First: I’ve been following with great interest the current research of Dickinson scholar Helen Kleeb. Just recently, she uncovered a never-seen-before photograph of Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia at the home of their brother, Austin Dickinson, and his wife Susan. Kleeb had been searching through the letters and personal effects of Dickinson's friend, Adaliza “Liza” Van Deusen, when she came upon the photograph enclosed with a letter from Emily Dickinson.
Below, left to right: Susan Dickinson, Austin Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson, Emily Dickinson, Mindwell Foss, and Adaliza Van Deusen.
Below, left to right: Susan Dickinson, Austin Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson, Emily Dickinson, Mindwell Foss, and Adaliza Van Deusen.
In the letter, Dickinson had thanked her friend for attending a holiday party hosted by Austin and Susan. She wrote to Liza the following morning, “I am so tired now, that I write just as it happens, so you mustn’t expect any style. My mind came to a stand, and has since then been stationary. Ere this intelligence reaches you, I shall probably be a snail.”
She also referenced a parlor game the group had played called “Snapdragon” – where each had to pluck flaming raisins from brandy – and it almost sounded as though she were suffering from some aftereffect of imbibing a bit too much at the soirée: "I am naughty and cross this morning, and nobody loves me here.”
She also referenced a parlor game the group had played called “Snapdragon” – where each had to pluck flaming raisins from brandy – and it almost sounded as though she were suffering from some aftereffect of imbibing a bit too much at the soirée: "I am naughty and cross this morning, and nobody loves me here.”
Second: While writing a recent post about Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s tribute to Shakespeare called “At Stratford-Upon-Avon,” I tried to find a poem by Dickinson where she had used the word “momently.” Aldrich had used the word “momently” in his work, and that triggered my memory about the poem by Dickinson – but which one was it? I searched “momently” in the online Dickinson archive, and 65 entries popped up – because the results included all of her uses of the word “moment” as well. Rather than sift through all of those poems, I ran a Google search, “in which poem did Dickinson use the word momently.”
| Google’s AI overview reported back, “Emily Dickinson used ‘momently’ in her poem ‘The Soul has Bandaged moments,’ where she writes, ‘When singing that Eternity possessed / And plundered momently in every breast,’ capturing a fleeting sense of the divine with human experience….” Trouble is, “momently” is NOT used in “The Soul has Bandaged moments.” The word “moments” is used three times, but never “momently.” As a matter of fact, that entire quote, “When singing that Eternity possessed / And plundered momently in every breast,” is not even from that poem. Furthermore, the quote wasn’t even written by Dickinson. It was written by Hart Crane in his tribute to Dickinson called, “To Emily Dickinson.” Yes, Google’s AI overview was completely incorrect; however, the search not completely fruitless, for the first link beneath the overview was to my own Dickinson site – to the entry where I’d written about Crane’s poem, and I mentioned Dickinson’s “It knew no medicine,” the very poem where she had used the word “momently.” |  |
| Third: This past weekend, I believe I found a long-forgotten poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an early critic of Emily Dickinson’s work, that is, in fact, a secret tribute to Dickinson. Who was Aldrich? Well, he was a poet and long-past editor of “The Atlantic,” and when he reviewed the first publications of Dickinson’s poetry, he predicted “oblivion” for her. Among other things he wrote about the poet, he said, “It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson ... But the incoherence and formlessness of her versicles are fatal.” By coincidence, I had selected at random a handful of poems by Aldrich to explore in some of my recent posts, and the last one I picked was called “Broken Music.” When I read it, my jaw dropped, for I came to realize that it was a secret tribute to the Belle of Amherst. Dickinson finally “stopped for death” in 1886, the first and second series of her poems were first published in 1890 and 1891, and Aldrich published his poem in 1893. Everything fits chronologically; plus, all of the details in the poem except one describe Dickinson with startling precision. |  |
So there you have it, two truths and one lie. Do you know which is – to remain in Dickinsonian fashion – the white lie?
RSS Feed
