Today in my American studies class, we were asked to read an article by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, about Emily Dickinson. Usually when we have literature reading, we have reader's responses due so that we can talk about them the next day in class, or else just to get our literature minds active. I always have trouble with the class discussions, so even though I don't have to write responses to this article, I'm going to blog about it so that tomorrow in class I'll have some premeditated opinions and maybe something profound to say.
Curiously, when Higginson (apparently) asked Dickinson her how old she was, she replied "I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir" and proceeded to attempt to describe herself instead of simply giving an age in answer to his question. She greatly respects his opinion, though, and (in comparison to Higginson, perhaps) "I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I read your chapters in the Atlantic, and experienced honor for you. I was sure you would not reject a reject a confiding question." In my opinion, the poems that Dickinson sent with her letters to Higginson were some of her better poems--perhaps she thought so as well, and wanted Higginson to see only the poems she was proud of, that he might judge her by her best work and not her average poems.
Higginson, apparently, was fairly perceptive to the reasons Dickinson wrote the way she did--or else, just to the peculiarities of her writing. He noted, after the inclusion of "Your riches taught me poverty" in his article, that "The slightest change in the order of word--thus, 'While yet at school, a girl' --would have given her a rhyme [. . .] she was intent upon her thought, and it would not have satisfied her to make the change." This seems, to me, to reflect upon the fact that Dickinson was reluctant to share her work with the public--after her death, she wished for her poems to be burned. It is not surprising, therefore, that she would not reword her poetry to make a rhyme to please others. She wrote, after all, for herself and it was more pleasing for herself that she wrote in her own style.
In reading some of the letters from Dickinson that Higginson published as part of his article, it dawned on me that Dickinson is a true poet. Even in her prose (that is, her letters, and later her conversation with Higginson in person), she was poetic. "The true are not ashamed," she said in reference to the lack of "dishonor" she felt in Higginson's criticism of her poetry. In regard to her preference of anonymity as opposed to being a published poet, she said "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her. . . My barefoot rank is better." Even more poetic is her description of herself, in lieu of a photograph, which, since Higginson had never met her at that point in time, needed to paint a picture in his mind of what she looked like, and was thus filled with imagery, "[I] am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves."
Repeatedly, Dickinson refers to Higginson as the surgeon of her work. In requesting that he remain honest, no matter how harsh his criticism of her work, she said "Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, sir, and fracture within is more critical." This, to me ,seems a fitting metaphor for how strongly she values Higginson's opinion and improvements to her poetry--"surgery", she originally called it. Later, she begged him to teach her, saying that she would "never reject [his] knife."
"War feels to me an oblique place," Dickinson wrote Higginson. "Love is its own rescue."
Higginson hit the nail on the head, in his description of the themes in Dickinson's poetry, or the aimed effect. "She almost always grasped whatever she sought, but with some fracture of grammar and dictionary on the way. Often, too, she was obscure and sometimes inscrutable; and though obscurity is sometimes, in Coleridge's phrase, a compliment to the reader, yet it is never safe to press this compliment too hard," he wrote in his article. I could not agree more. Mostly I thoroughly enjoy reading Dickinson's poems--they're short, sweet, and to the point, usually (my favorite is "A word is dead"), but other times it takes hours of thought and discussion to achieve the right perception of her meaning.
"A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend." So Dickinson said at the beginning of a letter. I think she means that exchanging letters, primarily letters to and from Higginson because they had not yet met in person, feels like a soul-to-soul conversation, as opposed to the face-to-face interaction that was more common in her time than in ours.
"Of our greatest acts we are ignorant."
In a conversation, Higginson recalled several profound statements that Dickinson made, seemingly out of the blue: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" "Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it."
In reading this article by Higginson, who through years of communication by letter and by a few actual meetings knew Dickinson personally, that I have also come to know her better. She seems more light-hearted than some of her poetry would lead me to believe, and I feel like perhaps she wrote short poetry in the hopes that it would be more light-hearted and accessible. She knew she wasn't perfect--that much was clear from the letters Higginson showed us. Perhaps she wanted her poetry, imperfection and all, to be understood by the few people with whom she shared it.
