In 1862, Dickinson read an article in "The Atlantic Monthly"
by a man named Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The article was titled "Letter
to a Young Contributor" and it was full of advice for struggling
writers. Its publication seemed almost like a sign. Since December,
Dickinson and Sue had been brainstorming names of prominent literary
figures whom they could approach with Dickinson's poems. Both women
believed that Dickinson needed an objective critic to assess the
literary merit of her poems. When Higginson's article appeared,
Dickinson and Sue decided that he was their man.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a man of letters and a
social reformer. He was an abolitionist, and he was in favor of
women's rights. Dickinson admired Higginson's writing. On April
15, 1862, Dickinson sent Higginson a short note along with four
of her poems. She hoped to find in him the kind of mentor or supportive critic
that Benjamin Newton had been before he died. In her letter to Higginson,
Dickinson effectively asked him to be her mentor. In his response,
Higginson was encouraging, but not effusive in his praise of her
verse. In fact, he urged her not to seek publication since her poems,
though lively and imaginative, lacked form. At times they even
seemed technically inept. Dickinson was crushed by Higginson's
response. She took to her bed for a week before responding to his
letter. Dickinson had sent the poems certain that they would overawe
Higginson, who would urge her to publish immediately. In fact,
Higginson was impressed by Dickinson's poems, but their lack of
sheen and rough-hewn structure discomfited him. He asked Dickinson
if she had ever read Whitman, whose poetry had a similar roughness
of structure.
Higginson and Dickinson continued corresponding regularly.
In later letters, and after having read more of her poetry, Higginson made
his admiration for Dickinson's talent more clear, telling her that
she was a gifted poet but should take the next couple of years
to study form and polish her verses. Higginson found Dickinson's enigmatic
and extraordinary letters sometimes baffling, sometimes annoyingly
oblique, and often enchanting. In response to his request for a
picture of her, Dickinson wrote to Higginson that she did not have
one but could offer this word portrait: "[I] am small, like the
Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur–and my eyes, like
the Sherry in the Glass, that the guest leaves."
Dickinson persistently and humbly sought out Thomas Wentworth
Higginson's advice on her poetry, yet she never heeded it. She did
not change one word of any of her poems to please him. During the
Civil War, Higginson commanded the First South Carolina Regiment,
the first black regiment in American history, and Dickinson continued
to send him letters which he read in his tents in the evening.
Their correspondence lagged for about eighteen months during the
war; Higginson was wounded, and busy with other war-related matters.
Dickinson took his silence as rejection.
In 1870, Higginson invited Dickinson to visit him in Boston
and see him read a paper at a gathering. She declined. Although
Higginson's response to Dickinson's poetry during their correspondence was
restrained and mild, after her death–and as her legend grew and grew–he
said that she had been a poet of genius, which he had believed
all along. Five years after her death, in 1891, Higginson wrote
a lengthy essay in "The Atlantic Monthly," saying: "The impression
of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my
mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after
thirty years of further knowledge; and with it came the problem
never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature
to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism." Yet Higginson did
not hesitate to criticize Dickinson's work during their correspondence.
Dickinson began to make her greatest strides in composition.
She was incorporating assonant rhyme, broken meter, and unusual
and unexpected capitalization of nouns, playing with form in an entirely
new way. Higginson characterized her seemingly random capitalization
as typical of the Old English style of "distinguishing every noun
substantive."
