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 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 Dickinson's 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.

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.

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 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 1858, 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 to 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:

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 standard, 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 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 in 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

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 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, as if intending that they should be read in the groups and order she chose and, perhaps, 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.

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:

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

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, c1862.[/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 word play—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

March 5-11, 1862: Women of Genius

Although Dickinson never met the English author Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pseudonym George Eliot, she considered Eliot a friend and certainly a role model. Eliot was not the only “woman of genius” Dickinson admired and identified with in terms of their shared struggle to be recognized and accepted. This week, we look at “women of genius” of this time period and how Dickinson’s own genius shaped her life.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Ivy Schweitzer

Sources

“What do I think of glory —”

This week we build on last week's post on a remarkable woman by picking up on a snarky comment from the February 22 Springfield Republican’s “Books, Authors and Art” section:

Miss Evans (George Eliot) promises a new novel this spring; but judging from her last (Silas Marner) her glory has departed; Happy marriage and rest from doubt and scandal take the passion out of women geniuses. Adam Bede and the Mill on the Floss were born of moral trial and heart hunger; and the reading world must find their compensation–if they can–for the falling off in their successors in the belief that the writer is content and at peace.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 1819-1880

The forthcoming novel referred to here is Romola, a historical tale set in fifteenth-century Florence, which appeared in serial form in Cornhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863 and was published as a book in 1863. Note that the writer of this article accepts the fact of Eliot’s artistic “glory,” but sees domestic happiness as antithetical to “women geniuses.” In fact, Eliot’s acknowledged masterpiece, Middlemarch, was still to come in 1871-72. Dickinson will rave about it in a letter to her Norcross cousins who solicit her opinion, using the same word, “glory,” as in the Republican’s dismissive comment:

What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory – except that in a few instances this “mortal has already put on immortality.”

George Eliot is one. The mysteries of human nature surpass the “mysteries of redemption,” for the infinite we only suppose, while we see the finite. … (L389, late April 1873).

Dickinson’s reverence for Eliot as woman and writer is well known (see Sources). Of the three portraits Dickinson hung in her room, one of them was a picture of Eliot, the only woman in the group. Although Dickinson never met the English author, she considered her a friend and, certainly, a role model. When Dickinson heard of Eliot’s death in December 1880, she was bereft, and wrote to her intimates about “Grieving for ‘George Eliot’” (L683), calling her “my George Eliot” (L710; emphasis hers). In a letter to Samuel Bowles, dated late November 1862 (L277), Dickinson alludes to an image from Eliot’s novel, Mill on the Floss, which she was probably reading during this time.

Eliot was not the only “woman of genius” Dickinson admired and identified with in terms of their shared struggle to be recognized and accepted. Eliot chose to publish under a male pseudonym, like the Brontë sisters before her, in order to evade prevailing cultural attitudes that trivialized or dismissed women’s artistic productions. Attitudes like the one asserted by the Republican, that women could only achieve genius if they were motivated by “moral trial” and “heart hunger.” But if they found some modicum of domestic happiness or stability, the quality of their work must inevitably fall off. That is, women could be artists, somehow transcending the limitations of gender, but not women at the same time.

In fact, Anglo-American culture has not been good to its women of genius, especially its poets. The first poet to publish a book of poetry written in the North American colonies was Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), the educated daughter and wife of men who both served as governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

But when her brother-in-law carried her book of poems to London to be published in 1650, it was titled, The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America. High flown praise, but muses are not writers. This brother-in-law felt it necessary to engage a bevy of notable literary men to write prefatory poems and endorsements for this somewhat unusual volume, and he himself wrote a long letter confirming that, indeed, this was the work of a woman “honoured, and esteemed where she lives for … her exact diligence in her place.” [editor's emphasis]

Over a hundred years later, the owners of the enslaved child prodigy, Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), tried to get her poetry published in Boston in the late 1760s.

Frontispiece to "Poems on Various Subjects," 1773

To do so, they not only appended a letter of verification to the volume, assuring a doubting public that this young African woman had indeed written poems that emulated Alexander Pope, but they also included a statement signed by a troop of prominent men who affirmed Wheatley's authorship. At the top of this list was the Governor, the Lieutenant-Governor and a host of Boston worthies, including a man who would soon make the act of signing his name the signal act of rebellion: John Hancock! Nevertheless, Wheatley had to take her manuscript to London for publication.

One of the reasons for this treatment is the historical gendering of genius, enshrined in the Roman origin of the word itself, which connotes the male “essence” or “gens” that is passed down through the male lines of a family. Romantic and Victorian ideas of genius look back to the Greeks, who argued that certain men could be the medium for ideas of the divine, a creativity that looked a bit like madness, because they were, according to the reigning medical theory of humors, warm and dry.

Women, by contrast, were wet and cold on account of having wombs; their madness was not creative but procreative—that is, hysterical (from “hyster,” the Latin word for womb). Thus, the rhetoric of genius that praised “feminine” qualities in male artists, like intuition and emotionality, excluded women and supposedly “primitive” peoples on the basis of biology and psychology. Some thinkers, like the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), developed the idea of the artist as a “third sex” or androgyne, who combined “feminine” receptivity and “masculine” will. But this led to different treatments of melancholia, a state closely associated with genius; in men, it was a channel to sublime revelation, but in women it led to weakness and mental illness.

In her ground-breaking feminist analysis of genius, A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) conducted a telling thought experiment. She imagines that Shakespeare had a sister named Judith, who was just as brilliant and ambitious as her brother, and tries to construct a life for her. After considering all the social constraints placed on Englishwomen of the sixteenth century, Woolf concludes that

a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

Not surprisingly, in this tale Judith ends up pregnant, abandoned and, unable to support herself, commits suicide.

Judith’s story is not so far from that of women of genius in the nineteenth century. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), hailed by her contemporaries as a rare intellectual and artist, condemns the treatment of women of genius of her day in her remarkable study, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Notice the connection in this passage by Fuller to Dickinson’s use of bird imagery for Sue and herself:

Plato, the man of intellect, treats Woman in the Republic as property, and, in the Timaeus, says that Man, if he misuse the privileges of one life, shall be degraded into the form of Woman; and then, if he do not redeem himself, into that of a bird. This, as I said above, expresses most happily how anti-poetical is this state of mind. For the poet, contemplating the world of things, selects various birds as the symbols of his most gracious and ethereal thoughts, just as he calls upon his genius as muse rather than as God. But the intellect is cold and ever more masculine than feminine; warmed by emotion, it rushes toward mother earth and puts on the forms of beauty. Women who combine this organization [the electrical, the magnetic] with creative genius are very commonly unhappy at present. They see too much to act in conformity with those around them, and their quick impulses seem folly to those who do not discern the motives. This is an usual effect of the apparition of genius, whether in Man or Woman, but is more frequent with regard to the latter, because a harmony, an obvious order and self-restraining decorum, is most expected from her.

Then, women of genius, even more than men, are likely to be enslaved by an impassioned sensibility. The world repels them more rudely, and they are of weaker bodily frame.

It is not hard to see why a woman like Dickinson, who knew herself to be touched with brilliance, would choose not to be an active member of a world that rudely “repels” women of genius.

“God spared my life, and for what …”

Springfield Republican, March 8, 1862.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

“Our position abroad is as good as we could desire.” Reports are that “the secession cause is in fact dead in Europe” and those backers in the British and French governments have accepted pending defeat of the South.

The war in Mexico concludes with “an armistice and negotiations for settlement.” The negotiations could continue for months, but the Union is not interested in rejoining the conflict, even if by chance it does start up again.

Trouble lies with Russia, however. Serfs criticize the law that gives them their freedom, because they have to buy their freedom, which is impossible for nearly all under serfdom. Poland and Finland seek to use this weak spot in Russian governing to gain independence. Germany, Hungary, Italy, Prussia, and Austria struggle with dissatisfaction in ruling powers and widespread imperial governments, and the Roman Catholic church is in turmoil due to an unstable Pope in times of war.

NATIONAL NEWS

Review of the Week: Progress of the War. “This week has been marked by important progress with little fighting,” says the Springfield Republican, and Union General Scott says “that the war is over and there is nothing to do but to clear up and prepare for peace, and the recent national successes at the West would seem to be decisive of the final result, so far as can now be seen.”

The “rebels” are retreating, cornered, or preparing to fight their last fights, and the Union has occupied most of the South by now. “Tennessee will soon quietly occupy its old position in the Union,” and “the confederate leaders at Richmond are represented to be in a state little short of panic.” [NB: Tennessee was the last state to leave the Union and the first to rejoin, but not until July 24, 1866. The Republican's comments show how overly optimistic the North was at this point.]

From Washington. The paper reports that the South had known about the decisive capture of Harper’s Ferry on Monday, but Southern newspapers were barred from printing such an update on the War, presumably to hide it from the public.

Confiscation and Emancipation. Illinois Senator Trumbull proposed a bill for the “confiscation of the property and the emancipation of the slaves of rebels,” a controversial move that has people asking what the rights of southerners are.

Senator Trumbull maintains that full war laws apply, and that the South is to be treated like an enemy nation with total destruction possible, but to lessen such a harsh punishment towards the rebels, that confiscation and emancipation was enough, and to treat them as “belligerents” was enough, at least until they could possibly be tried for treason.

“Suggestions for the Crisis.” This column debriefs some lessons learned, reasons for war, and what should happen in the event of another uprising. The author notes that starting the war in the spring was a good move for the Union considering the paralyzing winters the North experiences, and that the South had produced “few great men in this generation.” They also try to tease out the exact reason for the rebellion, but can’t quite find it, resolving to label it a power grab of the dying Southern power.

“The Dark Side of the Picture.” This letter from a Northern officer who was at Fort Donelson shows the “terrible realities of war.” He recounts the number of dead, the outcome, and the “wholesale slaughter” that left only seven out of 85 men alive in his company:

Do not wonder, dear father, that I am down-hearted. My boys all loved me, and need I say that, in looking at the poor remnant of my company—the men that I have taken so much pains to drill, the men that I thought so much of—now nearly all in their graves—I feel melancholy. But I do not complain; God spared my life, and for what, the future must tell.

“Was I the little friend —”

This week brought the sad news of the the death of the infant Edward Dickinson Norcross, on March 6. He was the son of Alfred and Olivia Norcross, Dickinson's maternal uncle and aunt.

Also this week, Dickinson writes a letter to Mary Bowles, the wife of Samuel Bowles, about accidentally sending Mr. Bowles a note to complete an “errand” for her, forgetting he left for Washington on the first of the month.

She worries that Mary instead did it for her, and it “troubled” her, and if Mary could “just say with your pencil – ‘it did’nt tire me – Emily’” she would cease her worries, as she “would not have taxed [Mary] – for the world -” Dickinson also asks about the new baby Charlie, and says she

sends a rose – for his small hands. Put it in – when he goes to sleep – and then he will dream of Emily – and when you bring him to Amherst – we shall be “old friends.”

Mary was a close friend of Dickinson, who frequently wrote letters to her, but received next to none back (the reply Dickinson asks for in the above letter “will be the first one – you ever wrote me -” she says). In editing some of Dickinson’s letters and poems, Mabel Loomis Todd switched the addressee from Sue to Mary to make their correspondence look more extensive and diminish the importance of Sue in Dickinson's life. In the above letter, Dickinson plaintively asks Mary, “yet – was I the little friend – a long time? Was I – Mary?”

This week, Dickinson also writes to Frances Norcross, one of two young Norcross cousins she adored and corresponded with throughout her life, about her sister Vinnie’s illness:

Poor Vinnie has been very sick, and so have we all, and I feared one day our little brothers would see us no more, but God was not so hard.

She also mentions that spring is supposed to be coming soon, but that this March has been particularly hard, with the Northeast hit lately with violent winter weather.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Ivy Schweitzer

For my women friends who are all geniuses!

Undammed

She is a neighbor and a painter,
mother of a wild red-headed girl
friends with my son
so long ago

calling to say she dreamt
of me in a café somewhere
hair wavy and golden
and I was sad, she said,

so sad, she had to call
though we are not close
how it flooded her night
snagged on the branches of sleep

and I am dumbstruck,
appalled by the mutinous grief
breaching my edges and
rushing into the ruts of the world

and I say yes,
I am sad and sorry to come
uninvited, and we talk
of the wild red-headed girl who works

at a women’s clinic in Texas,
facing protesters every day,
and my son dwelling in half-life
and our own lives as artists in this time

of profit and fools
and though nothing changes
I feel myself ebb as a tide
back into its almost

manageable course.

Bio: Ivy Schweitzer is the creator and editor of White Heat.

Sources

Overview
Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Bradstreet, Anne. The Tenth Muse lately Sprung up in America … London, 1650. Early English Books Online.

Freeman, Margaret H. “George Eliot and Emily Dickinson: Poets of Play and Possibility.” The Emily Dickinson Journal. 21.2 (2012): 37-58.

Fuller (Ossoli), Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman. Project Gutenberg EBook #8642. Section on “Tune the Lyre.”

Gee, Karen Richardson. “‘My George Eliot’ and My Emily Dickinson.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 3.1 (1994): 24-40.

Heginbotham, Eleanor Elsen. “‘What do I think of glory—’ Dickinson’s Eliot and Middlemarch.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 21.2 (2012): 20-36.

Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London, 1773.

Historical
Springfield Republican, volume 89, number 10. Saturday, March 8, 1862.

Biographical
Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences with Frances and Louise Norcross, DEA

Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences with Mary Bowles, DEA

Johnson, Thomas, editor. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. Belknap Press, 1958.

Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press, 1960.

Smith, Martha Nell, and Ellen Louise Hart, editors. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington. Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

Week of January 22-28: Fascicle 12

Dickinson chose to self-publish fascicles, booklets filled with hundreds of poems and variants, to avoid the pitfalls of the publishing industry. Upon her death, the fascicles were dismantled by her editors and then, in 1981, painstakingly pieced back together. This week, we explore what role the context of the fascicles plays in reading Dickinson’s poems by looking at Fascicle 12.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Madeline Killen

Sources

Book-Making: Fascicle 12

Emily Dickinson was ambivalent about the publishing industry of her time, to say the least. She was aware of the gendered conventions and limitations placed on women writers and thought her poetry would not be conveyed accurately in print. The editorializing of her work both during and after her lifetime shows she was right. A Dickinson poem is hard to capture in a single traditionally printed manuscript or the sea of print and columns that was a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper page. Many of her friends urged her to publish her work, and editors approached her. The eleven poems published during her lifetime appeared without her permission or supervision and often caused her consternation.

Instead, Dickinson chose a form of self-publication that allowed her to edit and organize her poems into groups on her own terms. From 1858 to around 1864, Dickinson made fair copies of her poems on fine paper, placed the folded sheets on top of each other and hand sewed the manuscript pages together, creating little booklets her first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, called "fascicles," which contained hundreds of her poems. In the early 1860s, she began including variants of words and phrases on the fair copies, often indicated by a small cross in the text next to the word with the variants in a list at the bottom of the page or on the sides or sometimes over the word itself. The variants thus become a part of the poem, which itself becomes dynamic and performative. The transcriptions we provide in the Poems section reproduce Dickinson's variants.

Dickinson produced forty fascicles (that we know of). She never labeled or dated them or the poems in them, or gave them numbers or titles. When they were discovered after her death, her editors immediately took them apart; now, multiple reconstructions of the fascicles exist, not all agreeing. In 1981, Ralph Franklin undertook a painstaking re-assemblage (based in part on the direction the needle went into the paper!) and printed the fascicles in manuscript, which is the closest way of reading Dickinson as she organized and presented herself. In an important study from 1992, Sharon Cameron argues that reading Dickinson's poems in the fascicle groupings substantially changes our understanding of her work. The inscrutable, difficult single lyric poem stands in a rich and complex, perhaps, more comprehensible context. In 2016, Cristanne Miller published a reading edition based on the fascicles titled Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them.In addition to disagreement over how the sheets go together, there is also lively debate over why the sheets go together – what did Dickinson intend by grouping these specific poems and in that specific order? How does the context of a fascicle inform the reading of her poetry? Why do some poems appear in multiple fascicles? How do the fascicles relate to each other? Some scholars, like Franklin, view the fascicles merely as a way for Dickinson to organize her poems, part of “her workshop” in a period of immense productivity. Others see them as poetic sequences with a consistent narrative or organizations of complex relationships. Cameron goes further, arguing that they represent, as the title of her study pithily puts it, Dickinson's approach of Choosing Not Choosing. That is, the fascicles illustrate Dickinson’s self-conscious playfulness and her resistance to closure or fixity. Given this important, though understudied way of reading Dickinson's poems, we thought it important to explore one of the first fascicles Dickinson put together in early 1862, Fascicle 12.

“Life in Washington. Through the Spectacles of a Lady”

INTERNATIONAL

Short news articles appeared this week on the history of French emancipation (presumably to apply to Civil War tactics and the lively emancipation debate in the North), and on the “Rejuvenation of Spain,” referring to the country’s reinvigorated military and economic power at the outset of the Second French Intervention in Mexico, when Spain joined with France and Britain to forcibly collect debts from Mexico after the country declared a suspension of loan payments to foreign creditors.

NATIONAL

Victory, with a teeming sense of urgency and anxiety, color this week’s affairs. The Springfield Republican’s “Review of the Week” describes how a “great victory crowns the new campaign,” referring to a battle in Kentucky where the Union obliterated a Confederate camp, seized some supplies, and pushed the enemy into retreat. The Hampshire Gazette contains the full report from Washington, and both papers pulled some quotations from Southern newspapers to show the past few weeks’ effect on Confederate morale. Numerous strong Union victories put a damper on things, and the Republican concludes that the only hope the “rebels” have is not to lose the whole war very badly. The “educated Southern men” are said to “rebel against the rebels,” and to think that the constant fighting is now pointless.

Also in the Springfield Republican, lengthy war preparation reports from states in New England follow some important upheavals in the North. On January 27, President Lincoln ordered all land and naval troops to advance southward by February 22 (George Washington’s birthday) to avoid Major General McClellan’s vastly unpopular waiting game war tactics. Lincoln also appointed Edwin Stanton as new Secretary of War, replacing Simon Cameron after allegations of corruption surfaced. The Hampshire Gazette chronicles an interview with Lincoln about this cabinet change, to which he replied his cabinet now feels more “cohesive.”

Two op-eds stand out in this week of taxation complaints: one about the unchanging and ever-similar “American Society” of both the North and the South, and one entitled “Life in Washington. Through the Spectacles of a Lady.” An anonymous upper class woman tells of her trip to the Senate to hear Charles Sumner’s speech on the Trent Affair,

Lithograph of Preston Brooks' 1856 attack on Sumner

including the sights of Washington, the distinguished socialites present (including other famous women), the politics discussed and derived from the experience, and the conclusions of the speech. The author makes a point to talk to the reader directly, her tone of voice and astute observations about Washington revealing that a woman, too, can not only engage in public political life but also form her own opinions on the happenings in Washington.

“A State of Constant Flux”

No letters are definitively linked to this week, but then we don’t know exactly when Dickinson wrote most of her letters. Over the next two weeks, Dickinson will pen multiple letters to Samuel Bowles, who is preparing to travel to Europe for his health. Some of these letters included poems, both old and brand new.

Recreated fascicles, Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst

Another task that occupied part of Dickinson’s time was the production of her fascicles, and we focus this week on Fascicle 12. Cristanne Miller dates its sheets from early 1861 all the way to April 1862, and probably later than that. As is clear from the widely varied dates of different sheets, Dickinson was in a state of constant flux and revision with her fascicles, and frequently edited them by taking poems out or putting poems in, editing words and adding alternate choices, and probably re-sewing them together as well.

Read this week's poems

Reflection

Madeline Killen

Believe it or not, I made it to age 18 and through an entire American public school education without reading an Emily Dickinson poem. The “Emily Dickinson” card in my mental rolodex had a couple of bullet points — recluse, apparently couldn’t stop for death — but was otherwise blank. Whether related to my Dickinson ignorance or not, I’d also never developed a particular affinity for poetry, choosing the less fair house of prose any day. I disliked that poetry so often felt like a locked chest with one little gem hidden inside; I wasn’t interested in searching for the key to a form that was so eager to resist me.

Yet somehow, as my undergraduate career comes to a close, I find myself writing a senior honors thesis on one of the most interpretation-resistant poets imaginable. In an ironic turn of events, it’s Dickinson’s seeming inaccessibility that makes me love her poetry as much as I do. She’s not inaccessible, she’s impossible; trying to decipher the core meaning of any one of her poems is a completely futile exercise, simply because there isn’t one. Rather than being infuriating, that’s liberating — Dickinson poems change depending on the angle you look at them from, like the smooth side of a seashell in the sunlight. Nowhere is this more striking than in her fascicles, where Dickinson’s choices of order and proximity cause you to lose your grasp on what you believe she’s writing about the moment that you start to feel confident about it.

Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin's composite renderings of Dickinson’s seldom-seen editing marks and word variants

When Fascicle 12 starts with “I taste a liquor never brewed -,” I see a Dickinson in love; can any phrase describe a lover struck by the “extasy” of their reciprocated feelings like “Inebriate of air –”? This leads me to a single reading of the brutal drop in mood from the fascicle’s first poem to the later “I got so I could hear his name -” — a broken heart trying to mend.

I got so I could stir the Box -
In which his letters grew
Without that forcing, in my breath -
As Staples – driven through -

Can any Dickinson reader envision anything now besides Dickinson shifting through her correspondence with Master? But this is the brilliance of Dickinson’s fascicles — “A single Screw of Flesh” depicts a tortured relationship with a “Deity” and casts the preceding poem in a different light. Could the Box in which his letters grew be a Bible? Are we watching Dickinson fall from faith or fall out of love? Both, and neither, and who knows, and what does it matter? We dwell in possibility now.

Bio: Madeline is a member of the Dartmouth class of 2018, where she completed an English honors thesis, supervised by Ivy Schweitzer, that focuses on Dickinson's Fascicle 18. An English major and an Italian minor, she took “The New Dickinson: After the Digital Turn” seminar, which inspired her thesis topic, in Winter 2017. A chapter of that thesis on the variants of "Bliss" won the award for best undergraduate essay on Dickinson from the Emily Dickinson International Society in 2018.

Sources

Overview and Biography
Cameron, Sharon. Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Ed. Cristanne Miller. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.

Dickinson, Emily. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. Ed. Ralph Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981.

Heginbotham, Eleanor Elson. “Fascicles.” An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Ed. Jane Donahue Eberwein. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1998: 108-09.

History
Hampshire Gazette, Volume 76, Issue 26. January 28, 1862.

“January 27: This Day In History.” History.com

Springfield Republican, Volume 80, Issue 4. January 25, 1862.

January 15-21, 1862: The Third Master “Letter”

Dickinson wrote and addressed, but never sent, three letters to an unnamed “Master.” The third letter—composed in 1862—echoes much of her work over the course of the year. The language of this letter highlights Dickinson’s own autonomy as a female intellect in nineteenth-century America by defying genre, logic, societal values and physics of scale.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Renée Bergland

Sources

The Third “Master Document”

Many poems Dickinson wrote during this year address what we might call “mastery”: mastery of her craft of poetry, of her time and space, as well as mastery by overwhelming feelings of love, loss, grief, power, powerlessness. Poems often involve issues of scale: the tiny and the huge, the daisy and the mountain, degrees and titles, royalty and subjects. Where there is a Master, though, there is inevitably a slave—language that suggests the political and ethical tensions underlying the Civil War.

We take up these themes in an exploration this week of the Third “Master Document,” previously known as the "Master Letter." After Dickinson’s death, three documents were found in her papers that scholars dubbed the “Master Letters.” They are grouped together because they all address an unnamed “Master,” appear to be drafts, but were never sent to a correspondent. According to R. W. Franklin, who published an edition of the three letters in 1986, they “stand near the heart of her mystery.” (Read his introduction). After studying the evolution of Dickinson’s handwriting, Franklin reconsidered previous scholars’ ordering and dating of the letters. He dates the first one, beginning “Dear Master / I am ill,” to Spring 1858. The second one, beginning “Oh – did I offend it –,” to early 1861, and the third and longest, beginning “Master / If you saw a bullet,” to summer 1861. The third document in this group has so much resonance for poems composed in 1862, we could not resist highlighting it.

In 2021, Marta Werner published an updated and expanded edition of what she calls “Dickinson's Master Hours.” In her “Historical Introduction” she aims to “unsettle” the identity of the “documents” as letters and recast them as “an early writing experiment (ca, 1858-ca.1864) … a master constellation … a cartograph or a ‘deep map’” that precedes and shapes Dickinson's experiment with the fascicles. She slightly revises Franklin's dating and adds two poems to this constellation, “Mute — thy Coronation” (F133, J151) and “A wife — at Daybreak” (F185, J461), also providing helpful timelines of events for each of the documents. An appendix examines other “Master” poems from the fascicles and offers candidates for inclusion in this category, some of which we consider in our section on Poems.

Richard Sewall, a Dickinson biographer, pronounces dramatically about the Third “Document”:

Like many a scene in one of Shakespeare’s more tightly knit tragedies, this letter may be regarded as a microcosm of the whole. Emily Dickinson’s whole life is here, the history of what could be called its failures and the reason for them and the prevision of its triumphant success and the reason for that.

For years readers have puzzled over the identity of the “Master,” and come up with different answers. (For a helpful summary, see Marianne Noble’s entry on “Master” in An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia.) In his desire for readers to experience the materiality of these letters, Franklin includes printed facsimiles stowed in a large envelope, so that we, their contemporary readers, have the dizzying experience of opening them up as if we were their recipients!

The passionate and seemingly uncensored language of these texts leads many to read them as missives from a woman scorned. In the second text, for example, Dickinson describes herself, in the third person, as virtually slayed by her feelings:

A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart — pushing aside her blood — and leaving her all faint and white […] I’ve got a cough as big as a thimble — but I don’t care for that — I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that don’t hurt me much, Her Master stabs her more.

Rather than reinforce the obsession with Dickinson’s love life, however, we focus on the writing in these extraordinary documents. For this discussion, we are indebted to the work of Renée Bergland, who has kindly shared ideas from her book in progress, provisionally titled Planetary Poetics: Emily Dickinson and Literary Relativity.

Bergland offers Adrienne Rich’s brilliant 1976 essay about Dickinson and power, “Vesuvius at Home,” as a framework. Rich rejects Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s evaluation of Dickinson as “partially cracked,” and the 20th century myth of a “fey or pathological” spinster, and imagines her “as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices. … too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will …” Rich insists:

It was a life deliberately organized on her terms. The terms she had been handed by society—Calvinist Protestantism, Romanticism, the 19th-century corseting of women’s bodies, choices, and sexuality—could spell insanity to a woman genius. What this one had to do was retranslate her own unorthodox, subversive, sometimes volcanic propensities into a dialect called metaphor: her native language.

In this vein, Bergland considers Dickinson’s use and revision of “master narratives” in the Third Master document. For example, how these texts defy genre, logic or, rather, phallologic (the language and law of the Fathers, the phallus), and the physics of scale. Are they letters if they were never sent? The second text does not even have a salutation. Are they poems (some parts of them scan) or prose poems or essays? Or a repository or catalogue of ideas, figures, and images for poetry? Or some kind of hyperobject? Tim Morton, author of The Ecological Thought (2010), defines a hyperobject as an object bursting with vitality, overruling distance, “molten” and “nonlocal”– that is, challenging the fixity of spacetime – and “interobjective,” or formed by relations between many objects.

Look at the image and read the transcript of the Third “Master Document” and you will see why this last description might be the most appropriate for it. Dickinson at her rhetorically volcanic best.

“Curious Intelligence in a Slave”

NATIONAL NEWS

This week, people all over the United States watched the events of the Civil War play out slowly. Since its inception the year before, only small skirmishes had occurred, no major battles. During the week of January 15-21, 1862, one of these skirmishes resulted in a Union victory: the Battle of Mill Springs. This battle took place on January 19 and marked the progress of the Union army into Kentucky, representing a slow but steady acceleration of the overall war. This first major Union victory eventually led Confederate Major General George Bibb Crittenden to resign in the fall of 1862. It was celebrated in the press and covered in both the Springfield Republican and Hampshire Gazette.

New York: Currier and Ives hand-colored print of the Battle of Mill Springs, 1862.

Also noteworthy was the resignation of Simon Cameron, President Lincoln’s Secretary of War, on January 15, to become the minister to Russia. Although historians determined that he was corrupt and incompetent, and annoyed the president by calling for the emancipation and arming of freed slaves way before Lincoln was ready to make this declaration, Cameron’s stated reason for leaving his position was that he did not find the work pleasant or enjoyable. The lack of major victories on either side led to a sense of restlessness and loss of faith in the war effort. On January 18, the Springfield Republican wrote that the present generation has

given up a belief in the future reign of peace, and if not also of good will among men, at least of other arbitraments than that of war for the solution of national differences.

LOCAL NEWS

The war was a large part of regional culture as well. On January 18, the Springfield Republican reported on the plan of Edmund Dwight, a wealthy businessman whose family members were leaders in education, to set up a military academy to educate and train soldiers. This would insure the army would be comprised of volunteers, rather than conscripts. The effects of the war were amply felt in Amherst. On January 14, the Hampshire Gazette described the solemn atmosphere at Amherst College:

one can but mark the effect which the call of their agonized country has wrought upon a company of generous, warm-hearted, young men.

Each edition of the Springfield Republican published updates on astronomy and science. On January 18, the paper discussed a new consensus among scientists that

throughout the whole universe there is diffused an ethereal medium which chemists cannot touch, and that the heat which we feel is communicated by motions of this body.

Another feature to note is the Republican’s publication, in a section called“Original Poetry,” of two poems by Caroline A. Howard, who we have not been able to identify further. The first, “By the Shore,” echoes the situation, if not the eroticism and fantasy, of Dickinson’s “I started Early – Took my / dog,” which we featured last week:

With the lighter burdens of life opprest
So weary in heart and mind,
With the ceaseless longings that fill my breast
With pain that is undefined,
I come with a tremulous hope of rest,
At last to thee,
O whispering sea!

The Hampshire Gazette for this week published an anonymous poem called “The Armies,” which emphasized the need for the war to progress and “march forward.” This was a popular point of view at the time.

Finally, in a section of the Republican called “Selected Miscellany,” a short article appeared titled, “Curious Intelligence in a Slave,” culled from the Free Press, Burlington, VT. The author, who lived on a cotton plantation for several years, told about an older enslaved man he met called Allan, whose job it was to weigh the baskets of cotton picked by the slaves and report the amounts every evening.

And though I subjected Allan to the severest tests I could think of to be assured of his accuracy, I never found a single occasion to doubt it.

“Master and Daisy”

According to Jay Leyda, Dickinson wrote only one letter this week, to Samuel Bowles’s wife Mary, who was in New York. She sent a rose and asked that they put it in the “small hands” of their infant son Charlie at night so he will dream of “Emily,” and when they meet, they will be “old friends.” Dickinson worried that Charlie will cause her friends to forget her and, in a barely concealed threat, says:

We shall wish he was’nt there– if you do– (L 253).

Mollie Bowles 1827-1893, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections

Dickinson’s passionate sense of attachment–to the point of violence–is fully on display in the Third Master Document. Many readers focus on the differences in scale Dickinson employs there: she addresses a distant figure she calls “Master” and refers to herself as “Daisy,” and in that diminutive guise seems to abase herself to the larger, often overpowering force.

This same term appears in several poems she wrote in the later 1850s and early 1860s. In his extensive exploration of the popular concept of "romance" that shaped Dickinson's "private mythology," Barton Levi St. Armand notes that "in the Victorian language of flowers the daisy was an emblem of innocence." Other critics argue that behind this usage is the myth of Apollo (or Helios/Sol) and Clytie, in which Clytie transforms into a daisy or sunflower as evidence of her devotion to the male force.

Clytie, George Frederic Watts, R.A., 1817-1904 Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To support this reading, Sylvia Henneberg points to three early poems: “Glowing is her Bonnet” (F106B, J 72), “‘They have not chosen me’ –he said” (F87A, J85), and “The Daisy follows soft the Sun” (F161A, J 106). But she also observes that “daisy” derives from the Old English “day’s eye,” and in this sense, “represents a force with which the male – the sun – must contend,” a force of independence and strength. In a poem dated to 1859, Dickinson herself takes a playful attitude to the trope:

In lands I never saw – they say
Immortal Alps look down -
Whose Bonnets touch the firmament -
Whose sandals touch the town;

Meek at whose everlasting feet
A myriad Daisy play -
Which, Sir, are you, and which am I -
Opon an August day? (F108A, J 124)

Read this week's poems

Reflection
Renée Bergland

August, 2015. My colleague is scarlet. He’s forty-five years old and I have always thought of him as worldly. I have never seen him blush like this. He laughs and almost stammers when he tells me that he made a very embarrassing mistake this morning, reading my book manuscript. The last part of the draft is a shaggy pile of conference papers and notes, with wild swerves in tone, but I don’t think it is terrible. Why is he so flustered?

It comes out. He has never read Dickinson’s third Master document. Finding it in the middle of the pile, he’d mistaken it for a private musing written by me. He’d thought I was on drugs when I wrote it, maybe, or delusional. He’d been shocked by my passion, my startling (and uncharacteristic) lack of prudery. Eventually, he tells me, he’d recovered enough to continue reading, and picked up on the context clues in the following discussion enough to figure out that Emily Dickinson wrote that thing. In 1861. Even so, he has trouble looking me in the face all afternoon. I have shocked my colleague to the core.

My own first encounter with this text was less disorienting: my friend Marianne Noble presented me with a clearly marked copy when she was working on an essay about Dickinson’s eroticism. Because I read the document before I knew much about Dickinson, my experience of reading Dickinson’s poetry is forever shaped by the experience of reading the text beforehand. I expect Dickinson’s work to be shameless. But my colleague’s startled reaction makes me understand what a surprising document it is. I would blush too, if I found a text like this in a friend’s files. It’s intimate, too intimate. It is artful—beautiful even—but it’s not polite. No filters, no rules, no protections. It’s naked. It’s dazzling.

In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe remarks that

Attention should be paid to Dickinson’s brilliant masking and unveiling (27).

As if we had any choice. No reader can look away, though none can really quite understand what they are reading either.

Poems and poets of the first rank remain mysterious,

Susan Howe explains (27). The third Master document breaks every rule of grammar and logic and narrative, upends all proprieties, immerses us in its passionate tide of exalted emotion, and takes us outside of language and every other system. Although they are addressed to a master, the words transform mastery into mystery. These words are shameless, honest, and dazzlingly mysterious: It’s enough to make any reader blush.

Bio: Renee Bergland is Hazel Dick Leonard Professor of English, Simmons College and Visiting Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies, Dartmouth. She says:

Like every cultural critic worth her salt, I am curious about everything. My research and writing tend to focus on nineteenth-century America, but in every piece I push against national and historical boundaries, trying to find (or make) connections and to think outside of disciplinary boxes. My first three monographs may seem to be on wildly different subjects: Native Americans, Women in Science, and Emily Dickinson. But there is a methodology to my madness. All of my work tends to span broad expanses of time, to offer slightly startling juxtapositions, to rely on close readings of both literary and historical texts, and to explicitly advocate a dialogic ethics of analysis. I keep trying to connect the past to the present.

Sources

Dickinson, Emily. The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Amherst: Amherst College Press, 1986.

Werner, Marta. Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours. Amherst: Amherst College Press, 2021. (available online from Fulcrum as an ebook)

Hampshire Gazette, 14 Jan. 1862.

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. New York: New Directions, 2007.

Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960, 45.

Rich, Adrienne. “Vesuvius at Home.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review. 5 (1, 1976).

St. Armand, Barton Levi. Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 81.

Springfield Republican, 18 Jan. 1862.

This Week in the Civil War

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January 8-14, 1862: The “Azarian School”

Previous generations regarded Dickinson as either unique and, thus, untouched by the literary trends of her time, or so ahead of her moment as to be uninfluenced by it. This week, we focus on a contemporary literary style of 1850s-60s, the “Azarian School,” which delighted in fanciful matters of the soul and ecstasy. Dickinson read and engaged with this literature—and then perhaps used it herself.

Overview

This Week in History

This Week in Biography

This Week's Poems

This Week's Reflection – Victoria Corwin

Sources

War, Death, and Influence

Previous generations regarded Dickinson either as sui generis—that is, unique and, thus, untouched by the literary trends of her time, or so ahead of her moment as to be uninfluenced by it. Current scholars, such as Cristanne Miller, have laid these views to rest, in studies like her Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012). To explore Dickinson's literary debts, we focus this week on the “Azarian School,” a term coined by the writer Henry James to describe the work of Harriet E. Prescott Spofford and Rose Terry Cooke, two writers from New England contemporary with Dickinson. The school's name derives from the title of Spofford’s novel Azarian: An Episode published in 1864. It is important at the outset of this year-long project to show how Dickinson read, absorbed and adapted the literary techniques of other writers, in this case, the prose works of New England women. We also want to frame this year, 1862, with an exploration of a literary style that influenced some of Dickinson's most incendiary poetry.

We follow the lead of David Cody’s 2010 essay, “‘When one’s soul’s at a white heat’: Dickinson and the ‘Azarian School.’” Cody argues that several well-known poems Dickinson wrote in 1862 were directly influenced by the prose works of Spofford and Cooke.

Image result — Harriet Prescott Spofford

As Cody tells it, Henry James’s review of the “school” was “scathing,” accusing Spofford

of a long list of literary crimes, including a tendency to indulge in “fine writing,” an “almost morbid love of the picturesque,” an emphasis on “clever conceits” and the “superficial picturesque” at the expense of “true dramatic exposition,” a “habitual intensity” of style, and an “unbridled fancy.”

Many readers at the time felt Spofford walked “a fine line between permissible daring and a reckless disregard of conventional morality.” In short, this style was the antithesis of the realist school, soon to come into popularity with the ascendancy of William Dean Howells to the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly.

According to Cody, the Azarian School style was characterized by intoxication and ravishment

by perfumes; sunsets; gems; diseases physical, psychological, and spiritual; fugues and symphonies; hurricanes; and panthers.

Barton Levi St. Armand argues that Spofford’s story, “The Amber Gods,” inspired Dickinson

to dare the technique of describing the moment of death from the dying person’s point of view.

The protagonists in Azarian School works are almost always heroines, and matters of the soul and ecstasy are important topics. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a big fan, being a friend and mentor of Spofford and Cooke as well as Dickinson, writing a supportive review of Spofford’s novel Azarian, and mentioning her to Dickinson in at least one letter. We don't have this letter, but we do have Dickinson's response. She said, probably answering his question about whether she had read the author:

I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me, in the Dark – so I avoided her – ( L261).

We leave it to you to decide whether Dickinson was, in fact, a secret disciple of the Azarian School.

“War As An Educator”

This week was rather uneventful, as the Civil War heated toward its boiling point, and President Abraham Lincoln began sending orders to General McClellan to take offensive action against the Confederacy. There were small victories for the Union, on January 8th at the battle of Roan’s Tan Yard under Major W. M. G. Torrence and on January 10th at the battle of Middle Creek under Col. James Garfield.

The January edition of The Atlantic Monthly included an essay on “Methods of Study in Natural History.” It prominently featured Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist credited with founding the practice of botany. Dickinson was a passionate botanist, as evidenced by the herbarium, a collection of pressed and identified local flowers and plants, she created in 1844 as a teenager.

The January edition of Harper’s magazine opened with a lengthy travel narrative titled “The Franconian Switzerland,” which discusses European geography and offers illustrations of the Castle of Goessweinstein. The second article, “History of the United States Navy,” looked back to 1775 for a historical context that would have appealed to readers during the Civil War. Excerpted and mostly anonymous poems—one simply titled “Frost”—and part of a serial novel, Orley Farm, by Anthony Trollope, were also included. A biographical essay on Mehetabel Wesley illustrates a common attitude towards women poets. The essay focused on her beauty and morals: “Nature, which seldom grants the double favor, richly endowed her both in body and mind,” and added that her poetry is full of “silly conceits.” The month’s edition ended with a two-page spread titled “Fashions for January” with illustrations of two women, one in an evening dress and the other in a walking robe.

The January 11th edition of the Springfield Republican included a column titled “War as an Educator” that observed: “the present war is doing, and is to do, a great work in the education of the American people,” and criticized the inefficacy of party antagonism and the dangers of men attracted to power. It called into question the idea that the United States is the “greatest nation on the face of the earth,” and warned of waiting to take action about incipient rebellion. On the other hand, the writer insisted that the war will make that generation of Americans “superior to any generation that America has raised since the revolution” due to rigorous training, discipline, and courage. Another column brought good news, the release of two hundred forty Union prisoners from Richmond.

LOCAL NEWS

In a time marked by violence and death, the Springfield Republican included a brief paragraph condemning the death penalty, a debate that might have influenced Dickinson in poems like “The Doomed – regard the Sunrise” (F298, J294), featured last week.

Comment on the death penalty, included in The Springfield Republican on January 11, 1862.

“The Value of a Close Friend”

Dickinson’s reading in the Springfield Republican, as well as her personal and literary relationship with its editor-in-chief, Samuel Bowles, had a deep influence on her life and writing. On around January 11, 1862, Dickinson wrote to Bowles, who was in New York, planning to sail to Europe:

Dear Friend, — Are you willing? I am so far from land. To offer you the cup, it might some Sabbath come my turn. Of wine how solemn full! … While you are sick, we—are homesick. Do you look out to-night? The moon rides like a girl through a topaz town. I don’t think we shall ever be merry again—you are ill so long. When did the dark happen? I skipped a page to-night, because I come so often, no, I might have tired you. That page is fullest, though… When you tire with pain, to know that eyes would cloud, in Amherst—might that comfort, some? (L247)

At the end of the letter, Dickinson included, “We never forget Mary,” referring to Bowles’s wife. It is clear from the letter that Dickinson was deeply concerned with Bowles’s well-being, and that his illness had taken a toll on her. This passage also contains a frequent Dickinson trope: that the skipped and blank page, or what is renounced, “is the fullest.” It appears as an image in the poem, “Going to them/her/him! Happy letter!” (F277), Dickinson composed in early January of this year and addressed to a personified letter. The poem exists in three versions with three different pronouns (depending on the recipients), and contains this line, where the speaker charges the letter:

Tell Them/Her/Him – the page I never wrote.

Samuel Bowles

What was the darkness that Dickinson refers to in her letter to Bowles? Richard Sewall, in his biography, The Life of Emily Dickinson, comments about her letters that

at times one wonders whether the recipients themselves may not at some points have been almost as puzzled as we are.

Though this is true of many of Dickinson’s letters, as we will see with the “the Third Master ‘Letter’” next week, it is especially true of her correspondence with Bowles. As Sewall points out, this correspondence was important because it punctuated a time of “extraordinary stress and inner turmoil” for Dickinson.

Bowles’s correspondence and editorship of the Springfield Republican likely provided Dickinson with a way to look outward at the world while she was turning inward during this period. What’s more, Bowles often published women writers in the pages of the Republican, including, according to Sewall, women of “spirit and brains” such as

Colette Loomis [“a pretty little aunt of mine” according to what Dickinson wrote in a letter], Lizzie Lincoln of Hinsdale, N.H., Luella Clarke, Ellen P. Champion, and Fannie Fern (Sarah Willis Parton).

As for his sickness, Bowles had traveled to Amherst in the winter of 1861 and became afflicted with “a chill and severe sciatica that sent him to Dr. Denniston’s in Northampton that fall.” As Bowles grew ill, Dickinson became increasingly aware that her worldly, literary, and affectionate friend might not be around forever.

Read this week's poems

Reflection
Victoria Corwin

I started my Dickinson studies as many do: in a high school classroom, with an old, generic anthology sprawled open to “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers -,” pressed to question how a person who never left her own room could produce such striking imagery of the outside world. My teacher fed me the mythological Dickinson, the woman in white, and I remember imagining the poet as a shy, stunted personality concerned with nature and childish dreams who talked to herself in her poetry. Years later, I regard her as one of the most advanced writers I’ve ever read.

The disconnect between what many of us read in traditional published collections and what Dickinson actually wrote intrigues me. This week’s poems deliver some of the most famous lines in her body of work that I’m sure many high school students have memorized, but memorization takes something away from the character of the lines that can only be revealed through the visual picture of the manuscript.

For example, Dickinson’s big swooping handwriting forces line breaks and enjambments that publishers ignore when printing poetry. Pick any poem from this week and notice that the words spill over to a second line. It’s especially noticeable in “After great pain, a formal / feeling comes -,” which stood out to me the most in this set, partly because I love the ending line: “First – Chill – then Stupor – then / the letting go -”

The emotion pulses through this poem; the horrible metric “Feet” that “mechanically” “go round” sound like a “formal” march to death when you read it in orderly printed lines. It sounds unstoppable, but the first time I saw the manuscript of this poem, the breaks made me hold my breath. You feel the Chill and Stupor as the dashes force you to slow down your reading, like slowly freezing. Then, on a completely different line that physically separates–

the letting go.

It’s funny, enjambment is supposed to keep poetry flowing, but in this case, the reader trips over the breaks and truly sees them as breaks, because of the disjointed subject matter and because of the striking spaces left over after the concluding words. The words sit with you, mimicking the formal feeling and ponderous tone of the poem. The breaks intensify everything.

Not to mention that Dickinson’s handwriting lends its character to each of her poems. The shape of her words colors the mood of her poems, generating beauty or solemnity or finality with all her different letter forms. For example, the word “impatient” looks absolutely beautiful in “Dare you see a Soul / at the White Heat?”—no impatient reader would rush past individual words here!

It’s a completely different experience reading the manuscripts, one that I am glad to have discovered so early in my studies. It took a few months of practice to decipher Dickinson’s handwriting, but the payoff is worth thousands of (printed) words.

Bio: Victoria Corwin is a Dartmouth class of '19 (a junior, to the uninitiated), a student of English and Classical Archaeology, a member of "The New Dickinson: After the Digital Turn" course in Fall 2017, and a member of the "White Heat" team.

Sources

Overview

Cody, David. “‘When one’s soul’s at a white heat’: Dickinson and the ‘Azarian School.’” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 19 no. 1, 2010, pp. 30-59. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/edj.0.0217

History

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 9, Issue 51. January 1862.

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vo lume 24, Issue 140. January 1862.

Springfield Republican, Volume 89, Issue 2. January 11, 1862.

Biography

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson, 1974, 281.

“The Health of Our Girls”

“Thoreau and Higginson on Health”

Reflection

Giavanna Munafo

“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

“Firmament to Fin”

“Things that are Not Things”

Dickinson & Higginson: A Preface

ReflectionIvy Schweitzer

“Resurrection” edited by Madeline Killen

“Resurrection”

“A Truly Independent People”

“A Brother Lost”

Reflection Madeline Killen

“God spared my life, and for what …”

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

“Was I the little friend —”

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Ivy Schweitzer

“Life in Washington. Through the Spectacles of a Lady”

“A State of Constant Flux”

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Madeline Killen

“Curious Intelligence in a Slave”

“Master and Daisy”

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War, Death, and Influence

“War As An Educator”

ReflectionVictoria Corwin

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Colleen Boggs

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Ivy Schweitzer

“Resurrection”
edited by Madeline Killen

Reflection
Madeline Killen

Reflection
Renée Bergland

Reflection
Victoria Corwin