My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe

Author:Susan Howe [Howe, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Poetry
ISBN: 9780811223348
Google: WUTQAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Published: 2007-11-15T21:06:48+00:00

Wrenched from the Heights, turned aside into an ominous tract, carried from Corners; unsafe–the exiles of Wuthering Heights, “Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came,” and “My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun–” all exist in a phantom and desolate world where life is a void labor, and Death, Desire’s dream. LEAR’s world of monstrous necessity where union with Nature means living outside comfort with the forces of destruction.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote his ironic “Letter to a Young Contributor” while waiting to join the Union Army. So far he had been discouraged in his wish for a regimental appointment. On the day he received Emily Dickinson’s first letter in response to his Atlantic essay, he had earlier introduced a Miss M.A. Drake to a gathering at the Worcester Gymnasium. Miss Drake was there to put a group of girls through their paces in a wooden dumb-bell exhibition. Higginson was an ardent believer in the beneficial effect of physical exercise for women.

Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on something that needs no advocate but itself.… Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than notoriety. Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become of us if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe reasoning from either extreme.

(“Letter to A Young Contributor,” Sept. 1862)

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