Poetry Penned to Perfection: Modern Selections from a Proud Poetess

American Poetry and the Civil War Although it ran 13 issues over two weeks in the winter of Feb.

1. The Monster (Electric Literatures Recommended Reading Book 16).
2. La física del futuro: Cómo la ciencia determinará el destino de la humanidad y nuestra vida cotidiana en el siglo XXII (Spanish Edition);
3. UBC Theses and Dissertations.

One of a handful of Sanitary Commission Fairs held in major northeastern cities, the Brooklyn and Long Island Fair is most notable for its resounding financial success: Unlike the broadsides, pamphlets, and newsletters circulated at other Sanitary Fairs, the Drum Beat was a full-fledged daily paper reporting on the day-to-day news of the Fair, as though it were a town itself, complete with original and selected articles and editorials, poetry and short fiction, humorous miscellany and illustrations, event reviews, and a daily record of notable happenings.

Richard Salter Storrs — , a well-known Congregationalist pastor and editor of the weekly magazine the New York Independent, the Drum Beat became a major feature within and beyond the Fair: For a few cents all proceeds donated one could post a letter to anyone at the Fair through this office, which would post a list of recipients and also print the list daily in the Drum Beat.

As the official published retrospective of the Fair reports: The Drum Beat got wind of these letters in one of two ways: The remaining 20 are unidentifiable in terms of gender. The vast majority of these poems, however, take as their subject the Fair itself, or people at the Fair, and so were likely culled from letters sent through the Fair Post Office from unknown, anonymous Fair-goers.

In other words, Storrs may not even have known anything about their authors. His final piece is a boastful open letter to the throngs of Fair-goers who addressed letters to him through the post office that he had yet to reply to. Clearly satirizing the kinds of letter that passed through the post office but also his own importance, Watts addresses the letter-writers in batches, by type.

He eventually turns to the amateur women poets who have written to him: I will give them the explanation in private. In regard to some of them, it is sufficient to say, that the Drum-Beat [sic] has run the subject of the Dying Hero as much as it will bear. All the sick soldiers, all the fine Christians, all the strong characters depicted in these sheets have, with one or two exceptions, been devoted to immediate death. For an extended discussion of the trope of the dying soldier, see Fahs 93— Now, the Drum Beat cannot be confined in this way to funeral marches.

The fact that we will never see all the submissions that did not make it into the paper means there can never be a definitive answer to this question; however, a closer look at material rhetoric in the Drum Beat suggests the latter explanation. The second page of the Drum Beat for February 24, Fig. In this poem, which is slightly humorous in tone, a generic sailor returns home after a long journey and finds his bride has died waiting for him.

In the context of the page of the newspaper for which this piece functions as leading text, the poem becomes even clearer as a kind of performance piece. The mediating force that is evoked in this particular printing of the poem seems to perform what each of the other texts on the page point to: What are you so busy about at night, when the other men are dreaming? Framed by this suggestive preface, the poem, which voices the perspective of a dying soldier, registers as composed by a soldier.

In doing so, the Drum Beat reshapes the origin and function of the poem, highlighting not the soldier but soldier relief, and ultimately the virtues of the female nurse, whose job was to comfort both the dying soldier and his family through the written assurance that his good death away from home, on the battlefield, was possible.

I would add that these celebrations were two-pronged, particularly in this context: Supporting both possibilities is the fact that Dickinson is known to have previously addressed poems in letters to Drum Beat editor Rev. Richard Salter Storrs, who was a long time acquaintance of the Dickinson family, though no manuscripts survive from this correspondence. Whittier, and Nathaniel P. All three poems are focused on nature sunset, flowers, seasonal change and the express a desire to articulate the ineffable. In this context the poem resonates with the ineffability of the war and the immense 69 need which the Sanitary Commission was founded to fill: The texts that surround this poem take up the very effort of absorbing and representing this pathos.

The Dickinson poem included here, while not providing the same kind of release valve for grief, does articulate the founding question of the Fair within a rich vision of beauty. Referring to the organization of goods at the Fair, Watts then relates his adventures in navigating the various tables of resplendent clothing and artwork, while his wife shops. Her poems as a group thus do not seem to have been guaranteed a position in the paper, but given place as they fit. While we do not know what Dickinson thought of these three instances of publication, we can be certain she knew about two of them whether or not she had a copy of the paper: By Dickinson had already seen her poetry a number of times in the pages of the Republican.

It is to the pages of the Republican that I now turn. One glimpse of The Republican makes me break things again - I read in it every night. Who writes those funny accidents, where railroads meet each other unexpectedly, and gentlemen in factories get their heads cut off quite informally? The author[,] too, relates them in such a sprightly way, that they are quite attractive. Vinnie was disappointed to-night, that there were not more accidents - I read the news aloud, while Vinnie was sewing. The Republican seems to us like a letter from you, and we break the seal and read it eagerly.

Josiah Gilbert Holland — and his wife Elizabeth — , which she sent in the fall of and from which the first of the two epigraphs above is taken, is not unusual in either its jocularity or 72 its intimacy, even if Dickinson and the Hollands had only met a few months before this letter was penned. Between the Dickinsons and their friends, the contents of these periodicals provided regular points of reference and exchange.

Holland, who was co-proprietor and associate editor of the Springfield Republican at the time, made the newspaper more than just an impersonal record circulated en masse to no one in particular. By the summer of , the Republican would seem like a letter from more than just Holland. As in her first letter to the Hollands, the letters and poems Dickinson sent to both Samuel Bowles and his wife Mary often respond or refer to recent news from the Republican, as though the newspaper itself formed part of their correspondence.

Even before Dickinson knew either Bowles or Holland, the Republican had served as an extension of her epistolary exchanges: No one in the Dickinson family was familiar enough with either editor at the time to have facilitated this exchange, and it is likely neither editor knew anything about Dickinson who was 22 at the time beyond what Howland might have communicated to them and what they gleaned from the witty valentine itself. Dickinson did not reply as far as we know, but it is probable that this exchange provided a conversation piece when she met Holland a year later, and informed her understanding of the paper as an extension of her epistolary exchanges.

The very positioning of the poem in the paper contributes to its secret character; it appears as one of many miscellaneous items on the page, and except for the white space around the poem, it is not particularly distinguished Fig. In fact, a cursory glance at the paper could easily mistake the small poem for an advertisement, some of which are even in verse form. In the early s, however, the epistolary aspect of the paper for Dickinson would be fundamentally altered.

Significantly, as Holland took permanent leave from his duties at the paper in , and poet and fiction writer Fidelia Hayward Cooke — took over as literary editor for the paper, the literary selections became at once more prominent and more supportive of a cultivated and ethically-oriented female poetic. Every issue included political news and editorials, scientific, religious, agricultural, and local news, original and selected stories and poetry, and usually humorous miscellanies. The weekly edition was a large cut-and-paste rural edition of the paper, containing selected articles, literature, and news from the daily edition issues of the previous week.

In fact, Holland had been for some time planning his exit. To fulfill the brunt of the 42 Circulation grew from around 11, to over 25, subscribers daily and weekly combined from to , which put it well above all other New England periodicals, excepting the cheaper Boston dailies. In his stead, Holland took over as editor-in-chief of the Republican.

But how can a man in these times? Cooke, or simply F. To Holland, at least, Cooke had always been more than just a scribbling woman. Cooke has not yet undertaken a poetical task equal to her powers, now in their fresh maturity, and the past, though bright as a performance, is brighter as a promise.

Whether Cooke and Holland were, at that time, acquainted much beyond their professional relationship of editor and contributing poet is unclear. Cooke unlike many a child of genius, looks the lady and appears the woman that she is. To a fine dark eye, a well and strongly molded face and open brow, she adds the grace of most agreeable personal manners, and the charms of happily adjusted conversational powers.

My dates are supported by the convergence of census records beginning with the U. Pomeroy managing editor , Joseph E. Hood senior editorial writer , W. This new section included two to three poems or, very rarely, one long poem, mostly by authors native to New England. It was usually printed in the top left corner of page 2, 4, or 6. Cooke was hired to do this work at her own desk, in the large editorial room of the Republican building alongside senior male editorial writers, which was highly unusual for a woman at the time.

Margaret Fuller — , for instance, who served as literary editor from at the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley, and who perhaps comes closest to Cooke in her responsibilities, worked outside of the Tribune offices. As Fuller scholar Catherine C. Bridgeman, former City Editor at the Republican ? Before , women were virtually absent from the editorial rooms of major metropolitan and provincial daily newspapers in the U. For an extensive early history of newspaper women before , see Stanton et al. Neither of these surveys mentions Cooke.

Beginning in , however, there is a notable gender shift: This trend is maintained through and then levels off to relative parity in , when poetry on the whole becomes a less distinguished feature in the paper. Wilcox Alvord — , Kate B. Bylines were also provided for literature by well-known poets and regular contributors. For pieces by unknown authors, often the New-England town or city would serve as the byline.

For reprints, the name of the original publication usually served as a byline, alongside the name of the author if particularly famous. Bylined pieces correspond roughly to all work written outside of the Republican offices. All other pieces, including all national and local news, general editorials, literary reviews, and religious articles, contained no bylines. Cook[e] in my remembrances; her notice of Mrs. Aurora Leigh, the longest and best of her poems, could never have been written without this domestic experience.

The first of these was advice to young men on the most beneficial way to choose a wife: Inspiration to a higher and purer life always comes from above a man, and female society can only elevate and purify a man when it is higher and purer than he is. In the element of purity I doubt not that women generally are superior to men, but it is very largely a negative or unconscious element, and has not the power and influence of a positive virtue.

Therefore whenever you seek female society, as agency in the elevation of your tastes, the preservation of your morals, and the improvement of your mind, seek for that which is above you…never content yourself the idea of having a common-place wife. You want one who will stimulate you, stir you up, keep you moving, joke you on your weak points, and make something of you.

The letter began somewhat acerbically: The point claimed is that domestic cares are narrowing in an eminent degree. On the contrary, they are enabling, because essentially unselfish. It bears to it the relation of the diameter to the circumference. While a man is slowly creeping round the gradual curve, her intuitions have flashed like lightening from point to point, and reached the goal before him.

She can therefore afford to dispense with the severer training that he finds so needful. Newspaper culture during this time—the first three years of the Civil War—certainly helped Cooke achieve this. As mentioned above, the Republican matched the big metropolitan dailies in delivering the earliest news by telegraph. Under Cooke, the Republican palliated the negative emotions of war-weary readers through the material positioning of topical, affectively soothing poetry in contiguous relation to frontline Civil War reports. Poetry in this particular issue is spread over three non-consecutive pages.

Additional poetry appears on page 6: Directly addressing the political and moral divisions that led to the war, each of the original poems on page 6 attempts to bring the battle lines between the North and the South into high moral relief. Ye throw the treacherous shots with dastard hand. Among that patriot band. Faster and fiercer, too, O shame of shames! Your missiles blend with the devouring flames, Till, in your frenzy suicidal grown, Ye have destroyed your own!

Habits by peaceful years endeared, Old forms and precedents revered, Pleading for slavery all. Ye spurn the Union, though her honored laws Alone have pledged us to your sinking cause, Shattering the tie whose fragile bond retains Your sable slaves in chains. Absolution for the North is mentioned in terms of a warning to the South, not in terms of a certain heaven-ordained fate: My country, fair and broad! What just curse has fallen from God, That before thy pleasant gates Anarchy, the Demon waits?

I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not Frankfort berries yield the sense Such a delicious whirl. Inebriate of air am I, 99 And debauchee of dew; - Reeling through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. As the last page of the paper, it was one of the first pages seen by readers, and especially so given that it housed the latest news telegraphed to the Republican on the progress of the war. This section was printed a third time on May 11, , in the weekly edition of the paper. In this iteration, however, the poetry section is not surrounded by war news.

The weekly edition, as a rule, was put together exclusively by Samuel Bowles on Thursdays, or, when he was away, by Josiah Holland until She may sing bass, but I do not wish to hear her. She is repulsive to me. A title is added, capitalization is conventionalized, all but two dashes are omitted, punctuation is added, the last 53 Like the Dickinson poems printed in the s, these earlier poems were submitted to the paper for publication by the friends who received them in letters, and not by Dickinson herself.

Each of these poems was printed anonymously. Though the original addressed poem is now lost, the fact that it appeared in the paper suggests that Dickinson had sent it to someone close to the Republican, the most likely candidates being Susan Dickinson or Samuel Bowles. I have also laid aside for you a letter of thanks from Clara Pease. You may expect to hear from the children by the next bulletin. I hope you are all well. However, given that she very rarely i.

This would also be an unusual action, however. Franklin notes that Dickinson used this paper from about August to August Although there is no clear evidence that Dickinson was aware of this particular interception, she was certainly aware of how 58 Dickinson also was likely aware of Fidelia Cooke as a regional woman poet connected to Bowles, Holland, and the Republican. During the s, Cooke was in close proximity to the Dickinson family. Since Cooke was so well known to the Bowles family and other friends in Springfield, as well as to the Hollands, it is quite possible that Austin and Susan Dickinson, at least, were introduced to her during one of their many visits between and And while Emily and Cooke may have never met in person, Emily took such an active, personal interest in the Republican, as well as in all news of Bowles and Holland, that it can be assumed she was well aware of the new literary editor at the paper.

Safe in their alabaster chambers, Untouched by morning, And untouched by noon, Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, Rafter of satin, and roof of stone. Light laughs the breeze In her castle above them, Babbles the bee in a stolid ear, Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadences: What sagacity perished here! Pelham Hill, June, Since no evidence exists to suggest Emily sent the poem to the Republican, the byline, as some scholars have suggested, points to the origin of the source copy: Following this trip Bowles did not return to the Republican offices, and shortly thereafter embarked on another fresh-air journey, hoping to mend his progressively ailing health.

Bowles was to be away from the office for most of the remaining months of and into January In February , organizing for a lengthy trip abroad in April, Bowles made preparations with his staff to handle the paper in his absence. If the poem was misplaced or forgotten among his papers the previous summer, it is quite possible that it resurfaced during these preparations, and was handed to Fidelia Cooke, who promptly arranged it for print.

The alternative second stanzas that Dickinson generates in her workshop with Sue, moreover, seem like successive variations on the deafness of the entombed dead to the sweeping, stirring, and thawing world above them, which operates according to an epic time rather than the seasonal change depicted in the version. Moreover, the blithe springtime nature of the version is replaced by stark elemental forces that grow less intelligent and act less of their own accord through each successive alternative.

The edits made in the course of printing the poem—which removed dashes, regularized punctuation, and inserted structural indents—leave this bleak sentiment largely intact. Assigning the final exclamation to the life beyond death allows the meaning of death and mortality to be preserved there, however mysteriously or inaccessibly. Only the poet, by her exclamation, ostensibly escapes this fate.

By hemming in this possibility with the addition of a colon, the printed poem returns sagacity, and the discernment of meaning to life beyond death, if not to death. Collinsville , entitled 63 This second poem does not have a byline. Susan also occasionally published her work in the papers. Here, in the face of perpetual trial and suffering, faith in the saving grace of God brings certain refuge. In the sestet, Spencer elaborates on the conceit: The one other original poem to appear in this issue of the Republican does not simply align with the affective movement of the first three, it also manifests the implication of this affective movement by offering Republican readers a cold, but thoroughly positive, sign of resurrection.

Pierced through its mail, the river moans, And where the brooklets kiss the stones, The dimples form and freeze; Yet with unfaltering faith we cling To the sweet promise of the spring For many a fair and winsome thing Is born of throes like these. Certainly the poem, printed on March 1, is timely and appropriate to the final days of winter in New England. That there is unusually no header indicating the status of the poetry supports the idea that the poem served to fill space allocated for advertisements. This parallel between 64 Other literary offerings in this issue, including selected poems, function primarily as entertainments or reviews of entertainments, rather than topical, affective, moral pieces, and they follow light social news and reviews, rather than war news.

This bookending indicates a complex network of influence between Dickinson and Cooke that directly involved Cooke in at least two ways: As such, each poem became much more than the sum of its parts. Under the editorial direction of Cooke, this poetry by Dickinson and others evokes a female poetic collective, one brimming in a cultivated feminine perceptivity, ethics, and high-sentimental reformist politics that reached beyond everyday domestic concerns to publically intervene in sociopolitical happenings beyond their New England towns.

Meaning of "poetess" in the English dictionary

As Dickinson told her friend, literary critic and writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, during his visit to her house some eight years later, this chill-factor was the mark of poetry: He says Emily definitely posed in those letters. Higginson was a well-respected contributor and editor for the prestigious literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly and was literary mentor to many young women writers, including Helen Hunt Jackson — , Louisa May Alcott — , Harriet Prescott Spofford — , and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps — And yet, as many critics have pointed out, Dickinson never found an eager editor in Higginson.

Did Dickinson hope for publication? If she was already being published at this time, why was Higginson needed at all? Was Higginson a way toward publication, or could he have been a way out of publication? Is possible that Dickinson failed Higginson in order to fail the standard that would make her publishable?

In fact, she makes no mention of the recent publication. If Higginson was indeed approached as a potential mentor, it is curious that Dickinson did not mention the publication, which was given such prominent place in the Republican.

Surely she had some to ask: Bowles, who received the poem presumably from Susan, passed the poem on to Cooke for publication in the Republican. If so, why does her letter to Higginson serve as the medium for this repudiation? My understanding is also informed by the recent work of Paul Crumbley and Cristanne Miller, both of whom have argued that Dickinson was uninterested in publication for much if not all of her life.

Dickinson approached Higginson to craft and sustain just the buffer she needed: In Higginson, Dickinson would find trust and predictability, largely because he was already a popular representative of literary convention and invested in the success of young, mostly women, poets under his tutelage. Dickinson could expect Higginson, whose intelligent and idealistic writings she followed closely70 and greatly admired and whose poetic ear was explicitly tuned to the prudent growth and professionalization of amateur poets, to be intrigued by her turn of phrase and moved to instruct her writing.

Approaching him as she did, she was baiting that kind of investment. Since this section was under the direction of Cooke, who was literary editor at this time, it can be assumed she wrote the piece. Look to the physical aspect of your manuscript, and prepare your page so neatly that it shall allure instead of repelling. Use good pens, black ink, nice white paper and plenty of it.

If your document be slovenly, the presumption is that its literary execution is the same, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding. If you really wish to obtain his good-will for your production, do not first tax his time for deciphering it, any more than in visiting a millionaire to solicit a loan you would begin by asking him to pay for the hire of the carriage which takes you to his door. But the most curious thing about the letter was the total absence of a signature.

It proved, however, that she had written her name on a card, and put it under the shelter of a smaller envelope enclosed in the larger; and even this name was written—as if the shy writer wished to recede as far as possible from view—in pencil, not in ink. The name was Emily Dickinson. In these initial letters to Higginson, Dickinson actively establishes seemingly different yet ultimately redundant modes of relation to Higginson: In each of these roles, Higginson functions not as liaison to the literary market or potential literary executor; rather, he functions as a valuable and reliable instrument by which Dickinson gains perspective on and situates her verse.

What is notable about her relationship with Higginson is how it does not contribute to her development as a professional author. In fact, Dickinson never actually workshops her poetry with Higginson and there is no evidence she corrected any of her poetry on his advice.

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But since this resistant correspondence with Higginson comes on the heels of, and is arguably an indirect response to, the material uptake of her poems in public modes of poetic address i. These different modes, especially in the case of poetry sent in letters, produce new contexts of address for the poetry and, as Socarides argues, new possibilities for communication As Chapter 4 explores in detail, the practice of enclosing poems with letters is quite rare for Dickinson, who, in correspondence with close friends and distant acquaintances alike, often set her poems in letters inserted or embedded in the prose or simply sent them as letters in themselves.

Does this mode support her negotiation of a particular relationship with him, or indeed, a certain ethos for her work? Except for two instances, all the poems Dickinson sent to Higginson in the first year of their correspondence take the form of individual enclosures, that is, poems copied either on separate single leaves or folded sheets of stationery. Enclosed poems, as a rule, appear alone on the sheet, without title, address, signature, other notes or markings. Though Higginson is requested to honor her trust in sending him the poems and not circulate them further, Dickinson nevertheless rests authority with him: In contrast, of the 12 poems sent in her first four letters to Higginson, while she was still actively negotiating the terms of their relationship, all but one had been copied from existing fascicle sheets, and many had been previously circulated in more incorporated forms not as enclosures and more intimate contexts of address.

Just prior to enclosing the poem in her letter to Higginson, and after sending it to Dwight and Susan, Dickinson copied it onto an unbound, unfolded sheet and also recorded it in Fascicle By the time Higginson received the poem it was in some sense already tried and true.

Moreover, whether or not these poems were written with Higginson in mind, it appears neither was sent in whole or part to anyone else. Taken together, in the context of the fifth letter August , both poems present a similar situation: In both cases, the poem itself attempts to make present the sensual experience it describes. At the same time, however, the material rhetoric of the enclosures helps to curtail any explicit personal address in the poems.

Although, as in her first letter to Higginson, these poems seem specially chosen to affect him, and though their status as untried makes this exchange seem to cultivate intimacy in ways more akin to her correspondence with close friends, she still unusually encloses the poems separately from the letter and thus deliberately preserves the distinction between poetic and epistolary address — that safe distinction which so often marks her correspondence with Higginson.

Together, then, the symbolic and material rhetoric of the enclosed poems establishes and maintains a certain balance of intimacy, staving off a potential slip one way or another. In fact, she leaves him no comfortable position as recipient of her poetry, except as her literary mentor, or perhaps more accurately, her literary crutch, a support that instead of helping her professionalize, would keep her seeming wayward.

That the rhetoric of her correspondence with Higginson precludes his assumption of such a role, in fact, suggests the opposite: Disrupting both the direct intimacy of a letter between friends and the professional acumen of an exchange between author and editor, Dickinson always kept Higginson too nervous to act on her behalf. This nervousness might seem odd coming from a well-respected male writer who had devoted a large part of his literary life to promoting new female poetic talent and who had very little to lose by presenting an edited Dickinson to the public after her death and near the end of his own life.

Without touching her, she drew from me. This design is foreign from my thoughts. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: And God called the firmament Heaven… And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas Gen.

Since Dickinson never sent this poem to anyone as far as we know, we might understand it as her private and possibly most pointed reason for dismissing such fame: But why tell Higginson this? As a dismissal of publication and fame, moreover, her smile lets Higginson off the hook as a potential, if ambivalent, agent in her literary career. Positioned as such, Higginson was inclined only to encourage her prudence with publication. I believe Dickinson intended this dynamic all along, and that she used it specifically to create a gap between herself and an encroaching literary culture, a gap her closest friends and more distant admirers were all too eager to close.

In fact, Dickinson used her correspondence with Higginson not only to defer his approbation indefinitely, but also to negotiate exemptions from the print world more broadly. As Dickinson became more widely known, and more solicitations by interested editors came her way, she turned to Higginson for help in furnishing refusals. While it may have been Susan who first suggested she contact Higginson, my contention is that Dickinson contacted him with intentions opposite to those Susan may have imagined. While I agree that Dickinson turned to Higginson for protection from the pressure of publication, I do not believe Higginson really understood his position as such, nor would he have accepted this position at face-value.

He served as a confidential yet discerning audience of one for this most private of poets, offering his professional advice about the work she sent him; his judgments strengthened her confidence in her poetry's value and bolstered her hopes for posthumous fame. These novels are to be written by eminent authors, and in each case the authorship of the work is to remain an inviolable secret When the volume of Verse is published in this series, I shall contribute to it: Surely, in the shelter of such double anonymousness as that will be, you need not shrink.

I want to see some of your verses in print. Unless you forbid me, I will send some that I have. There ought to be three or four volumes of stories first, I suppose -. In other words, not even the editor of the volume need know who the real author was. I am ver[y sorry if] I have seemed [neglectful] and I hope [to hear from] you again. You say you find great pleasure in reading my verses.

Let somebody somewhere whom you do not know have the same pleasure in reading yours. Dickinson pleaded the case to Higginson: Dear Friend, - Are you willing to tell me what is right? Jackson, of Colorado, was with me a few moments this week, and wished me to write for this. I told her I was unwilling, and she asked me why?

I said I was incapable, and she seemed not to believe me and asked me not to decide for a few days. Meantime, she would write me. She was so sweetly noble, I would regret to estrange her, and if you would be willing to give me a note saying you disapproved it, and thought me 84 This manuscript is in pieces, with some parts cut away. I am sorry to flee so often to my safest friend, but hope he permits me. Seeing her efforts wasted, Dickinson corrected Higginson: But may I tell her just the same that you dont sic prefer it?

On April 29th, , Jackson again tries to reduce the stakes of publication for Dickinson: If you will give me permission I will copy them - sending them in my own handwriting - and promise never to tell any one, not even the publishers, whose the poems are. Could you not bear this much of publicity? I wish very much you would do this - and I think you would have much amusement in seeing to whom the critics, those shrewd guessers would ascribe your verses.

L a In late October Jackson visited Dickinson again, and followed up with a final, deeply personal request for the poetry: I ask it as a personal favor to myself - Can you refuse the only thing I perhaps shall ever ask at your hands? Unlike other poetry anthologies of the time, which arranged their contents by author, and sometimes by subject, this volume includes a spare table of contents, which listed poems by title only in no apparent order.

The front and back matter are likewise structured to give the sense of masked performance. Beneath the illustration, a short verse teases players and audience alike, inciting a competitive game: Vain is the mask! Who cannot, at desire, Name every singer in the hidden choir? A thin disguise is that which veils with care The face, but lets the changeless heart lie bare!

The volume as a whole has a parlor game quality to it, inviting readers to perform the piece and guess the player. The volume concludes with an envoy, again delivered as an emblematic pairing of illustration and interpretative verse. The illustration is of a middle-aged man, dressed in a robe, sitting on a bench in a classical dramatic setting — there are ancient Greek-style masks hung up beside him, a thyrsus leans on the bench beside him, and there is a scroll at his feet.

He looks back toward the final poem with his face resting on his hand, in contemplation. The verse, a line 89 This was in fact penned by Thomas Bailey Aldrich — , one of the contributors.

1. Translation of «poetess» into 25 languages.
2. Tessies Secret/Annabelles Secret Crush?
3. POETESS - Definition and synonyms of poetess in the English dictionary.
4. Asleep in Jesus;

Still it has much interest for all literary people. Not one of all the Purple Host Who took the flag to-day, Can tell the definition, So plain, of Victory, As he defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonizing clear. The existing Dickinson copies and the Brooklyn Daily Union printing are practically identical in phrasing. This suggests at least some edits were made by Niles himself, or volume editor Guy Lathrop, not Jackson.

It also suggests that Jackson did not hide the fact that Dickinson was the author of the poem. And apparently satisfaction and ease escape both. These agonizing positions in relation to success are not, however, the only ones; the poem also allows a third position, that of the speaker or poet.

Tara Keppler (Author of Last Flight Out)

Merely observant, she articulates the scene from another vantage point, one that transcends, not success per se, but the need for success. Even those who will never know it will know that. Rather than ironizing the reach for success and imagining a way out of its souring economy, it encourages the reach and especially a competitive reach. But would Dickinson have shared this kind of professional disappointment?

Using Higginson as an intermediary, Dickinson attempts to forestall and even preclude the opportunity Jackson offers and all it portends: A common thread among these theories is the assumption that Dickinson was forced to abandon the possibility of publication because the nineteenth-century literary market was not receptive her poetics. Company often; and strangers begin to come, demanding to see the authoress who does not like it, and is porcupiny.

In this second letter, he added a personal remark: Dickinson always made clear choices when it came to communicating her poetry to others, or communicating with others through poetry. I should not want to say how highly she praised them, but to such an extent that I wish also that you could.

Thank you, Mr Niles, I am very grateful for the Mistake. In the context of this letter, the poem takes on a didactic tone. It also precedes a final stanza of verse that develops the poem as a comment on the most fulfilling way to be: We obtain by seeking. In this context, the poem is less didactic and distant, than it is creative and conspiring, as she aligns both herself and Higginson, in their respective realms his: In cultivating an amateur ethos with Higginson, she made it possible to remain just outside a relation to literary success or fame, an oblique proximity from which she would neither make an entrance on the scene nor directly reject it.

She already had that courage. Utter it then freely - write it down - stamp it - burn it in the ink! The amateur ethos that Dickinson negotiated through the material rhetoric of her letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson proved effective: That Dickinson did all of this deliberately is telling. As we saw in Chapter 3, for instance, the material rhetoric of poems enclosed with letters to Higginson, which helped to negotiate her amateur ethos, left him permanently uneasy about her readiness for publication. Dickinson addressed her poems to at least 46 people during her life around half of those known to have received letters from her , both those who knew her personally and those who did not know her at all.

I argue that Dickinson was invested in realizing deep interpersonal affectivity through poetic address, and that this was only possible in correspondence with a specific, personal—not unspecific, public—addressee. Her binding of poetry into fascicle booklets, for instance, has been read as either as a book-making precursor or alternative to print culture publication. I do not believe the fascicles were ever intended to be shared with others, let alone a public. The specific, personal poetic address made possible by epistolary modes of circulating her poetry is precisely what made this mode preferable for Dickinson.

Key to the familiar nature of such letters is this specificity. These letters, despite their multiple addressees or addressors, are nevertheless personally and exclusively addressed. In other words, the familiar letter does not, in its exposure to non-addressees, inaugurate new addressees.

The mode for the remaining 61 cannot be known for certain; though documented as sent, neither the holograph nor manuscript transcript of these letters and their poems exist. One could hazard an educated guess for most of them, however. In the first mode, in which Dickinson addresses a poem as a letter, the poem itself is explicitly and unambiguously addressed to the recipient. In this case, the poetic and epistolary address are one and the same.

In the second mode, in which Dickinson sets a poem in the body of a letter, the poetic and epistolary address become implicated in each other, and not entirely collapsed. The third mode, in which Dickinson encloses a poem with a separately addressed letter, contrasts with the latter two in terms of how they directly link poetic and epistolary address. A letter to Henry V. Emmons from suggests she lent him some poems on the condition of his returning them promptly, which he evidently did not: See also L , August 18 That she often sent the same poems in whole or part to two or more people in different modes, furthermore, provides fruitful ground for comparing differences between or within modes and for highlighting patterns between mode type and recipient.

In other words, each poem addressed to a specific recipient either sent as, set in, or enclosed with a letter forms a unique instance of poetic address and takes on a unique identity in that context. Please send me gems again - I have a flower. In a letter to Higginson, Dickinson, referring to Newton, wrote: The lack of enclosed poems associated with extent letters before , and the suggestion that she shared record copies of her poems with Emmons and Newton, indicates any poems she may have sent were to very close friends, meant to be reviewed and returned as her record copies , and by extension, neither directly nor indirectly addressed to them.

Poems Sent as Letters Over half of the poems that Dickinson is known to have addressed to correspondents were sent as letters. Unlike poems set in or enclosed with letters, this mode relies on and actively constructs an explicit intimacy between Dickinson and her recipient. As might be expected in correspondence to very familiar addressees, the epistolary address in this case is generally informal or understated, and it is often collapsed with the poetic address or merely implied.

Like this and other early comic valentines, the poems Dickinson sent as letters are peculiarly enthymematic in that they become meaningful and cultivate deeper connection with a particular, knowing recipient. Enthymemes are typically understood as syllogisms that omit certain premises already understood or assumed by the audience, and thus enthymemes rely on the audience to fill out their logic and can be quite powerful for that reason.

In other words, it uses emotionally-charged, exclusionary language to nudge the addressee toward one side of the argument, before the punch. Enthymematic in function, the poems that Dickinson addressed as letters and also, as will become clear, the poems she set in letters, work toward either recapitulating or building this common ground of affectivity. The key variable for Dickinson in this process is the relation she draws between her poetic and epistolary address: The pull and push of Dickinson's relationship with Higginson are occasioned in large part by how those modes functioned to establish and harness and then disrupt common ground.

While the scope of this chapter prevents me from detailing these exchanges, without exception they involved or referred to a shared physical experience. By , his friendship with Emily Dickinson was established enough that she began a correspondence that included letters and addressed poetry. The addressed poem that was intercepted by literary editor Fidelia Cooke in represents one of 26 poems addressed as letters to Bowles. In the summer of , for instance, Dickinson sent the following note to Bowles alone on a folded sheet of stationery: Many more were passed on to Bowles via Susan.

Though an optician ADEL: With a little stretch of the imagination, it might be the case that Dickinson was having trouble with her eyes as early as this note was sent and that Bowles was aware of that, which would add to the enthymematic force of this particular poem. Since the small note would make very short work to rewrite, even on the next blank leaf, and since she would often rewrite her letters as surviving drafts make clear , it is unusual she did not choose to in this particular case. For instance, in a letter from Bowles to Dickinson brother, Austin, he writes as apostscript along the edge of the sheet: How does she do this summer!

In both the Higginson and the Bowles cases, Dickinson draws attention to her scene of composition and yet in very different ways: The first half of this poem was sent as a letter to Susan Fig. Except the smaller size No Lives are Round - These - hurry to a Sphere - And show - and end - The Larger - slower grow - And later hang - The Summers of Hesperides A total of eight known addressed poems have their record copy among the 21 poems included in this fascicle: Both of the Higginson poems are variants of those sent previously to Susan.

In fact, fold lines on the manuscript sheet show it was folded in thirds with two triangular slits cut along the bottom fold, presumably to secure it horizontally to something, such as the side of a woven basket. This concrete material referent does not necessarily determine the meaning of the poem in general, for Dickinson or for her readers, but it does provide an occasion for the poem—or at least the part of the poem she addressed—and allows the poem to function in a particular way for Susan.

Dickinson arranged this gift by hand and very likely hand-delivered it to Susan. But what, in this context, would that have been? Primed to interpret the referents of the poem in literal terms, given the basket of apples, Susan may have found the material poem itself as the next most readily apparent referent. In rhetorically associating a longer and slower poetic meter with the image of a long summer in Hesperides, Dickinson is positioning the poem itself as the beating life of that place, one of its golden apples.

This would be the last Dickinson poem to be smuggled into the newspaper during her lifetime. If I still entreat you to teach me, are you much displeased? Haste can make you slipshod, but it can never make you graceful. If one imagines Susan unpacking the gift of apples in the kitchen with her toddling son and perhaps giving him one of those apples to chew on, that blonde-haired son, the sole progeny of the entire Dickinson family at the time, suddenly supplies another literal referent for the golden apple described by the poem.

Coincidentally, the manuscript itself is literally marked up by the child: In sending poems as letters to Susan, Dickinson relied on and reinvigorated a specific interpersonal affection already known between them. The collapse of epistolary and poetic address that characterizes this mode allows her poems to affectively charge the relation between her and her addressee, and in doing so articulate and preserve an interpersonal connection much more directly and intensively than a letter alone could do.

The other two modes poems set in a letter and poems enclosed with a letter demonstrate how the relative distance and distinction of epistolary address from poetic address within the letter context works to negotiate or modify the intimacy between Dickinson and her addressees, for different ends.

While, in numbers, there are only half as many set poems as there are poems that served as letters, set poems were sent to a much more diverse audience, and as such can be said to be her primary or default mode for circulating her poems across her correspondence. This mode thus defines a diverse group of recipients, comprising both those personally known to Dickinson and those whom she never met in person. Like poems sent as letters, poems set in letters also function enthymematically; however, they are couched in broader and gentler terms of address that serve to set the tone, and even woo the addressee before the poems enact their affective punch.

Thus, this mode could be used to reach people with less existing affective connection to Dickinson, or to offer condolence less intensely or more approachably, or to develop new terms of affective engagement with those to whom she was deeply connected. The versatility of this mode extends beyond its flexible reach to how poems were incorporated within the letter. Dickinson set poems within letters in a variety of ways. For instance, she might include one or more poems in their entirety, as single stanzas, or as excerpted lines at various places within the prose of an addressed and signed letter.

As Mitchell has demonstrated, however, conscious if subtle genre markers do exist in the letters: For Socarides, poems that appear embedded in the prose of a letter draw out new possibilities for communication and intimacy for Dickinson: What is at stake here, however, is not genre, per se; it is address. This addressed poem, as Socarides points out, represents the first time Dickinson embeds a poem in an epistolary address and has important implications for her practice as a whole: Though setting poems in letters was not a fashionable convention in mid-nineteenth-century U.

There is only one known example, for instance, in which Dickinson inserts an entire poem that is not her own within a letter. In this early letter ca. It is also possible that Dickinson recited the poem at a gathering at which Mary was present. While Dickinson regularly set poems within letters for the purpose of condolence throughout her life, this instance of setting an entire poem that is not her own within a letter is very unusual. In other cases when Dickinson set poems by others within her letters, unlike the above example, she embeds only excerpts between or inserts them following prose sections of her letter, using the poems to amplify, extend, or prepare the way for other sentiments or ideas that may form the basis of the exchange.

Together, within the context of the letter, these poems work to draw Dickinson and her recipient, Benjamin Kimball, into greater sympathy as mutual friends of the recently deceased Judge Otis P. Lord — , while revising the ways in which Lord might be remembered. The letter in full reads: On my way to my sleep, last night, I paused at the Portrait - Had I not loved it, I had feared it, the Face had such ascension. Go thy great way! Thank you for the nobleness, and for the earnest Note - but all are friends, upon a Spar. But if, around my place of sleep, The friends I love should come to weep, They might not haste to go.

Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom Should keep them lingering by my tomb. These to their softened hearts should bear The thought of what has been, And speak of one who cannot share The gladness of the scene; Whose part, in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills, Is—that his grave is green; And deeply would their hearts rejoice To hear again his living voice. And yet quoted here, this scene and its particular vision of life after death are also problematized.

For Dickinson in this is a old disbelief: If it were not for the headstone, the mourners would not know where to find the dead, in order to gather in their memory. In the years before Lord died, the possibility of marriage between the two was considered, at least informally. The powerless friend to whom Dickinson refers is thus both Lord and herself facing the death of Lord and the reciprocal gesturing of their correspondence. Dickinson had once before felt this same powerlessness. A Whiteness of Bone. Penguin Books Indian Ltd. Mansour Dina et al. Identity, Difference and Belonging.

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