the beauty of womanhood in its dewy promise, “a rose with all its sweetest leaves folded.” … But the real school-girl is sometimes a very different person. She is a rose too early opened, with its petals imperfect yet widely flaunting to catch the reluctant gaze. … She is only bent on amusing herself in her own untrammeled way, a way which lowers her position, depraves her taste, and robs the budding rose, while yet enfolded in protecting moss, of half its fragrance and its dew.

Poetry: “Under the Snow” by the Late Gen. F. W. Lander (1821-1862) from The Atlantic for May.

Lander's poem is an account, in four-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter rhyming abab, of a “fallen woman” driven out into the winter. Pregnant and alone, she goes back to the place of “her spring time vows” and, presumably, her fall,

where one ghastly birch
Held up the rafters of the roof,
And grim old pine trees formed a church.

Compare this to Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” (F236B, J324), a poem about the garden as a very different kind of church.

Books, Authors and Art. This column reports publication of a collection of writing by Thomas de Quincey and previews the contents of May’s Atlantic Monthly:

The only bit of romance in the number is in the first part of a story by Miss Prescott, showing a good degree of her peculiar power, somewhat chastened and pruned of its early redundancies of expression. … it is not lavishly sensuous in its descriptions, and has many touches of simple, genuine nature. It awakens an interest which may not be fully sustained in the concluding chapter, as this writer, with all her vividness of imagination and pictorial power, does not usually excel in conclusions.

Hampshire Gazette May 6: Begins with “Lines, for Mrs. W. addressed to her husband, on their “Silver Wedding,” April 25, 1862 by E. T. Hayward.

From the Beaufort Cor. Phila. Inquirer: Secession in its Effects upon Women.

The secession females (I will not call them ladies) … here, as elsewhere, endeavor to take advantage of their sex, and the disinclination of the officers to use harsh measures with them, to show their malignity and to do us all the injury in their power.

Notice about selection of officers of the Horticultural Club (of Springfield, MA): all males in the subcategories of agriculture and horticulture except for three females “on Floriculture.”

Amherst:

Col. W. S. Clark has sent home to the College six muskets taken from the enemy at Newbern. In examining them, Mr. Oliver Hunt, the Janitor, found one loaded with six charges of Minnie balls, and burst the barrel in getting them out. Probably it is in this way that the rebels count one Southerner equal to five Yankees.

Amherst is now quite independent of the rest of the world on the score of news, for she boasts a daily newspaper—even the Amherst Daily Express. This little issue comes forth at the early hours of 6 o’clock, A. M. , containing “all the latest news from the seat of war by [illegible] telegraph.”

“Earth as Heaven”

Dickinson once remarked in a letter to her Norcross cousins,

I was reared in the garden you know,

and the frequency and accuracy of garden imagery in her poetry substantiates this boast. Dickinson’s mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, is generally credited with her children’s love of gardening. She was renowned around Amherst for her skill in producing the most delicious fruits, especially figs. Dickinson started gardening at age eleven at least, and never stopped.

A page from Dickinson's Herbarium. Houghton Library, Harvard University

As a child, Dickinson painstakingly filled an herbarium book with over 400 specimens of plants, which she labeled in Latin. We know from her letters to friends that she collected and traded specimens. In 1845, for example, she wrote to her friend Abiah Root,

I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter, which you must press for me. Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you … If you do, perhaps I can make some addition to it from flowers growing around here (L6).

Creating herbariums was a common occupation among young girls at the time, in part because the natural sciences were considered an acceptable feminine occupation which girls were encouraged to practice. Books were specially published with labeled spaces for pressed plants. Dickinson and her female peers studied natural science extensively at Mount Holyoke and Amherst Academy.

Dickinson's original conservatory, Dickinson Museum

Judith Farr, who has made a deep study of Dickinson’s gardens, points out that in 1855, Edward Dickinson built his daughter a glassed-in conservatory off the dining room, so that she could garden year round and also keep exotic species of flowers like jasmine. Farr suspects that Edward gave this particular gift not only to please his daughter but

because growing flowers was, to him, a more suitable occupation for a woman than writing verse.

Wily Dickinson made the two occupations interdependent, and often sent gifts of pressed flowers in her letters or tucked poems into bouquets from her garden and conservatory.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Ivy Schweitzer

Two of my garden poems:

“Caging the Tulips”

Every spring their pale tips
poke through soil
in my neighbor’s plot,
a tiny platoon of beauty.

I imagine the autumn muster:
plump bulbs with papery skins,
bottoms fringed with roots,
roll from perforated
sacks to be nestled
in close rank and file,
precisely eight inches beneath the loam.

In May, showers roust them out,
green recruits of incipient joy;
sun gives the drill command,
and we brace for the cadence of color—
when the cage goes up around them.

Four feet of chicken wire
open at the top but tall enough
to deter winter thin deer.

They come, then, smoldering
orange petals with blazing yellow
throats, pitch black at the center,
erect three lobed stigma
ringed by six slender stamen,
their anthers dusty with pollen and curved daintily outward,
splayed cups of exultation
penned in for their own protection.

I lope past after my morning run,
suddenly remembering how you reached for me
last night, unexpectedly,
how we panted in the dark air suffused by scents
from my rowdy spring beds
laced with manure.

Oh glorious disorder, I croon to the captives,
let us throw reason to the winds,
let us plant tulips for the spring
and let ravenous deer
eat the sweet tips,
or not.

“Bringing down the Basil”

Outdid yourself this summer—
thigh high and
redolent,
lording it over the bush beans
rivaling the Sun Gold tomatoes,
rampant and clustered like grapes,
their simmering flesh panting
for your heady infusion.

Subjected to weekly sheering and pinching
of blossoms, you grew potent by thwarting,
turning the heads of passersby
who paused, asking for my secret—
what is there to say?

manure and ruthlessness.

Broken on the blades of my blender,
your majesty challenged with
lobes of garlic, pignoli and reggiano,
pesto is a balm for the
bruised soul.

Now cool September nights nip your leaves.
My pruners neatly sever your woody stems,
releasing a scent
like a sigh
like the spirit escaping the lips of prey
at the moment of passing—

Something ancient in reaping
what we have sown and fostered,
until in the fullness of touch
and time
we break its body
for succor.

bio: Ivy Schweitzer is the editor of White Heat.

Sources

Overview

“Emily Dickinson and Gardening.” The Emily Dickinson Museum.

Farr, Judith with Louise Carter. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, 4-5.

Yin, Joanna. “Garden, as Subject.” The Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Ed. Jane Donahue Eberwein. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1998, 122-23.

This week in History

Hampshire Gazette, May 5, 1862.
Springfield Republican, Sat May 3, 1862.

April 23-29, 1862: Second Letter to Higginson

On April 25th, 1862, Dickinson wrote to Higginson for the second time, apparently after some delay, responding to his critique of her poems and including several poems, thought which exactly are in dispute. This week’s post explores one of Dickinson’s experiences receiving literary criticism, underscoring the literary shrewdness and subversive assertions in her reply.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week‘s Poems

This Week‘s Reflection - Joseph Waring

Sources/Further Reading

“Thank you for your surgery”

On April 25th, 1862, Dickinson wrote to Higginson for the second time, apparently after some delay:

Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude – but I was ill – and write today, from my pillow. (L261)

As discussed in last week’s post, Dickinson was first prompted to write after reading Higginson’s essay, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” published in the Atlantic Monthly on April 15th, and her letter inspired a swift response. Though we don’t know exactly what Higginson said in his reply to Dickinson, we do know that he offered some criticism of the poems she enclosed—criticism that she refers to in her second letter as “surgery.” Having her poems dissected by an established male editor “was not so painful as I supposed,” she writes, but she side-steps his advice, engaging on her own terms, in a series of dense, opaque lines, discussed in This Week in Biography.

This scenario is all too familiar to poets who are women. In 1964, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem to Emily Dickinson, referencing Higginson's involvement in and “garbling” of the posthumous publication of Dickinson's poetry. The poem's title is a phrase taken directly from Dickinson's June 7th, 1862 letter to Higginson (L265). Check out the pun on “premises” at the end of the poem!

“I am in Danger Sir”

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living,
afterward famous in garbled versions,
your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,
now your old snood

mothballed at Harvard
and you in your variorum monument
equivocal to the end
who are you?

you, woman, masculine
in single-mindedness,
for whom the word was more
than a symptom

a condition of being.
Till the air buzzing with spoiled language
sang in your ears
of Perjury

and in your half-cracked way you chose
silence for entertainment,
chose to have it out at last
on your own premises.

– Adrienne Rich, from Necessities of Life (1966)

This week’s post explores one of Dickinson’s experiences of receiving literary criticism, underscoring the literary shrewdness and subversive assertions in her reply.

“This hectic grandiloquence so fashionable among the codfish aristocracy”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Springfield Republican, April 26

The Pear and Grape Mania, p. 1:

“Pyrumnia, or pear fever, and vitifermania, or grape fever,” says the New York Horticulturist, are endemic diseases, affecting most violently the inhabitants of anti-rural towns, and chiefly those recently from city life in the spring. This disease, to plethoric purses, is well understood by nurserymen, to whom its appearance is as welcome as an epidemic to young physicians, or a financial crisis to briefless lawyers. The first stage of the disease usually commences soon after taking a country residence, and shows itself in a general admiration of fruit. Soon half a dozen or more thrifty tress and vines are bought. These trees are generally faultless in shape and proportion, and the nurseryman very reluctantly, but obligingly parts with them.

Emancipation and Colonization, p. 2:

Frank P. Blair of Missouri made a speech in Congress, on the 11th, in defense of the president’s war policy, and of his plan of colonizing Black people as they are emancipated.

We can make emancipation acceptable to the whole mass of non-slaveholders at the South by coupling it with the policy of colonization. The very prejudice of race which now makes the non-slaveholders give their aid to hold the slave in bondage will then induce them to unite in a policy which will rid them of the presence of the negroes; and, as nine out of ten of the white people of the South are non-slaveholders, and as the right of suffrage is almost unlimited, it is easy to see what will be the result. It is objected, however, that we have no right to remove the negroes from their own country against their will. I do not believe that compulsory colonization is necessary to the ultimate success of this plan; but neither do I regard it with any abhorrence. On the contrary, I look at it as the greatest boon we can confer upon this race—greater by far than the gift of personal freedom in a land in which they must forever remain in a condition of social inferiority, among people who will treat them with every imaginable indignity.

The Abuse of Words

It may be a small matter to some that the noblest words in the English language are daily prostituted to the commonest affairs of life, but to an admirer of his mother tongue it is certainly painful. The constant application of great words to small things is gradually undermining the native strength of the language, insomuch that to make an impressive statement it is not infrequently necessary to pile a Pelion of adverbs upon an Ossa of adjectives. But that is not the only bad phase of the subject; to plain matter of fact sort of people nothing can be more nauseating than this hectic grandiloquence so fashionable among the codfish aristocracy.

Books, Authors and Art, p. 7:

Mrs. H. B. Stowe’s Romances of Italy and America, “Agnes of Sorrento,” and “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” will appear in book form on the same day. One is a story of the Old World’s loves and sorrows, and the other is a vivid picture of our own country’s romance of a newer life. Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, in Boston, and Messrs. Sampson, Low & Co., in London, will bring out both these charming stories on the 1st of May. The author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” thus provides summer reading for both sides of the Atlantic.

The Unparalleled Flood of 1862, p.8

The rapid melting of immense bodies of snow throughout New England has caused a sudden freshet in most of the rivers, wholly unparalleled at some points. No rain fell until the water had begun to subside. The few warm days of last week caused the snow to melt and run like butter… As the great spring freshet of 1801 was called the “Jefferson flood,” and that of 1854 the “Nebraska flood,” so this unparalleled one of 1862 may perhaps go down to posterity under the name of the “Secession flood.”

Hampshire Gazette, April 29, 1862

New Orleans Captured, p. 2

Dispatches from Gen. Wool at Fortress Monroe, and Gen. McDowell, at Fredericksburg, contain the intelligence, obtained from rebel newspapers, published in different southern cities, that New Orleans has been captured by the federal forces.

Fredericksburg Fully Occupied

The correspondent of the Herald, under date of the 23d, states that Fredericksburg, Va., is now occupied by Gen. McDowell’s force. The troops are in excellent health, only 75 being on the sick list, including 14 wounded. The flotilla has succeeded in clearing the Rappahannock of obstructions, and reached Fredericksburg on Saturday. Work has been commenced on the Acqui Creek and Fredericksburg railroad, which will soon be in running order. The railroad bridge over the Rappahannock will of course be immediately rebuilt.

“The Most Experienced and Worldly Coquette”

Upon receiving Dickinson’s first letter, Higginson reported in a reminiscence published after her death that he was struck by

the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius

exemplified by the four poems she enclosed. Just what Higginson wrote back to Dickinson is up for speculation; even he seems to have forgotten, as he admits in his 1891 recollction in the Atlantic, “On Dickinson’s Letters:”

It was hard to tell what answer was made by me, under these circumstances, to this letter. It is probably that the advisor sought to gain time a little and find out with what strange creature he was dealing. I remember to have ventured on some criticism which she afterward called “surgery,” and on some questions, part of which she evaded, as will be seen, with a naive skill such as the most experienced and worldly coquette might envy.

Indeed, in her letter Dickinson thanks Higginson “for the surgery,” riffing on whatever dissecting remarks he made about her four enclosed poems and the fact that, one line before, she claimed to be ill in bed. Jason Hoope, who studies their relationship, remarks that

these passages expand on the stylistic criterion of vitality established by the first letter

and that Higginson’s criticism

dovetails with the phenomenon of Dickinson’s own physical illness; both her poetry and her person, she suggests, are in a state of recovery from Higginson’s salutary critical procedure—the invasions of editorial “surgery” are appreciated as “kindness.”

In the Atlantic essay written many years after the events, Higginson claims that in her second letter Dickinson attempted to “step nearer, signing her name” and calling him her “friend.” He is also impressed by her astute response to his didacticism:

It will also be noticed that I had sounded her about certain American authors, then much read; and that she knew how to put her own criticism in a very trenchant way.

Dickinson’s lines were trenchant, to say the least, and convey a pointed dishonesty that obscures her intent in responding to, or accepting, Higginson’s criticism, advice, and correspondence.

You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.

I read Miss Prescott’s Circumstance, but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.

Dickinson's demure categorization of Whitman as “disgraceful” leaves us wondering; a poet with her ear to the ground and an appetite for upending literary convention, she very well might have read Leaves of Grass, however disgraceful. As for Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Circumstance, the post for January 8-14 makes the case that several of Dickinson’s poems were directly influenced by what David Cody calls the “Azarian School” named after Spofford’s novel, Azarian. In fact, in a column Susan Dickinson wrote in the Springfield Republican praising Spofford’s works, she reports having sent “Circumstance” to Dickinson, her sister-in-law, after reading it. Dickinson immediately replied:

Dear S. That is the only thing I ever saw in my life that I did not think I could have written myself. You stand nearer the world than I do. Send me everything she writes.

Regardless of what Dickinson is willing to admit to Higginson, it is clear that she was intensely interested in Spofford’s writing. And she clearly read the Azarian works thoroughly; Cody points to a handful of Dickinson’s poems that are intertexts for, or at the very least heavily influenced by, Spofford’s novels.

These are not the letter’s only half-truths. “You ask how old I was?” Dickinson writes, “I made no verse – but one or two – until this winter – Sir –.” This is, of course, blatantly false, as Dickinson had been writing deftly since at least 1850, and had penned hundreds of poems, distributing many to friends and family members before contacting Higginson. She goes on to mischaracterize her status as a novice, asking

I would like to learn – Could you tell me how to grow – or is it unconveyed – like Melody – or Witchcraft?

In asking for Higginson’s guidance and simultaneously likening it to witchcraft, Dickinson belies her claim to being a beginning poet. What could a male magazine editor have to offer her about the unconveyable art of witchcraft or melody? Further, Hoope argues that Dickinson’s fib stands as a parody of Higginson’s condescension in the Atlantic’s “Letter,” where he said:

Do you know, my dear neophyte, how Balzac used to compose?

Dickinson goes on to relay that she

had a terror – since September – I could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid.

Cynthia Wolff comments that “for a long time critics supposed that this ‘terror’ was some disappointment in love,” but she disagrees and observes:

she scarcely knew Higginson at the time of this letter, and it would be astonishing to find her alluding to such an intimate matter in so early a note.

If Dickinson had been referring to a love affair gone wrong, Wolff thinks she would have said “loss” or “disappointment.” Instead, Wolff asserts, it is more likely that the “terror” refers to “periods of severely impaired vision.”

Additionally, Susan Leiter wonders if Dickinson might be referring to the departure of Rev. Dr. Wadsworth, which made the news that week.

Philadelphia Daily News

The Arch Street Presbyterian Church firmly but kindly resisted the application of the Rev. Dr. Wadsworth for a dissolution of the pastoral relation. So urgent were the people, that the Presbytery sent back the application to the congregation. But when it was found that the Dr. had made up his mind that it was his duty to go to California, the congregation yielded, and he was dismissed. He was accepted to the pastorate of the Calvary Church, San Francisco…

If Dickinson’s meanings in correspondence with Higginson are so obscured and indirect, then what were her intentions? Hoope asserts another possible reading of her letters:

By radically joining herself and her writing to Higginson and his writing, moreover, Dickinson links the antinomian qualities of her charismatic personality to social belonging and poetic achievement. In one movement she thus reverses the alienation and commonness Emerson associates with portfolioists, who are on his account mostly lonely eccentrics who litter the “masses of society,” with the fruits of their inspiration “sacred” to themselves alone.

In exchanging reading lists, asking for literary criticisms but then asserting her own standards, and even commenting on Higginson’s own writing—“I read your Chapters in the Atlantic – and experienced honor for you,” Dickinson engages Higginson in a discourse of two equals, or, as Hoope calls it, a “poetic elect.” Referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “equality in honor,” Hoope thinks we can understand Dickinson’s “riposte” as a relationship between writers who are both up for the challenge, willing to “play the game.” At any rate, Dickinson’s rhetorical agility and coy rebuttals in her second letter spurred a long correspondence and friendship with Higginson, who would be inspired by her “wholly new and original poetic genius.”

Read this week’s poems

Reflection

Joseph Waring

Scholars have argued for treating Dickinson’s letters, including her letters to Higginson, as literary texts, but rarely are they read for their subversive potential as queer. In light of her decision to sidestep the publishing industry and forgo conventional metrics of “success,” Dickinson wrote with a negative affect that resembles what Jack Halberstam terms a “queer art of failure.”

By negative affect, Halberstam means the “disappointment, disillusionment, and despair” that “poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” (Halberstam 3). Dickinson’s disillusionment with the publishing industry is well-documented in her verse—“Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man” (F788, J709)—and her second letter to Higginson invokes an ongoing sense of unnamed despair: “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid” (L261).

Moreover, in a letter that otherwise might have been a request for literary mentorship, Dickinson insists on invoking illness, pain, and loss while concealing her motives behind a cryptic rhetorical mask. Her letter rejects what Halberstam calls a certain strain of “positive thinking,” a “North American affliction” that traffics in

a combination of “American exceptionalism” and a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude (Halberstam 3).

“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?,” Dickinson asks in her first letter, precluding the opportunity for Higginson to say if it’s good or “successful.”

Though scholars portray Higginson as a literary mentor and teacher, Dickinson’s letters verge on a vision of “education” that is anti-disciplinarian, anti-authoritarian, and untrained. First, she deceives Higginson, claiming that she “made no verse, but one or two, until this winter,” which we know to be untrue—a simple lie, but it undermines the teacher-student norm, which requires students to be honest. Second, she asserts herself as unschooled: “I went to school,” she admits, “but in your manner of the phrase had no education.” Instead, she avows an alternative form of education, an unconventional teacher: “When I was a girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality.” Finally, she mentions past experiences with “tutors” that were rife with conflict. One died, leaving her with one companion, her “lexicon,” and the second “was not contented [that she] be his scholar, so left the land.”

Her misadventures with education and insistence on alternative pedagogy are akin to Halberstam’s “counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity” (11-12). Though no one would ever call Dickinson’s “stupid,” Halberstam invokes a sort of unschooled, subversive naiveté, a

refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counter hegemonic discourse of losing (12).

“I would like to learn,” Dickinson insists, but she proposes only alternative pedagogies—learning immortality from a child, for example—and suggests that any “growth” might be unconveyed rather than studied, “like melody or witchcraft.” What does witchcraft have to do with education? It is, as Halberstam would call it, a “counter hegemonic discourse,” an alternative way of knowing (12).

In the closing line, Dickinson signs her letter, “Your friend,” as if to recall Ranciére’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster or Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Dickinson rejects the hierarchy of student-teacher relations, and insists on a “two-way street,” a “dialogic relation to the learner” (13). Halberstam comments:

[Ranciére’s book] examines a form of knowledge sharing that detours around the mission of the university, with its masters and students, its expository methods and its standards of excellence, and instead endorses a form of pedagogy that presumes and indeed demands equality rather than hierarchy.

Now, to zero in on the second letter’s most peculiar, and perhaps queer, diction. “Thank you for the surgery,” Dickinson writes, “it was not so painful as I supposed.” Why use a term like “surgery” to describe Higginson’s critique of her poetry? Why subject herself to his pen at all? Halberstam, verging on the Freudian, argues that “cutting”—where Dickinson’s “surgery” stands in as a textual metaphor for self-harm—

is a feminist aesthetic proper to the project of unbecoming (135).

Writing to Higginson, knowing well the pain it might entail, is Dickinson’s form of “unbecoming,” implicating a “desire for mastery, and an externalization of erotic energy” (135). In two moves—exposing herself to critique and then undermining it—Dickinson shatters the hegemonic “self” of the conventional poet, a practice that “may have its political equivalent in an anarchic refusal of coherence and proscriptive forms of agency.” Out of the public eye and away from the editor’s pen, Dickinson remains illegible to the hegemonic powers that be. Her “surgery” is the cut that breaks her away through, what Halberstam calls, a “masochistic will to eradicate the body” and leave only the page (135):

The antisocial dictates an unbecoming, a cleaving to that which seems to shame or annihilate, and a radical passivity allows for the inhabiting of femininity with a difference. The radical understandings of passivity … offer an antisocial way out of the double bind of becoming woman and thereby propping up the dominance of man within a gender binary (144).

What is queer about all this? Dickinson forgoes hegemonic structures, engages in self-shattering, revels in illegibility, and embraces the

incoherent, the lonely, the defeated, and the melancholic formulations of selfhood that it sets in motion (148).

If, at one time, her only companion was her lexicon, then that is a “lexicon of power” that, as Halberstam maintains, “speaks another language of refusal” (139).

Sources
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Bio: Joe Waring graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied English, Italian, and Linguistics. He came by Dickinson like most, in his high school classroom, where he memorized “It Feels A Shame To Be Alive,” and was happy to revisit Dickinson in Professor Schweitzer's class, “The New Emily Dickinson: After The Digital Turn.” His favorite Dickinson poem is, unquestionably, “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” (F1350, J1298).

Sources

Overview

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” The Atlantic, October 1891.

Rich, Adrienne. Necessities of Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966.

History

Hampshire Gazette, April 29 1862

Springfield Republican, April 26 1862

Biography

Dickinson, Susan Huntington. “Harriet Prescott’s Early Work: A Reader Who Agrees with Us That Mrs. Spofford Should Republish.” Springfield Republican. 1 February 1902: 19.

Leiter, Sharon. Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2007. Print

Hoppe, Jason. “Personality and Poetic Election in the Preceptual Relationship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862-1886.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 55 no. 3, 2013, pp. 348-387, 352-58. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/517590.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” Atlantic Monthly, October 1891.

Wolff, Cynthia. Emily Dickinson. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc. 1988, 165.

April 16-22: Coming out as a Poet

On April 15th, Dickinson read Higginson’s essay, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” in the recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly containing advice to young writers. She immediately wrote to him and asked the famous question, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” This week, we explore Higginson’s essay and Dickinson first (of several) responses.

“Coming out as a Poet”

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Colleen Boggs

Sources/Further Reading

“The Correspondence of Dickinson and Higginson Begins”

“On April 16, 1862, I took [Emily Dickinson’s letter of the previous day] from the post office in Worcester, Mass., where I was then living,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) recalled in an article he published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1891.

The letter was postmarked “Amherst,” and it was in a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town.

What happened after he read this letter was momentous in the lives of both writer and recipient, as well as American literature.

Sometime around April 15^th, Dickinson read Higginson’s essay, which appeared in the recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly titled “Letter to a Young Contributor,” containing advice to young writers about writing and publishing. She immediately wrote to him and asked the famous question,

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

Higginson responded, and Dickinson wrote again the following week. They corresponded until the month she died on May 15, 1886, but most of Higginson's letters to Dickinson are lost. Still, we have the letters Dickinson wrote to him and they tell us a good deal about her ambitions, her writing process, and herself.

It is an important correspondence because Dickinson, who had become reclusive at this time, initiated contact with someone she did not know personally, who was a well-known literary figure and radical abolitionist. And she sent him samples of her poetry, effectively coming out as a poet. Over the course of their long correspondence, according to Martha Nell Smith, Dickinson sent Higginson 171 poems and letters, more than any other recipient aside from her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson (who received quite a bit more: at least 430 letters and poems from Dickinson). This week, we explore Higginson’s essay that prompted Dickinson into outward motion, and her first rather coy and alluring advance to him.

“We are getting out gradually into the light, and into the free, fresh air”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Springfield Republican, April 19th, 1862: Review of the Week. Progress of the War:

This week, which opened with a general act of thanksgiving and praise, by armies in the field and the people at home, on Sunday, at the request of the president, has witnessed important advance and success without any great amount of fighting. … the capture of Fort Pulaski, commanding the approaches to Savannah, and the occupation of Huntsville, Alabama, by Gen. Mitchell’s division.

Fort Pulaski under fire April 10–11, 1862. Leslie's Weekly Magazine.

Emancipation in the District—

The bill emancipating the slaves in the District of Columbia has passed both houses of Congress, and needs only the president’s signature to become operative. … Only two members from slave states voted for the bill, but of the thirty-nine who voted against it, twenty-two were from free states [their emphasis; and SR prints their names.] We account this one of the greatest victories of the war … We now have a government and a Congress on the side of freedom, and not on the side of slavery. The president has signed the gradual emancipation resolution … Verily the world does move. We are getting out gradually into the light, and into the free, fresh air. Now, if the white slaves from the free states who voted against emancipation in the District could be emancipated by an act of Congress, Washington would become quite a decent place to live in. But everything in its time. Events will cure or kill these fellows.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

From the Springfield Republican:

The all engrossing subject in England and on the continent, is the immense revolution taking place in naval warfare. It is generally admitted that the Monitor is a solution of the question between wooden vessels and iron ones, and the engagement between this vessel and the Merrimac is the subject of universal comment by the English parliament and press. It is seen that old fashioned fortifications for the defense of harbors and coasts, are no longer to be depended on …

Presentation of Rebel Cannon to Amherst College —.

inscribed at Chicopee … formally presented to [Amherst College] Monday afternoon. … taken by the 21st Massachusetts regiment near the spot where Adjutant Frazar Stearns fell. … he was a model soldier, faithful, active, intelligent and brave among the bravest. … Edward Dickinson, chairman of the occasion, made known the object of the gathering in a few appropriate remarks. He referred to the sacred associations of the day, it being the anniversary of the time when the great uprising of the people began. He spoke of the death of three of the sons of the college since the war began, and closed by referring to the sacred memory of the brave adjutant, which the emblems of war brought so vividly to mind.

Poetry, page 7: “The Fashionable City Church and the Country Meeting-House” by Park Benjamin, in heroic couplets, and “A Lay for the Cumberland” by “the Peasant Bard.” [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow also wrote a poem about the Cumberland.] This poem is framed with the following note:

The fight of the Cumberland frigate with the iron-clad Merrimac [the Confederate ironclad] was gallant in the extreme. Accounts state that, after her sides were opened by the steam ram, she went down with her colors flying, in the thunder of her last broadside, as she disappeared; many of her gunners embracing their guns and going down with her.

On page 8 “Our Little One,” a poem about the death of a child.

Hampshire Gazette for Tuesday April 22 leads with the poem, “Lists of the Killed:”

Mothers who sit in dumb terror and dread,
Holding the terrible list,
Fearing to look lest you see ‘mid the dead
The name of the boy you have kissed –

It also includes several columns related to Newbern, N.C., including “letters found in the rebel camp … interesting as specimens of rebel literature.” Also, a letter opining,

As I conceive Jeff Davis to be about “played out,” I judge the following from Byron’s Foscari to be appropriate for him as a farewell speech to his fellow conspirators:– “My last hope's gone …”

“The new has the poets, the people, and posterity”

What prompted Thomas Wentworth Higginson to write the essay, “Letter to a Young Contributor” that so motivated Dickinson? Brenda Wineapple, who has written a thorough and insightful “biography” of the friendship of Higginson and Dickinson, argues that history has treated Higginson badly, painting him as a well-meaning bungler, who might have recognized Dickinson’s poetic genius but was just as happy to regularize her poetry when he co-edited the first posthumous volume with Mabel Loomis Todd in 1890.

In reality, Wineapple notes, by 1862 Dickinson would have known Higginson

by reputation. His name, opinions, and sheer moxie were the stuff of headlines for years, for as a voluble man of causes, he was on record as loathing capital punishment, child labor, and the unfair laws depriving women of civil rights. … Above all, he detested slavery.

He was a member of the “Secret Six,” men who anonymously funded John Brown in his 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, and from 1862-64, served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized regiment of Black soldiers. He was an ordained minister, and in an installation sermon in 1852, he declared

we must choose between the past forms which once embodied the eternal spirit, and the other forms which are to renew and embody it now . . . . The old has the court, the senate, the market; the new has the poets, the people, and posterity.

He wrote “Letter to a Young Contributor” to consolidate his reputation as a literary figure and also, according to Wineapple, “to console himself” about his inability to fling himself into the action of combat, because he needed to stay home with an invalid wife. His letter drew heavily from his journals and contained basic practical advice for submitting one’s work (write clearly and neatly and don’t waste the editor’s time) as well as some idealistic recommendations about writing (be patient, distill your thoughts). As an aside, he also calls “merely traditional … the supposed hostility between … England and Slavery,” a belief we noted a few posts ago was rampant in the Union North.

Although he would shortly leave to lead a regiment of Black men in South Carolina, Higginson warns his young contributors to ignore “all these fascinating trivialities of war” and gives the final word on the conflict to lawyer and former congressman Rufus Choate, who declared:

a book is the only immortality.

At the time Dickinson read Higginson’s essay, she had experienced several important losses, which may have prompted her to reach out of her tight circle of family and friends. The death of Frazar Stearns was still fresh in people’s minds and still a newsworthy item in both the Springfield Republican and the Hampshire Gazette for this week on account of the arrival of the memorial cannon in Amherst.

In addition, Charles Wadsworth, a minister Dickinson felt close to, moved with his family to California, and Samuel Bowles had not come for a promised Spring visit (see letter 259). Sue and Austin were busy with their growing family and bustling social life. Dickinson needed another interlocutor, another mind she could think with.

One of Higginson’s recommendations clearly hit a nerve in Dickinson: “Charge your style with life.” Here is what she does with this imperative in her first letter to Higginson:

15 April 1862

Mr Higginson,
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
The Mind is so near itself-it cannot see, distinctly-and I have none to ask-
Should you think it breathed- and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude-
If I make the mistake-that you dared to tell me-would give me sincerer honor-toward you-
I enclose my name-asking you, if you please-Sir-to tell me what is true?
That you will not betray me-it is needless to ask-since Honor is it's own pawn-
(L260)

There was no signature; rather, Dickinson enclosed a card in its own envelope on which she wrote her name. She also enclosed four poems, which we will explore in the Poems section for this week. Scholars offer many readings of this short letter with its repeated mention of “honor,” but what we should note immediately is how Dickinson’s opening question echoes Higginson’s recommendation from his “Letter to a Young Contributor.”

In his study of this central relationship, Jason Hoppe argues that this strategy, which we can see in other of Dickinson’s letters to Higginson, amounts to a “deep inhabitation” of his language and thought, linking “the antinomian qualities of her charismatic personality to social belonging and poetic achievement.” Dickinson's echoing and rescripting of Higginson’s words speak to her sense of their shared literary “election” and her understanding that this was to be, in Hoppe's words,

a relationship essential to her own poetic legacy.

Read this week's poems

Reflection
Colleen Boggs

It’s an honor to write this response, especially since the topic for this week resonates with two important topics – friendship has been the focus of Ivy Schweitzer’s scholarship, and animal imagery has preoccupied me for many years.

Anachronistically, we can read Dickinson’s letter to Higginson as the “beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Like the mismatched pair at the end of Casablanca, the two straddle divides of cultural authority. But they also inhabit a shared sphere, engaging fluidly with the same culture of letters – to draw on Richard Brodhead’s term for print’s ability to connect people and goods in naturalizing ways.

Those naturalizing ways are ones that Dickinson interprets for us by thinking about the nature of writing and her correspondence with Higginson. Certainly, this connection becomes evident in the accompanying poem, discussed in today’s post: if “literature is attar of rose,” in Higginson’s words, and the poet, in Dickinson's words, “distills amazing sense” to produce “attar so immense,” then the “sense” is both the fragrance of the roses as well as the sense-making of poetry.

And yet, this reworking of Higginson’s trope and appeal to him as a fellow naturalist presses beyond the (by the time of his writing, tired) trope of poetry as flower. Dickinson is not interested in her verse’s ability to extract life but invested in its ability to be live; she asks if her “Verse is alive.” That question receives additional urgency when she wonders whether “it breathed.” We may see this kind of trope in relation to the animation a creator gives her creature. However, Dickinson indicates that she herself would “feel quick gratitude” for such an assessment. “Quick” is a marker of speed, but read as such, it seems out of place. In the context of the letter’s imagery, it also indicates a “quickening,” that is, a coming alive. It is Dickinson herself, then, who stands the chance of becoming animate by Higginson’s appreciation of her verse being alive.

Although Higginson was not always Dickinson’s most astute reader, his 1891 recollection pays homage to their initial encounter: associating her handwriting with the “fossil bird-tracks” in Amherst, he acknowledges a strangeness in their correspondence that extends beyond conventions of human friendship into an animate and animal realm. As next week’s post will show, Dickinson responded to Higginson’s request for a self-description by likening herself to Carlo, her dog. As I have documented elsewhere, animals came to play a crucial role in Lockean models of children’s education: Locke had insisted in his epistolary work, “Thoughts on Education,” that animals were crucial for facilitating literacy and cultural literacy. Higginson’s “Letter to a Young Contributor” inhabited a long didactic tradition of advice literature; in asking his advice, “to say if my Verse is alive,” Dickinson pushed that tradition beyond implicit assumptions about literature’s relation to humanity, and opened the field up to larger animal and animate realms that could reanimate, beyond myopic self-enclosures, a way of seeing beyond “The Mind.”

Bio: Colleen Glenney Boggs is a Professor of English at Dartmouth College who specializes in nineteenth-century American Literature.

Overview

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” Atlantic Monthly October 1891.

Smith, Martha Nell. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. University of Texas Press, 1992, 28.

History

Hampshire Gazette, April 22, 1862

Springfield Republican, April 19, 1862

Biography

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Things New and Old,” Installation Sermon (Worcester, 1852), 5.

Wineapple, Brenda. White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. NY: Anchor Books, 4-8.

April 9-15, 1862: Edward Dickinson

This week’s post takes a look at the influence Edward Dickinson had on Emily Dickinson’s life and writing. Having grown up in a family facing financial trouble, Edward Dickinson governed his own household with a firm hand, kept a tight domestic economy, and imposed his values on his family members. While Emily Dickinson respected her father greatly, and tended to obey the rules he set for her, she kept her poetry well out his reach.

Edward Dickinson

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Hannah Matheson

Sources/Further Reading

“He buys me many Books – but begs me not to read them”

Though Edward Dickinson may have bought his daughter Emily Dickinson many books, his role in her life was more complicated than that of a fatherly didact. One such book he purchased was Letters on Practical Subjects to a Daughter by William B. Sprague, a sort of etiquette manual of orderly conduct for women. At the very least, this gift shows some fatherly desire to control and to rein in his daughter's intellect. Edward also bought her Dr. Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter, another advice manual. Writing to Higginson, Emily Dickinson comments that her father “buys me many Books” but suggests that he knows little about her and how she occupied her time, because he is “too busy with his Briefs” (L261). Even when he was absent on business trips, the books he gave to his daughter were an attempt to maintain control over her conduct and shape what he might have regarded as her flagging sense of social decorum.

That Edward Dickinson begged his daughter not to read books, fearing they would “joggle the mind,” makes his gifts all the more curious. He certainly wasn’t afraid that she might read and internalize those instructive manuals on proper female conduct. He must have feared the effect other, perhaps literary and intellectual books had on her—a father afraid that his daughter’s ever-growing intellect would break the protective belt he had strapped around her life.

Edward Dickinson, 1840. Portrait by O.A. Bullard. Houghton Library, Harvard University

This week’s post explores the influence Edward Dickinson had on Emily Dickinson’s life and writing. Having grown up in a family facing financial trouble, Edward Dickinson governed his own household with a firm hand, kept a tight domestic economy, and imposed his values on his family members. While Emily Dickinson respected her father greatly, and tended to obey the rules he set for her, she kept her poetry well out of his reach. She only mentioned him directly in one poem, “Where bells no more affright the morn” (F114), which is based in fact: he would literally wake his children with a bell at an early hour. Thus, Edward is largely absent from her poetry. Following the lead of Dickinson scholars, however, we’ve located him in other places: in her legal vocabulary, in her metaphors of domestic control, and in her notions of power.

“No more kid-glove policy”

NATIONAL HISTORY

Hampshire Gazette, April 15, responds to the battle of Shiloh on April 6-7th"

“The best contested and most sanguinary battle that ever took place on this continent, occurred on Sunday and Monday of last week. The rebel forces, under Gens. Beauregard and S.E. Johnston, advanced from their fortified position at Corinth, evidently with the intention of defeating our army by piecemeal, and attacked that portion of it stationed at Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee. It was a complete surprise and during the first day our forces were defeated, and had it not been for the opportune arrival of reinforcements, the union army would have met with a most fatal reverse.”

Springfield Republican, April 12, “Civil War in Cipher,” p. 4:

“A Cipher Despatch from Beauregard.—We have been shown a dispatch or message, in cipher, from Beauregard to some confederate in Washington, which, in addition to the ingenuity which characterizes the cipher, contains intrinsic evidence both as to its origin and the desperate means proposed by the rebel general for getting possession of the capital. It seems certain that arson and assassination were component parts of the chivalry of which we heard so much a year or so ago, and perhaps the publication of such a dispatch as this may modify the tender sensibility of those who adhere to the kid-glove policy in dealing with rebels who themselves stickle at nothing in prosecuting their traitorous schemes.”

Springfield Republican, April 12th, p. 5, Proclamation by the President:

“By the President of the United States of America—a Proclamation: It has pleased Almighty God to vouchsafe signal victories to the land and naval forces engaged in suppressing an internal rebellion, and at the same time to avert from our country the dangers of foreign intervention and invasion. It is therefore recommended to the people of the United States, that at their next weekly assemblages in their accustomed places of public worship, which shall occur after the notice of this proclamation shall have been received, they especially acknowledge and render thanks to our Heavenly Father for these inestimable blessings.”

The Amherst Cannon on display at the North Carolina Museum of History, 2012

Hampshire Gazette, April 15th: “Edward Dickinson in the Public Eye”

“Presentation of Cannon.—The ceremony of presenting a six-pound brass cannon captured from the rebels at the battle of Newbern, by the 21st Mass. regiment, to the trustees of Amherst College, took place at Amherst yesterday. The occasion called together about two thousand people, who gathered in front of the college chapel building, where the ceremonies were held. The cannon is a beautiful piece. It bears the stamp of ‘U.S.,’ and is believed to be one of the pieces captured from the federal army at Bull Run. … Hon. Edward Dickinson presided and introduced the speakers.”

Atlantic Monthly, April 15, “Letter to a Young Contributor” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

My dear young gentleman or young lady,—for many are the Cecil Dreemes of literature who superscribe their offered manuscripts with very masculine names in very feminine handwriting,—it seems wrong not to meet your accumulated and urgent epistles with one comprehensive reply, thus condensing many private letters into a printed one. And so large a proportion of “Atlantic” readers either might, would, could, or should be “Atlantic” contributors also, that this epistle will be sure of perusal, though Mrs. Stowe remain uncut and the Autocrat go for an hour without readers.

How few men in all the pride of culture can emulate the easy grace of a bright woman’s letter!

Yet, if our life be immortal, this temporary distinction is of little moment, and we may learn humility, without learning despair, from earth’s evanescent glories. Who cannot bear a few disappointments, if the vista be so wide that the mute inglorious Miltons of this sphere may in some other sing their Paradise as Found? War or peace, fame or forgetfulness, can bring no real injury to one who has formed the fixed purpose to live nobly day by day.

“His Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists”

The eldest of nine children, Edward Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1803 to an established family. His parents, Samuel Fowler Dickinson and Lucretia Gunn Dickinson, valued education and, despite financial difficulties, sent their son to Amherst Academy, Yale University, and Northampton Law School.

Equipped with a first-rate education and a traditional set of values, Edward Dickinson launched a successful career in law, was elected as a Representative to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1838, to the National Whig Convention in Baltimore in 1852, and to the Congress of the United States as a Representative from the Tenth Massachusetts District in that same year. His successful career buoyed his stature in the Amherst community, and he governed the Dickinson household with a authoritative hand commensurate with his status as a prominent legal and political figure.

Even his personal life was touched by his ambitious resolve; in a letter to Emily Norcross, whom he would later marry, he wrote,

My life must be a life of business, of labor and application to the study of my profession.

His obsessive commitment to his career set in motion a precarious and, at times distant relationship with his family, especially his eldest daughter, Emily Dickinson. As a politician, he was eager to bring a railroad to Amherst, an accomplishment that was met with

great rejoicing through this town and the neighboring [one],

according to Dickinson in a letter to her brother Austin (L72). She admired her father's success, commenting a bit wryly later in the correspondence that

Father is really sober from excessive satisfaction, and bears his honors with a most becoming air.

Though Dickinson clearly thought highly of her father, his conventional values and imposing authority strained their relationship. Writing to Austin, who was away at school, she expressed regretfully that she and her family

don’t have many jokes tho’ now, it is pretty much all sobriety, and we do not have much poetry, father having made up his mind that it’s pretty much all real life. … Father’s real life and mine sometimes come into collision, but as yet, escape unhurt! (L65).

Similar sentiments emerge in other correspondences. To Higginson, Dickinson wrote,

and Father, too busy with his Briefs – to notice what we do – He buys me many Books – but begs me not to read them – because he fears they joggle the mind (L261).

Their relationship was one of contrasts: Edward Dickinson was supportive of his daughter's education yet wary of its effects, overbearing in his authority yet distant and, as Emily withdrew from religious observance, Edward underwent a religious conversion in the revival in Amherst in 1850. Her tone about him is routinely marked by a regretful distance. In a letter to Joseph Lyman, she wrote:

My father seems to me often the oldest and the oddest sort of a foreigner. Sometimes I say something and he stares in a curious sort of bewilderment though I speak a thought quite as old as his daughter… And so it is, for in the morning I hear his voice and methinks it comes from afar & has a sea tone & there is a hum of hoarseness about [it] & a suggestion of remoteness as far as the isle of Juan Fernandez.

Richard Sewall, Dickinson's biographer, describes their relationship as

compounded of many elements incompatible with fear. It developed early into an amused tolerance, a touch of condescension arising from an entirely justified sense of intellectual superiority, a tender devotion that made her delight in serving him in many ways, and later on into a deep, pervasive pity for his lonely and austere life.

Edward Dickinson died in Boston on June 16, 1874 shortly after speaking in the General Court, where he reportedly felt ill. Though Dickinson occasionally commented on her relationship with her father while he was alive, her posthumous remarks are keenest. In a letter to Higginson in 1874, a month after Edward's passing, she reflects on the memories she has of her father (L418):

The last Afternoon that my Father lived, though with no premonition – I preferred to be with him, and invented an absence for Mother, Vinnie being asleep. He seemed peculiarly pleased as I oftenest stayed with myself, and remarked as the Afternoon withdrew, he “would like it to not end.”

His pleasure almost embarrassed me and my Brother coming-I suggested they walk. Next morning I woke him for the train – and saw him no more.

His Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists.

I am glad there is Immortality-but would have tested it myself-before entrusting him.

Mr Bowles was with us–With that exception I saw none. I have wished for you, since my Father died, and had you an Hour unengrossed, it would be almost priceless. Thank you for each kindness.

My Brother and Sister thank you for remembering them.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Hannah Matheson

Two Poems

SOTERIOLOGY

Salvation’s brutal logic. Our Father progenitor
of Munchausen by proxy: made us wrong
to be the one to fix broken. Fashioned
to fall. How’s that for self-
indulgence? His and mine,
I mean. Made in His image,
cheap facsimile that
I am, a mirror of ire. Anger is
unflattering. This is why we say
fear of God, and this is why
Sunday service finds me close-
fisted, fingernails carving red
crescents into my own palms,

but even if I gall I recognize
the architecture of a fine thing,
ornate scaffolding of psalms—
exquisite echolalia of call
and response, which is at least
an answer, even if it returns
in the sound of one’s own voice
whispering prayer, soothing
sleep along. What alternative
do I offer when, asked
a question, I can do nothing
but point to all my milk teeth
scattered on the floor?

LUST (II)

and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves –Dickinson

For so long, Emily, my body as a scaffold of loss: self-
portraiture a composite of leavable parts. Anatomy
predicated on negative space—skeleton defined
by the emptiness filling around it. My ribs so hungry,
bone stitches suturing air. So much nothing. So much
take it or leave it, as they wished. I did not want to tell you

about what I allowed this frame to weather.
My labia scoured by a whiskered mouth. Rawed down
until I swelled, bleeding rose—red spattering of cells
in my underwear. I took it like a moth pinned
to corkboard, wingspread, still. Another time,
a different pair of hands, also hungry… I yearned
my pelvis away from his looming need. Battering
ram of his fingers breaching my borders, somehow
he sowed longing, somehow I wanted him
to want me, the truth is I did

go back, as if searching for the pummeling. What
did I think I could wrest from another night
in that dank room? As simple as a dog returning, wanting
to be un-kicked. I keep running from, running to
this exacting metronome but and of course the jolts
of these pulses are like everything else
a familiar rhythm—heartthrums, footfalls, the same
frat house couch spring
it hurt it hurt it hurts

bio: Hannah Matheson is a member of the class of 2018 at Dartmouth College and was an English major concentrating in Creative Writing. She studied poetry with Vievee Francis. She has edited for Mouth and The Stonefence Review, literary publications at Dartmouth, and sang in The Subtleties, an all-female a cappella group. .

Overview

Habegger, Alfred. My Wars are Laid away in Books. New York: Random House, 2001, 46.

History

Atlantic Monthly, April 15, 1862.

Hampshire Gazette, April 15, 1862.

Springfield Republican, April 12, 1862.

Biography

Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Eds. Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Martin, Wendy, ed. All Things Dickinson: an Encyclopedia of Emily Dickinson’s World. Greenwood, 2014.

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard Univesity Press, 1974, 61.

April 2-8, 1862: Publication

One of the most intriguing aspects of Dickinson’s poetry is that most of her almost eighteen-hundred poems were published posthumously. Ten of them (and one letter) made it into print during her lifetime, none under her own name. We explore why a prolific and ambitious poet with such close relationships with prominent editors chose not to publish during her lifetime, and her evolving feelings about print publication and fame.

“Firmament to Fin”

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection - Ivy Schweitzer

Sources/Further Reading

Publication

One of the most intriguing aspects of Dickinson’s poetry is that most of her almost eighteen-hundred poems were published posthumously. Eleven of them (and one letter) made it into print during her lifetime, none under her own name. (For a list of these, see EDA’s “Resources.”) Some people think that Dickinson contacted the editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in order to sound him out about publishing her poetry. But in her third letter to him, written on June 7, 1862, Dickinson responded, rather coyly:

I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish”—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin— (L265).

We will see, however, in exploring Dickinson’s first two letters to Higginson later in this month that she did not always tell him the truth. In point of fact, her contacting him at all was triggered by her reading his essay, which will appear in the Atlantic Monthly later this month, offering advice to young writers on how to publish their work.

Why would a poet with such close relationships with editors, such as Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican and Thomas Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly, who were known to champion writing by women, choose not to publish during her lifetime? The question is complicated by the fact that several of Dickinson's poems did appear in the Springfield Republican—with varying degrees of her approval—and that she was already circulating poems to friends, family, and editors through her correspondences.

What’s more, Dickinson edited her own poetry in a form of self-publication: she made fair copies, destroyed the worksheets, and bound more than 800 poems into 40 “fascicles,” so called by her first editors, as if intending that they should be read in the groups and order she chose and, perhaps, be published in print posthumously in that form and order.

One common explanation of her choice not to publish in print was that she was responding to the print industry’s tendency to edit, punctuate, reword, and modify poetry before it hit the press, without the consent of the author. We discussed this process in the post for February 26 – March 4 in which Dickinson’s poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” was renamed “The Sleeping,” heavily edited so that it conformed to conventional poetic norms, and published in the Springfield Daily Republican on March 1st, 1862.

Springfield Republican Still, Cristanne Miller argues that the “being edited” argument—though clearly a concern for Dickinson—is insufficient to explain why so much of her poetry went unpublished. Miller points to two compelling reasons that go beyond Dickinson’s preoccupation with editorial interference. First, her most profound poems deal with matters of life, death, and loss in

familiar forms, working from the hymn and popular ballad-style poetry, and using the popular idiom.

Dickinson will balk when Higginson suggests that her poetic “gait” is “Spasmodic,” and resisted his advice to write in blank verse. This may indicate that poetry was a form of reflection for her, a way of working through deep questions of war, life, and time without concerning herself with an audience. In effect, the process of writing without the pressures and demands of commercial publication allowed poetry to maintain its role of personal exploration and experimentation in her life.

Second, Dickinson likely found objectionable the way print publication implicated her poems as commodities in a larger market. This point becomes all the more urgent when considered in the context of slavery, a market in itself that involved the attachment of monetary value to bodies, spirit, and labor. We will explore this theme in the poems section in our discussion of “Publication – is the Auction” (F788, J709).

Furthermore, print publication fixes poems and makes them static. Karen Dandurand speculates that Dickinson’s frequent revising of her own poems, even years after they were written, suggests that she regarded poems as always “works in progress,” and it was essential for her to retain them within her control to keep them dynamic and open to change.

These reasons provide insight into Dickinson’s choice to avoid print and “publish” in her own way: binding her poems into forty fascicles, sending them off to friends and family in letters, and etching them into the corners of envelopes and paper scraps. Reworking the rules of “publication” allowed her to write, share, and preserve her work in a way that resisted the commodification of the “Human Spirit” that was so rampant in the nineteenth century’s media environment.

“Things that are Not Things”

NATIONAL HISTORY

As mentioned in the Overview, the horrors of war, death, and slavery were ever-present questions for Dickinson, just as they were for the nation at large. This week, the Springfield Republican includes extended meditations on both. A piece called “Things that are not things” focuses on the paradoxical treatment of enslaved people as both property and persons—a rhetorical gymnastics and perverse logic that slave owners use to argue their right to own property and simultaneously avoid taxation:

The slaveholders refuse to be held to any definite theory on the subject, while they claim the advantages of the most opposite principles. Slaves are not property, when you talk about taxing them, or confiscating them, or in any way making them subject to the liabilities of other kinds of property; but if the government proposes to remove them from the national capital, paying a fair price for them, then they become property to all intents and purposes, and to touch them without the consent of the owners is a great outrage … The constitution does not recognize them as property … Slavery must not be allowed to shirk any of the burdens or evade any of the just consequence of the war it has instigated by mere quibbling.

A column titled “Speak kindly of the dead” attempts to make sense of death and offers instruction on how to think about the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, commenting that while “censure” might mean something for the living, it is powerless to the dead.

Fallen confederate soldiers with identifying headboards on Rose Farm. LOC, Civil War Trust. — Fallen Confederate soldiers with identifying headboards on Rose Farm. LOC, Civil War Trust.

Let us speak kindly of the life that is closed … Every nature has its ennobling struggles, its inherent discords that can only be subdued to harmony by vigorous effort … The soldier went forth to do or die, and was cut down before the final charge was made and the dear-bought victory attained. Let us accept him if he fell manfully, with his face to the foe, and bear him mutely homeward upon his battered shield.

The Republican also announced an important early step in the government’s involvement in the freeing of enslaved people by way of an Emancipation Proclamation:

The United States Senate, on Tuesday, the 2d, adopted the joint resolve from the House, suggested by the president’s special message, offering the aid of the general government to such states as may choose to initiate emancipation.

… it is a great thing that senators representing three of [the border] states should declare for this first step towards emancipation. It required high courage, and they should have all honor for the act, for we must remember that in the South there is no such connection between loyalty to the government and hostility to slavery as exists generally among us, and the southern loyalists are by no means to be judged by our standard of opinion.

LITERARY HISTORY

In relation to this week’s focus on publication, it is important to note that the Springfield Republican frequently published poems by women on some of the same themes that interested Dickinson. The Springfield Republican for April 5, for example, includes “The Country Child” by Marian Douglas (Annie Green, 1842-1913), which invokes some of Dickinson’s favorite motifs: flowers, dew, and birds, but to very different effect:

She seems to bring the country here—
Its birds, its flowers, its dew;
And slowly, as, amid the throng
She passes from our view,
We watch her, sadly, as we might
Some pleasant landscape fade from sight. …

So fair a flower should open with
The daisy buds at home;
Mid primrose stars, as sweet and wild,
As she will be—dear, woodland child!

It also includes a poem by Edna Proctor (1827-1923) on heroism (“Are the Heroes dead?”), while the April 12th edition includes “The Dying Wife” by Emily Gleason.

The Republican also included a literary snippet on primary school instruction that reads like a “How-To” guide on writing like Dickinson. The “Books, Authors and Art” section for this week describes “Object-Lessons,” a new form of pedagogy for the young:

The principle employed in Object-Lessons is one likely to modify the whole process of primary instruction, and the culture of which it is the basis. It employs the fresh faculties in observing, closely and accurately, and in committing to memory obvious facts, not meaningless words. It just takes the many objects with which the child is familiar, and bids him note carefully their sensible properties, their shape, size, color, texture, flavor, resemblance or difference; doing for the dullest what talent does for the gifted.

Dickinson & Higginson: A Preface

On April 5th, 1862, the Springfield Republican published a notice of the upcoming edition of the Atlantic Monthly that would prove crucial in Dickinson’s relationship to publication. In the section titled “Books, Authors and Art,” the Republican reported:

The Atlantic Monthly for April is one of the best numbers ever issued; not of that popular periodical merely, but of magazine literature since its first inception. It is full of rich thoughts clothed in well-chosen words; the ripe fruits of culture, presented with admirable taste. Its leading article, T. W. Higginson’s Letter to a Young Contributor, ought to be read by all the would-be authors of the land, although such a circulation would surpass that of the New York Ledger or any other periodical whatever. It is a test of latent power.

Although we don’t know if Dickinson saw this notice, she may have been aware of the irony of advertising a literary essay from the Atlantic Monthly in the Springfield Republican: publication of literary writing—be it poetry or prose—was entangled in a large commercial economy.

Though she reads this essay and ultimately decides to write to Higginson, Dickinson's letters are often coy and evasive. We will study them more closely in the last two weeks of this month.

Read this week's poems

Reflection
Ivy Schweitzer

Two Poems

In Dickinson’s voice

As Firmament to Fin – I said,
the robin snug in wood
and great white whales in aqua
seas +singing to their brood –

To fling a song the world among
from throat and – fearless eye
+Leaping in golden lines beyond
ocean and the sky –

As Firmament to Fin – I think
I could assay – the weight
of breeze and wave that language – make
an essence rare to strike –

+crooning +bursting

In a contemporary voice

The answer is no from the poetry editor,
no from the national grant.
My snarky response—dies on my lips,
failures—clamor at my heart.

The answer is no from my children
hurrying into grown-up lives,
no from my husband, plugged into
his virtual toys. No from my balky knees
grousing at every mile I run, every
delirious slope I ski.
No from my sciatic nerve, achy hips,
hair-line eczema, vaginal dryness.

The answer is no
from the justice I swore to promote
at every barricade, real and
abstract, with youthful panache,
no from a world fraught
and fracked, from peace punished
and starved.

It’s time, my Soul, to transmigrate into a stone.

bio: Ivy Schweitzer is Professor of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her fields are early American literature, American poetry, women’s literature, gender and cultural studies, and public digital humanities. Recent projects include The Occom Circle, a digital edition of works by and about Samson Occom, an 18^th century Mohegan Indian writer and activist, and a full-length documentary film entitled It’s Criminal: A Tale of Privilege and Prison, based on the courses she co-teaches in and about jails. During the pandemic, she collaborated on a pedagogical website titled HomeWorks, which features the work of 19th century women writers on home and domesticity, and puts Dickinson in conversation with Lucy Larcom and Sarah Winnemucca.

Sources

Overview

Dandurand, Karen. “Dickinson and the Public,” in Dickinson and Audience. Eds. Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996: 255-77.

Dobson, Joanne. Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

Smith, Martha Nell. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

History and Biography

Emily Dickinson Archive http://www.edickinson.org

Dickinson, Emily. Selected Letters. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986.

Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

Springfield Republican: April 5th & April 12th, 1862.

March 26-April 1, 1862: Fascicle 18

Emily Dickinson compiled Fascicle 18, consisting of 17 poems, in autumn 1862, though the poems she gathered in it were mostly written before that time. This week we focus on the complex relationships created by the poems’ proximity within the fascicle and how themes of resurrection, the afterlife, and immortality arise, through the Honors work of a student focusing specifically on Fascicle 18.

“Resurrection”
edited by Madeline Killen

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection - Madeline Killen

Sources/Further Reading

“Resurrection”

Emily Dickinson compiled Fascicle 18, consisting of 17 poems, in autumn 1862. A seasonal marker emerges in the second poem of the Fascicle’s first sheet, “I know a place where Summer strives” (F363A, J337). The poem recounts the annual battle between summer and winter when “Frost” overtakes “her Daisies” for a brief period. Although Summer continues to pour “the Dew” upon the hardened ground, it “stiffens quietly to Quartz” in the increasingly cold air. While this poem works beautifully as an illustration of the changing seasons, Dickinson also uses this subject as a metaphor for resurrection, a theme that haunts the entire fascicle. As last week’s post observed, Dickinson associated resurrection with the season of spring, and it is a major preoccupation of hers. As she will remark to Thomas Higginson in a letter dated June 9, 1866:

You mention Immortality.
That is the Flood subject. (Letter 319)

The theme of resurrection emerges mainly through the poems’ proximity to one another. This reflects Sharon Cameron’s argument in her landmark analysis of the Fascicles, Choosing Not Choosing (1992). According to Cameron, while the Fascicles do not form a classically linear or chronological narrative, the poems’ proximity within the pages of the Fascicles inevitably leads the reader to associate them with one another and, thus, understand them through that relational lens.

In the case of Fascicle 18, we can observe this process working to create several narratives. One of the most obvious is how the poet blurs the lines between a lover and a deity or higher power. Thus, a poem like “I tend my flowers for thee” (F367A, J339), which appears romantic and erotic outside of the Fascicle’s context, reads as spiritual and even skeptical when it follows “I know that He exists” (F365A, J338) and “He strained my faith” (F366A, J497). For this post, though, we will focus on the themes of resurrection, the afterlife, and immortality, which in this fascicle take the form of belief in and questions about what happens after death.

“A Truly Independent People”

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Springfield Republican, March 25, 1862, Foreign Affairs: “The difficulty of the allied powers with Mexico may be considered as settled.”

John Bull and Brother Jonathan: This column argues that Americans have come to care nothing for England’s opinion and searches for a reason. The writer points to English ignorance of American institutions and peoples, their “sham rejection of slavery,” their lack of “sagacity,” even their ignorance of American geography, and makes this astonishing declaration:

We have never before, in our national history, been free from bondage to this opinion. Now, thank Heaven, we are. England has lost something she could not afford to lose; we have gained something we have always needed to make us a truly independent people.

“The rebel steamer ‘Nashville’ running the blockade at Beaufort, North Carolina.” Harper’s Weekly, April 5, 1862, page 209 (illustration).

It is worth remembering, as was noted in last week's post, that Lieutenant Colonel Clark, who commanded the 21^st Massachusetts regiment, reported that Frazar Stearns was killed by “a ball from an English rifle. ” In this week’s Hampshire Gazette, a description of the battle of New Bern confirmed the fact that England was arming the Confederacy:

A large quantity of small arms, many of them new English rifles, were thrown away in their [the rebels’] flight. These with boxes of English caps found upon the ground, were, no doubt, late importations by the Nashville, which recently ran the blockade at Beaufort.

NATIONAL NEWS

Springfield Republican, Saturday, March 29, Review of the Week: Progress of the War. “The rebels, having abandoned their boasted Gibraltars, are now talking largely about making Thermopylaes. They undertook one near Winchester, Virginia, the other day, but Gen. Shields spoiled it for them, and after a most disastrous defeat, they fled to seek a new stand-point further in the heart of Virginia.”

Gen. Shields at the Battle of Winchester, VA. Currier & Ives, c. 1862.[/caption]

The General Situation: “The rebels are suspected of playing false in the matter of exchanging prisoners.”

Springfield Republican: Life in Washington; Seen through New Spectacles. From our Special Correspondent: “Spring hovers not very far up in the sunny azure. … Nature may allure me to say that even Washington is fair.”

Also, from the Republican, the army rouses out of its winter lethargy. It is worthwhile to compare this description with the obsequies of Frazar Stearns in Amherst:

With shouts of joy which seem to rend the very sky, they receive their orders to march. With hilarious cries they rush on to death or victory. And these are not the men, whose fall on the battle field will win them glorious fames, funeral pageants, and immortal eulogies. They know that if they are wounded, strangers will tend them, while they languish in dreary hospitals; that if they die in battle, strangers will lay them in their unrecorded graves, if haply they do not fall like cattle in their trenches. These are our mercenaries.

Another column: How Shall We Deal with Slavery?

It is true that slavery is a purely state institution; the constitution neither sustains nor prohibits it, but simply recognizes its existence in the states. But the struggle of the southern leaders has been to make it a national institution, and to use the power and resources of the Union for its protection and extension, and they have made war upon the Union because they say that they had forever lost the power to prostitute the general government to the interests of their barbarous institution. Every legal and constitutional measure by which slavery can be limited and checked ought therefore to receive popular support, and will.

Springfield Republican printed “Night-Song in Lent” by R. Storrs Willis (1819-1900), an American composer mainly of hymn music, and a long column on the recent popularity of photo albums. Then, this short notice came at the very bottom of the last column on page 6:

Fanny Fern (Sara Willis, 1811 – 1872, sister of R. Storrs Willis), a popular columnist and writer

“Fanny Fern” has separated from her husband, Parton, on the ground of alleged misuse, not only on his part but that of one of his relatives.”

“A Brother Lost”

This week, the Dickinsons still mourn the death of Frazar Stearns.

Hampshire Gazette for March 25 ran a story about “The Capture of Newbern” that included a letter by “Lieut. Dwight of this town,” written to his brother, in which he says of the battle:

It is impossible for me to give you any description of the fight in writing … The fog was very thick and the smoke hung to the ground … We heard cheering and knew that a charge was being made, but there was no cessation of the firing and it was understood that the enemy held their position. This charge was made by the 21^st Mass., 3 companies, and they got inside but were driven out, and their loss was very great. Adjutant Stearns of the 21^st was killed. He is the son of President Stearns of Amherst College.

The Gazette also included a long obituary for Stearns that began:

The death of this young man has detracted much from the joy with which the victory would otherwise have been hailed by our people. … the remains of the student soldier were followed to the tomb by all the faculty and students of the college, and many of the town’s people, all of whom mourned as for a brother lost.

But change is afoot. April will be a momentous month for Emily Dickinson.

Crocus in spring.

Read this Week's Poems

Reflection
Madeline Killen

Starting in middle school and ending when I came to college, I would spend hours every day baking in the sun on poorly maintained tennis courts, perfecting my serve and topspin. Any one of my coaches’ rolling baskets of fuzzy yellow balls would inevitably contain a tiny torture device called a “reaction ball.” I bet many high school athletes would know exactly what I’m referring to: a tiny rubber device that looked like a bouncy ball with other bouncy ball halves growing out of it at odd angles. Coach would bounce it, I’d go running after it in whichever completely unpredictable direction it opted to fly off. Catch it in the air, I’m still in the game; catch it after a bounce, and I’d have push-ups or burpees or sprints as punishment. For a while, I thought that quitting tennis in college meant I’d left the unpredictable demands of the reaction ball far behind me. But that was before I started writing a senior honors thesis on Dickinson’s Fascicle 18.

Fascicle 18 a beautiful reaction ball of themes and meanings, hopping away from me in some shocking new direction the moment I begin to think I’ve gotten a grip on it. I found my way to the fascicle because of a close reading assignment I completed my junior winter in Professor Schweitzer’s “The New Emily Dickinson” course on its fourth poem, “I know that He exists.” The year of the poem’s composition—1862, at the peak of Dickinson’s “white heat” of creativity and the Civil War—and its use of words like “Ambush,” “piercing,” and “Death,” led me in the direction of war. I read the poem as a call to an absent God to intervene in the bloody tragedy of the Civil War.

Based on this reading, I submitted my thesis proposal, positing that I would do an analysis of the fascicle through the lens of war and religion. I quickly realized, however, that to boil a fascicle down to two central themes is to do Dickinson a great injustice—so for the past few months, I’ve chased this fascicle down countless side alleys and back roads, finding myself face-to-face with themes as quintessentially Dickinson as cyclical time, immortality, death, and poetry itself, and as surprising as miscarriages, abortions, and trauma.

In Fascicle 18, it’s exactly Dickinson’s noncommittal wordplay—choosing not to choose single definitions—that creates this reaction ball effect. In “I know that He exists,” “Bliss” is personified; she must “Earn her own surprise.” Later in the fascicle, in “Is Bliss then, such Abyss,” Bliss is an object: “sold just once / The Patent lost / None buy it any more—.” On sheet five, the speaker’s “Reward for Being, was This—/ My premium—My Bliss—.” Within the fascicle context, this single word takes on three different meanings but also inevitably carries the context and definition that it has elsewhere in the fascicle. We hold all three Blisses in our mind at one time when we read Fascicle 18, incapable of ignoring the trace of Dickinson’s variants and altering the impression of the entire poem and fascicle.

Bio: Madeline is a member of the Dartmouth class of 2018. An English major and an Italian minor, she took the "The New Dickinson: After the Digital Turn" course taught by Ivy Schweitzer in winter 2017. This course inspired her English honors thesis, which focused on Dickinson's Fascicle 18. A chapter of this thesis, titled “The Landscape of Bliss,” won the prize for the best undergraduate research essay from the Emily Dickinson International Society in 2018.

Further Reading on “Resurrection”

Kirby, Joan. “Death and Immortality.” Emily Dickinson in Context. Ed. Eliza Richards. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 160-178.

Sources

History
Hampshire Gazette, March 25, 1862

Springfield Republican, March 29, 1862

Biography
The Hampshire Gazette, March 25, 1862

“The Health of Our Girls”

“Thoreau and Higginson on Health”

Reflection

Giavanna Munafo

“The grand struggle of the war has not yet come off.”

“The Chinese Museum”

Reflection

Chin Woon Ping

“Gardens are being made”

“The Heart Wants What it Wants”

Reflection

Melissa Zeiger

“Telescoping Places”

“The Wounded Heart”

“The Heart Wants What it Wants”

ReflectionJoe Waring

“Garden Politics”

“May-day has come”

“Earth as Heaven”

Reflection

Ivy Schweitzer

“Thank you for your surgery”

“This hectic grandiloquence so fashionable among the codfish aristocracy”

“The Most Experienced and Worldly Coquette”

Reflection

Joseph Waring

“Coming out as a Poet”

“The Correspondence of Dickinson and Higginson Begins”

“We are getting out gradually into the light, and into the free, fresh air”

“The new has the poets, the people, and posterity”

ReflectionColleen Boggs

Edward Dickinson

“He buys me many Books – but begs me not to read them”

“No more kid-glove policy”

“His Heart was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists”

Reflection

Hannah Matheson

Two Poems

“Firmament to Fin”

“Things that are Not Things”

Dickinson & Higginson: A Preface

ReflectionIvy Schweitzer

Two Poems

“Resurrection” edited by Madeline Killen

“Resurrection”

“A Truly Independent People”

“A Brother Lost”

Reflection Madeline Killen

Reflection

Joe Waring

Reflection
Colleen Boggs

Reflection
Ivy Schweitzer

“Resurrection”
edited by Madeline Killen

Reflection
Madeline Killen