Sherry Chandler

From Joel Brouwer’s review, in the Washington Post, of Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat. The Friendship of Emily Dickinson And Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf):

Before reading White Heat, I thought of Higginson — if I thought of him at all — as the eminently ordinary man to whom Emily Dickinson wrote those beautiful letters. But Wineapple sensibly suggests that America’s foremost literary genius must have had some reason to seek this particular person’s approval. For one thing, as Wineapple quickly makes clear, Higginson was far from ordinary. The product of a venerable New England family, he received a predictably excellent education and made a predictably good marriage, but his adamant moral conscience made a predictable life impossible.

After Higginson led an attempt to free a captured slave held in Boston’s Court House, Thoreau praised him as “the only Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, Unitarian minister, and master of seven languages who has led a storming party against a federal bastion with a battering ram in his hands,” a distinction I imagine Higginson holds to this day. He ran guns to antislavery settlers in Kansas, helped John Brown plot his attack on Harper’s Ferry and commanded the Civil War’s first regiment of freed slaves. He threw himself with comparable vigor into the struggle for women’s rights, making plans to write an “Intellectual History of Women” and serving as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association. How could I not have known any of this?

I ask myself the same question. I always thought Higginson a little bit the villain in the drama that was Dickinson’s life.

Thanks to R. S. Gwynn for the link.

And while we’re on the subject of Miss Dickinson and feminist thought, the online Boston Review has an article I recommend by Maureen N. McLane. Entitled This Ecstatic Nation, Learning from Emily Dickinson after 9/11, the article puts forth the proposition that Dickinson was “a homegrown poet of terror.” McLane uses Dickinson as a focus to bring together cultural threads discussed by Susan Howe in My Emily Dickinson, Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream, and even Susan Sontag in her much maligned New Yorker commentary on September 24, 2001. (Three Susans. Just noticed.)

Peace

WHEN will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
         He comes to brood and sit.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918; Bartleby.com, 1999)

According to Fussell, a curtal or curtailed sonnet is a form invented by Hopkins. It cuts the “octave” to six lines and the “sestet” to 5½. It rhymes abcabc dbcdc. Fussell argues that there is nothing at all to justify calling this a sonnet, primarily because it has no real turn, no “problem” and “solution,” and because the linked rhymes in the two halves join rather than distinguish the two parts of the argument. Hopkins didn’t seem to find the form terribly attractive either. Apparently he only wrote two, two that saw publication anyway, this one and the more well-known “Pied Beauty.”