Emily Dickinson's First Major Inquiry

For Lit Hub, Martha Ackmann thinks about an historic letter penned by Emily Dickinson. To essayist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had recently offered advice to would-be writers for The Atlantic, Dickinson asked: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"  More:

When Thomas Wentworth Higginson collected his mail from the Worcester, Massachusetts post office, he pulled out a letter with a curious scrawl. The letter bore no signature, but inside was a smaller envelope, and written on the card was Dickinson’s name. He read the poems, and wrote back immediately. It would be another eight years until Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily Dickinson met face-to-face, but the relationship begun with that portentous letter would change their lives.

Higginson learned quickly it was best not to offer Dickinson advice. She knew her mind better than anyone. But what he could not offer in critique, he offered in constancy, friendship, and an enduring interest in the wild terrain of her mind. When she died in 1886, he traveled to Amherst to read an Emily Brontë poem at her funeral. Later, after Dickinson’s sister found sheet upon sheet of poems tucked into a dresser drawer, she contacted him. Higginson and co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd went to work, and in 1890, Emily Dickinson’s Poems launched into the world.

Read the full piece—an excerpt from Ackmann's book, These Fevered Days (Norton)—at Lit Hub.