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Performance Appraisal

1/24/2025

Who was Arlo Bates?

Arlo Bates was an American author, educator and newspaperman. An 1876 graduate of Bowdoin College, Bates became the editor of the Boston Sunday Courier in 1880. Later he taught English at the MIT.

In 1889, the prospective publisher of Dickinson’s poems sent the selected poems to Bates for an appraisal. Here is some of what Bates said about his first look at Dickinson’s poetry:

“There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent.”

Like Higginson and others, though, Bates fretted about the format: “there is hardly one of them which is not marked by an extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”

Dang, those Victorians were hung up on rigid formats and convention.

Bates continued, though, with “The author was a person or power which came very near to that indefinable quality which we call genius.”

Hmm…”very near”?

I’ll continue with more of Bates’ report tomorrow.

Daddy Dearest

1/23/2025

I’ve been writing about the initial editing of Dickinson’s poetry by her first editors/publishers, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. They agreed to sort the poems in Todd’s possession into three categories:

A: Those “of most original thought” and “in the best form.”
B: Those with “striking ideas” but “with too many of her peculiarities of construction.”
C: Those considered “too obscure” or “too irregular in form.”

Of course, all of this work took place in 1889, and the first publication debuted in 1890. Todd documented the process in a 1930 article for Harper’s Magazine, and Todd’s daughter Millicent Todd Bingham also wrote about it in her 1945 book “Ancestors’ Brocades.”

In that book, Bingham also included info about her father, David Peck Todd, and his contribution to the process:

“The part played by my father, especially in seeing the poems through the press has hitherto been overlooked. For several years he gave a good deal of time to the work – to proofreading in particular. ‘We made independent lists of the ratings A, B, and C, and then compared them,’ he told me, adding that ‘we used to sit up all night to read the proof.’”

From 1881 to 1917, David Peck Todd was a professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at Amherst College. For more on his life, check HERE.

Below left: David Peck Todd and Mabel Loomis Todd; below right: Millicent Todd (later Millicent Todd Bingham).

Ch-ch-changes

1/22/2025

Emily Dickinson died in 1886, and in 1889, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson were editing her poems to publish them posthumously.

The two editors had sorted about 200 or so poems into three categories:

A: Those “of most original thought” and “in the best form.”
B: Those with “striking ideas” but “with too many of her peculiarities of construction.”
C: Those considered “too obscure” or “too irregular in form.”

In their letters to one another about the process, Higginson mentioned two poems in particular to include: “Glee! The great storm is over” and "I know some lonely house off the road” (“we must have that burglary” wrote Higginson).

I posted both of those poems yesterday, and I wondered how much editing Todd and Higginson did on them to ready them for their publication. With some of the poems, they changed words, lines and stanzas; for example in “Because I could not stop for Death,” Todd and Higginson altered lines and rhymes and even omitted an entire stanza – so with these two poems, I was curious to see what might have been changed.

To be honest, I was surprised – outside of punctuation (i.e., the use of dashes) and capitalization – how minimally the poems were altered – but changes were made.

In “Glee – The great storm is over,” Todd and Higginson did change “urge” to “ask” in the third stanza, but “ask” was an alternate word choice considered by Dickinson. In the same stanza they changed “story” to “shipwreck,” but I’m not sure if that word was considered a possibility by the poet.

In the final line – to correct the subject-verb agreement – they changed “Sea” to “waves” to keep the rhyme of “reply” with “eye” (had they stuck with “Sea,” they would have had to change “reply” to “replies”).

Most of the other changes deal with the dashes, capitalization, and other instances of subject-verb agreement – and edits like these account for any changes in ‘’I know some lonely Houses off the Road.”

Playing Favorites

1/21/2025

Three years after Emily Dickinson’s death, Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked Mabel Loomis Todd to classify the poet’s work into three categories:

“A – Not only those of most original thought, but expressed in the best form…B, those with striking ideas, but with too many of her peculiarities of construction to be used unaltered for the public, and C, those I considered too obscure or too irregular in form for public use, however brilliant and suggestive.”

Todd sorted the poems and sent them to Higginson for review.

“I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying the poems,” he wrote to Todd.

In particular, Higginson loved “Glee! The great storm is over.” Plus, in a short letter to Todd in December 1989, he wrote, “I am at work with many interruptions on those poems; have gone through B and transferred about 20 to A (we must have that burglary).”

That poem is “I know some lonely houses off the road.”

And so we come to 1890, the year the first edition of Dickinson’s poems was published (HERE) The book included 116 poems – and both of Higginson’s favorites were included.

Treasure Hunt

1/20/2025

I’ve been writing about the time when, shortly after Emily Dickinson’s death, the poet’s sister, Lavinia, visited Mabel Loomis Todd with a box full of Emily’s poems. Todd recognized immediately the box contained “a veritable treasure.”

She then organized the poems into three categories: finished poems (i.e., those Dickinson had copied into her fascicles); those in “rough form” but contained “breath-taking thoughts,” and fragments with “merely the glint of an idea.”

Todd then selected about two hundred of the poems which she deemed the best, and off she went to consult with Dickinson’s friend and mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

On November 6, 1889, Higginson visited Todd’s home to review the poems and to discuss (from his diary) “the best way of editing them.”

He had suggested that Todd sort “the best ones, and (her) own favorites” into three groups; from Todd’s journal:

“A – Not only those of most original thought, but expressed in the best form…B, those with striking ideas, but with too many of her peculiarities of construction to be used unaltered for the public, and C, those I considered too obscure or too irregular in form for public use, however brilliant and suggestive.”

In a number of days, Todd finished this task and sent the classified poems to Higginson. He wrote back to Todd:

“I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying the poems. There are many new to me which take my breath away and which also have form beyond most of those I have seen before.”

Higginson was very much worried about Dickinson’s “form” as evidenced by his preface to the 1890 publication of Dickinson’s “Poems.” I wrote about that HERE.

Higginson sorted through Todd’s selections (“rejecting some – provisionally”), and he divided the rest into three headings:

Life
Nature
Time, Death, and Eternity

He was now very excited about the project and told Todd that the plates for the book’s pages would cost $1 per page, and since some pages could contain more than one poem, the total cost would be about $230 for 250 pages with 300 poems.

“Would that satisfy Miss Lavinia?” he asked.

Categorical Logic

1/19/2025

Yesterday I posted info from Mabel Loomis Todd’s journal about Lavinia Dickinson’s visit to her home with “a veritable treasure – a box full of Emily’s poems.” At that time, Lavinia asked Mabel if she could help with getting the poems published.

Todd then turned to Dickinson’s friend and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson for help.

Below, left to right: Mabel Loomis Todd, Lavinia Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Todd realized that “all could not be taken to him” so she organized “the vast conglomerate of poems” into three categories Todd’s daughter Millicent Todd Bingham described her mother’s classifications as follows:

“Those which Emily had copied into the little ‘volumes’ were finished poems. Others, though rough in form, contained breath-taking thoughts. Still others had merely the glint of an idea, jotted down for future use.”

After categorizing the poems Todd wrote in her journal, “I selected from among the hundreds of copied poems about two hundred of the most characteristic, most different from the mediocre verse being put forth in papers and magazines. Armed with what seemed to me the most remarkable poems written within recent years, I went to Cambridge to interrogate Mr. Higginson.”

And what was Mr. Higginson’s reaction and his advice?

I’ll cover that tomorrow! Stay tuned!

Jerk Reaction

1/18/2025

Emily Dickinson died in May 1886.

In her will, which is dated 19 October 1875, Dickinson left her entire estate to her sister Lavinia: “I give devise and bequeath to my only sister Lavinia N. Dickinson all my estate, real and personal, to have and to hold the same to her and her heirs, and assigns forever.”

The precise nature of Dickinson’s “direction” to Lavinia remains unclear, though. According to Mabel Loomis Todd, Lavinia was uncertain about Dickinson’s exact “wishes” as to what to do with all of her personal effects.

Following Dickinson’s death and prior to contacting Todd – this according to Todd – Lavinia had destroyed all of Emily’s correspondence as per “Emily’s direction.”

Todd then wrote the following in her journal:

“Soon after her death her sister Lavinia came to me, as usual in late evening, actually trembling with excitement. She told me she had discovered a veritable treasure – quantities of Emily’s poems which she had had no instructions to destroy. She had already burned without examination hundreds of manuscripts, and letters to Emily, many of them from nationally known persons, thus, she believed, carrying out her sister’s partly expressed wishes, but without intelligent discrimination. Later she bitterly regretted such inordinate haste. But these poems, she told me, must be printed at once.”

This journal entry comes from Todd’s article in the March 1930 “Harper’s Monthly Magazine,” “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut.”

By the way (and this is a bit odd), in exploring leads to that article, I found this article — a totally unrelated piece by Andy Borowitz about “Emily Dickinson: Jerk of Amherst.”

Hmm…I usually find Borowitz funny. This column, while waggish, isn’t one of his best.

To access the article, click the pic at the right, or click HERE.

Unconventional Wisdom

1/15/2025

Who taught Emily Dickinson to read? Well, it was probably a combination of a bit of homeschooling by her parents and the district primary school that it seems most likely the Dickinson children attended as youngsters (built on land that had belonged to their grandfather, Samuel Dickinson).

At age ten in 1840, Dickinson entered Amherst Academy, and she stayed there through 1847. Further education included one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

More information about her schooling can be found HERE.

That link includes this line, “It seems clear that Dickinson was an eager and inventive student, and that in some ways the very laxness of the school’s structure gave her valuable freedom.”

And then there’s this, from a letter by Amherst College alum (class of 1869) Reverend Dr. E. Winchester Donald to Mabel Loomis Todd in 1890 soon after Todd’s first publication of Dickinson’s poetry:

“My Dear Mrs Todd –

I opened the ‘Poems’ this evening at ten o’clock: it is now long past midnight: I have read them, every one, and I shall read some of them again before I sleep. I own that you had roused my curiosity and, by one or two quotations, raised my expectations, but who could have imagined – never having known her, or for that matter having known her – that, all unknown to the thousands who have passed her silent house eager only not to miss a train, there was a mind and imagination that could tell them more of nature and the mysteries of life than the combined wisdom of the College.”

More from Rev. Dr. Donald’s letter tomorrow.

Above: Rev. Dr. E. Winchester Donald

CONTINUED...

Yesterday I shared a portion of Reverend Dr. E. Winchester Donald’s 1890 letter to Mabel Loomis Todd after the publication of the first book of poems by Emily Dickinson. In that letter, Donald mentioned, “there was a mind and imagination that could tell them (i.e., anyone and everyone who passed Dickinson’s home in Amherst) more of nature and the mysteries of life than the combined wisdom of the College (i.e., Amherst College).”

Later in the letter, I found one passage to be a bit surprising – his lines about the preface to the book written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s friend and mentor and Mabel Loomis Todd’s co-editor with the first edition.

Dr. Donald wrote this about Higginson’s introduction:

“Mr. Higginson figures badly, in my judgment: his preface is a bit of brutal impertinence. I shall tear it out of a copy I mean to put into the hand of a dear friend. Beside his clumsy pedantry, how gentle, pathetic, tender, and sufficient is her own ‘Prelude.’”

“Her own ‘Prelude,’” by the way, was the poem “This is my letter to the world,” the lines Todd and Higginson chose to open the book of 115 of Dickinson’s poems.

Dr. Donald finished this section of his letter by stating, “My God! What a bloodless tragedy must have been enacted behind those doors – that innocent hedge,” and he wrote these lines:

A fever in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns
Here, on its bed of pain.

I’ll share one last bit of Donald’s letter tomorrow.

Oh, if you want to read Higginson’s “Preface” yourself to see if you agree with Donald’s assessment of it, see below -- or click HERE.

CONTINUED...

Emily Dickinson died in May 1886. Four years later, at the request of the poet’s sister Lavinia, co-editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson published the first collection of Dickinson’s poems.

Before the year was out, Todd received a highly enthusiastic letter from Amherst College alum (class of 1869) Reverend Dr. E. Winchester Donald.

“I opened the ‘Poems’ this evening at ten o’clock: it is now long past midnight: I have read them, every one,” wrote Donald, “and I shall read some of them again before I sleep.”

Donald was highly critical, though, of Higginson’s preface to the book.

“I shall tear it out of a copy I mean to put into the hand of a dear friend,” he proclaimed.

Higginson had, in fact, praised Dickinson’s “flashes of wholly original and profound insight”; however, instead of applauding Dickinson’s inventiveness and originality, he stuck too safely to the side of “enforced conformity” and the “accepted ways” by noting Dickinson’s efforts were “often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame.”

Later in his letter Donald weighed in on this again: “I wonder what these poems will effect – I don’t care what is said of them by the wise or the foolish – Higginson’s screed is not promising, is it?”

Donald closed his letter by wondering if “the inexorable cost of all this illumination” was her “seclusion and ache?”

“Her ‘Calvaries of Love’ surely have brought, ere this, the grand recompense to her poor, rich, suffering, victorious soul”; he then quotes the first four lines of this poem:

If I can stop one heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one life the aching
Or cool one pain.

“I testify that she did not ‘live in vain,’” wrote Donald.

Play It Again, Ludwig

1/13/2025

Well howdy, all you Dickinson fans out there!

I’m back from my extended trip to Hawaii – extended because to get home, we re-routed through Seattle instead of LA due to the devastating fires there – and then we stayed extra time in Seattle to see my sister; however, she got sick, and we never got to see her – only conversations on the phone. BUT – that gave time to see the Museum of Glass in Tacoma and the Chihuly Gallery and Gardens in Seattle.

Anyway, I’m back now and take up once again my daily posts about the Belle of Amherst and her poetry.

Way back in December, on Beethoven’s birthday, I wrote a post where I wondered whether or not Dickinson, a pianist herself, ever played any music by Beethoven. That post is HERE.

At the time, I explored any connection between Dickinson and Beethoven, and my searches came up with responses like this, “There's no information about whether Emily Dickinson ever played Beethoven music on the piano.”

Well, on the plane out to the west coast, I began to read Millicent Todd Bingham’s 1945 book “Ancestors’ Brocades,” the story of her mother’s involvement with the first posthumous publications of Dickinson’s poetry, the poet’s “literary debut,” as Bingham’s mother Mabel Loomis Todd called it.

On page 12 of the opening chapter of that book, Bingham quoted from her mother’s journal where she kept copious notes about her involvement with the publication process – and her interactions with the poet herself. NOTE: Todd never met Dickinson face-to-face. Their interactions were kept distant, between rooms and doorways, by the reclusive poet. The only time Todd actually saw Dickinson was when the poet lay in her coffin in 1886.

Back to Todd’s journal notes; she wrote this:

“Emily’s notes to me became personal and affectionate, and although our interviews were chiefly confined to conversations between the brilliantly lighted drawing-room where I sat and the dusky hall just outside where she always remained, I grew very familiar with her voice, its vaguely surprised note dominant. I usually sang to her for an hour or more, playing afterward selections from Beethoven and Bach or Scarlatti, which she admired almost extravagantly…. Dressed always in white, her presence was like an inhabitant of some other sphere alighting temporarily on this lovely planet.”

Sooo…I still don’t know if Dickinson herself played any Beethoven on her piano, but I do know that the strains of Beethoven did waft through her home.

CONTINUED...

Back in December, on Beethoven’s birthday, December 16th, I wondered if Emily Dickinson ever played Beethoven on the piano. I responded to that earlier post yesterday (see above).

While I was looking into that Beethoven-Dickinson connection again, I found this site, from a classical music channel in Nashville; the article is entitled “It has a song–’ A Playlist Inspired by Emily Dickinson.” Some of the linked videos no longer work; however, the info about the Dickinson-inspired works is there. The link is HERE.

At the bottom of the page there is another link which takes one to an article entitled, “‘Musicians Wrestle Everywhere’: Music In The Poetry Of Emily Dickinson.” It’s about the musicality of Dickinson’s poems. That article is HERE.

Aloha, 2024 -- and Aloha, 2025!

12/31/2024

Okay, this is too funny – that is, the last thing I’ll include in this post is too funny! It made me chuckle!

I’ll begin by wishing everyone a Happy New Year (though I’ll admit that I’m a bit worried about the Year of the Snake).

Yesterday, on the eve of New Year’s Eve, I posted info related to how often Dickinson used the word “eve.” If you missed it, that post is HERE.

For today, I ran a Google-search on “Emily Dickinson and New Year’s Eve,” and I found a page of “Poems for the New Year” published by poets.org, HERE. It includes a “ list of New Year’s poems to call on after the clock strikes midnight” tonight.

Some of the poems are linked, some are not. A poem by Dickinson is included on the list – “One year ago – jots what?” – and it is not linked; therefore I’ve posted the poem in a pic below.

This same poem is included on another list, “15 Classic Poems for the New Year,” HERE, and this site adds, “The poet wrote it on the anniversary of her father's death.”

Hmm…Johnson dates the poem to 1861 while Franklin and Miller both list the poem as from 1862. Edward Dickinson, Emily’s father, died in 1874, so that little bit of trivia is incorrect.

Okay, now to that funny bit I alluded to (“to which I alluded” for all you grammarians out there):

This is the final #DickinsonDaily post until mid-January as my wife and I are off to Hawaii. Just to be funny, I ran a Google-search on “Emily Dickinson and Hawaii” to see what might pop up.

I’ve posted below the first bits of info from the top of the page that was generated.

Then, I scrolled down the page. Lo and behold, I found a link to info from my own site, HERE. LOL – take a peek and let me know if you remember the bizarre milestone the post refers to (“to which the post refers” for all you grammarians out there).