Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Emily Dickinson's life has intrigued many people over the years.  Why did she withdraw from society, refusing to "cross [her] Father's ground to any House or town"?  Why did she write such strangely compelling poetry?  Who inspired her?

One popular reimagining of ED is William Luce's 1976 play The Belle of Amherst.  (The picture below is from a recent production.)

You may also see part of Jennifer Levinson's performance at this video linked below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz8girAKwJM

Others are intrigued by ED's relationship to her sister-in-law, Sue.

http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/emily-dickinson-lesbian-her-letter-to-susan-gilbert-in-june-of-1852-might-tell-us-less-than-you-think/

http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/ed/node/78

Brenda Wineapple has decided to examine ED's friendship with poet, editor, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  As she points out, often people have wondered just what ED saw in Higginson.  He has been caricatured as the man who tried to regularize ED's poetry.  After all, his poetry tended to be carefully crafted sonnets, and his most well-known poems today are translations of Petrarch, the 14th century Italian poet known for his love poems to Laura, a woman he never actually met.

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#010

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#020

Also, take a look at the cover of White Heat above.  How old does she look?  What comes to mind when you look at her?  when you look at her next to the middle-aged man with facial hair and a military uniform?


It is one of the few photographs of ED.  True.  It was taken when she was a teenager.  She began to write to TWH when she was thirty.  Without fooling around with her existing photographs (which in itself is trouble and which ED's family did do), we will always have a distorted view of ED (and therefore of her relationship to TWH) if we focus on the photographs.  I don't know what I would have placed on the cover of White Heat, but something less direct and more evocative might have been better.

However, Higginson was more than "just" a translator and magazine editor, and his relationship with ED was fairly complex.  Wineapple notes its sexual tension.  Today we might consider their relationship to be an emotional affair and even emotional infidelity as TWH was married to a chronically-ill woman at the time.  Wineapple also speculates about what he gained from ED as well as about what she gained from him.  Moreover, as Wineapple points out, ED consciously chose Higginson as her mentor, for she would have been familiar with his work for the Atlantic Monthly as well as his political activism.  This is not to say that ED was politically radical or even engaged with politics.  Some of the tension in her relationship with TWH occurs when she downplays his desire to fight in the Civil War.  (He ultimately trained African-American soldiers in South Carolina.)  She was much more interested in TWH's nature writing, and her family was relatively conservative.


Below is Frederic Edwin Church's painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, one of the many subjects of TWH's nature writing.




 However, TWH tended to examine nature closely.  A more typical topic for him would be the water lily (shown below):

As you'll note from these poems, ED also likes to examine nature closely.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20949

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180204

http://www.tcnj.edu/~carney/dickinson/poems.html#did_the_harebell



Yet Wineapple is persuasive in her readings of ED's poems with imagery relevant to the Civil War.  See these links for a few of these poems:  

Apologies for any pop-ups!

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/10548

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Portion_is_Defeat_%E2%80%94_today_%E2%80%94

Below is a picture of Glory, a 1989 film about the company that Higginson had wanted to command.

ED and TWH's friendship began in 1862 and continued through the rest of her life despite his remarriage to a much younger woman and her intriguing relationship with Judge Otis Lord.  ED & TWH's correspondence periodically slowed, but she would send him her poems, referring to herself as his "Pupil" as late as 1884, the year before her death.  Interestingly, even then, she also toyed with submitting her poems for publication when another of TWH's proteges, Helen Hunt Jackson, contacted her about submitting them to The No Name Series.  ED sent Jackson one poem, "Success is counted sweetest":
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174990

This poem would be published...anonymously.

After her death, TWH co-edited her poems with Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of ED's brother.  Todd, as it turns out, was responsible for the "regularization" of ED's poems.  TWH was more of an advocate, convincing Todd to include particular poems and writing the preface to the collected poems.  Initially, this project was successful, but 19th century readers were not quite ready for Dickinson, and Lavinia Dickinson, ED's sister and heir, soon quarreled with both Todd and TWH.  

Below is a link to a version of TWH's preface that appeared in the October 1891 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  Beneath the Victorian verbiage, he quotes freely from ED's poems and letters:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/emilyd/edletter.htm

I'll close with a picture from the garden at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.  During her lifetime, ED was also known as a gardener.