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The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Knopf
August 2008
On Sale: August 12, 2008
432 pages ISBN: 1400044014 EAN: 9781400044016 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
The first book to portray one of the most remarkable
friendships in American letters, that of Emily Dickinson—
recluse, poet—and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister,
literary figure, active abolitionist. Their friendship began in 1862. The Civil War was raging.
Dickinson was thirty-one; Higginson, thirty-eight. A former
pastor at the Free Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, he
wrote often for the cultural magazine of the day, The
Atlantic Monthly—on gymnastics, women’s rights, and
slavery. His article “Letter to a Young Contributor” gave
advice to readers who wanted to write for the magazine and
offered tips on how to submit one’s work (“use black ink,
good pens, white paper”). Among the letters Higginson received in response was one
scrawled in looping, difficult handwriting. Four poems were
enclosed in a smaller envelope. He deciphered the
scribble: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse
is alive?” Higginson read the poems. The writing was unique,
uncategorizable. It was clear to him that this was “a
wholly new and original poetic genius,” and the memory of
that moment stayed with him when he wrote about it thirty
years later. Emily Dickinson’s question inaugurated one of the least
likely correspondences in American letters—between a man
who ran guns to Kansas, backed John Brown, and would soon
command the first Union regiment of black soldiers, and the
eremitic, elusive poet who cannily told him she did not
cross her “Father’s ground to any House or town.” For the next quarter century, until her death in 1886,
Dickinson sent Higginson dazzling poems, almost one hundred
of them—many of them her best. Their metrical forms were
unusual, their punctuation unpredictable, their images
elliptical, innovative, unsentimental. Poetry torn up by
the roots, Higginson later said, that “gives the sudden
transitions.” Dickinson was a genius of the faux-naïf variety, reclusive
to be sure but more savvy than one might imagine, more self-
conscious and sly, and certainly aware of her outsize
talent. “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” she
wondered. She dared, and he did. In this shimmering, revelatory work, Brenda Wineapple re-
creates the extraordinary, delicate friendship that led to
the publication of Dickinson’s poetry. And though she and
Higginson met face-to-face only twice (he had never met
anyone “who drained my nerve power so much,” he said),
their friendship reveals much about Dickinson, throwing
light onto both the darkened door of the poet’s imagination
and a corner of the noisy century that she and Colonel
Higginson shared. White Heat is about poetry, politics, and love; it is, as
well, a story of seclusion and engagement, isolation and
activism—and the way they were related—in the roiling
America of the nineteenth century.
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