Category: Sharon Leiter

Born To Be Wild

7/22/2025

In yesterday’s post, I shared praise of Dickinson’s poetry from Thomas Wentworth Higginson as he worked with Mabel Loomis Todd to edit and prepare selected poems for publication in 1890.

“How wonderfully strong are some of these later ones! Surely they must find readers,” wrote Higginson to Todd.

However, there was one poem that gave Higginson pause.

“One poem only I dread a little to print,” he confessed.

And that poem is…

**drum roll**

“Wild nights – Wild nights!

Of course, Higginson feared the poem's sensuality would be misinterpreted or even seen as scandalous. Hmm…I’m not sure how it could be “misinterpreted” (LOL) – and, as a matter of fact, the poem did cause some initial shock and concern due to its overtly passionate and erotic tone when it was first published in 1891.

Sharon Leiter, in her Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work, included notes from Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson on Higginson’s worry “lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there.”

Leiter also included discussion on the poem, including this:

"On the physical level, the image of the speaker as a boat mooring in a harbor reverses the roles inherent in male and female anatomy. This observation has led some readers to a homoerotic interpretation. If the poem is about Dickinson’s love for another woman (the most likely candidate would be her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson), the problem is eliminated.”

However, Leiter also added this:

“Still others have read the poem in a religious light, as expressing a desire for immersion in a greater power or transcendent reality.”

Seriously? Is that the interpretation any of you landed on when you read the poem?

Anyway, before I move on tomorrow to other tidbits of Dickinsonian tales and trivia, let me relate a humorous take on all of this: I exercise every day via a daily run, and I always do so with music.

Yesterday, just after I set the stage for the “dreaded” poem Higginson questioned for publication, I went out to run, searched on Spotify for a workout playlist to listen to, and the first song to pop-up was a workout remix of “Please Me,” a song originally performed by Bruno Mars and Cardi B.

I did not recognize the song as one I’d heard before, but oh, my – the lyrics are quite spicy to say the least (and the workout remix I heard was cleaned up a bit and did not include the “F” words you’ll see if you Google the lyrics). It was funny to me that I had just posted Higginson’s concerns from over 135 years ago over a poem that by today’s standards is quite tame.

The next song to pop up during my run was “Shut Up and Drive,” a hit by Rhianna, and this was a song with which I was familiar. Again, the lyrics were quite suggestive; however, I would say that the extended automotive metaphor throughout the song was much more inspired than the unsophisticated “Please Me.”

But again – it was just another garden-variety lyric in today’s world – with a good beat.

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The Circle of Life

5/13/2025

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Yesterday I posted a link to Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work” to discuss the Foreword of the book by Gregory Orr, and when I explored “who is/was Gregory Orr,” I was surprised to find that he lives where I live, in Charlottesville, Virginia. See yesterday’s post for details, HERE.

I also looked into “who is/was Stanley Kunitz,” the person Orr quoted at the start of his Foreword:

The voice of the solitary
Who makes others less alone
~ Stanley Kunitz

It was at that time I uncovered a second surprise: Kunitz was an American poet who was twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (first in 1974 and then again in 2000), and when information popped up on my screen, I discovered that his first wife shared my last name, Asher.

So who was Elise Asher? (And are we related? LOL.)

Elise Asher was an American painter and poet. She is known for paintings on canvas and plexiglass, illustrating poems written by herself and others.

Of course, you know I ran a search to discover if Asher ever painted anything based on a Dickinson poem, and I got this: “Whether Elise Asher ever painted anything based on Emily Dickinson's poetry cannot be definitively stated.”

Some of Asher’s paintings are shown below.

Since I ran a search to explore any connection between Elise Asher and Emily Dickinson, I decided to run a search, too, on Stanley Kunitz and Emily Dickinson. I ended up getting an AI generated discussion on the two poets and their styles, but no “connection” between the two – EXCEPT – there was a link to a page at the Poetry Foundation with an essay entitled “Remembering Stanley Kunitz” (HERE), a memorial tribute written by a former student of his.

The writer said this:

“He modeled for many of us, for me at least, a poetry rooted in autobiography, but transfigured by imagination. The ‘I’ that inhabits his poems is not trapped in the personal self, but is instead Emerson’s ‘representative man.’ Or what Emily Dickinson said (she who began more poems with ‘I’ than any other word)—’when I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.’ The protagonist of his poems both him and not-him, and always searching, always questing.”

And who was this writer/former student? None other than Gregory Orr, the gentleman who penned the Foreword to Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson,” the very book I wrote about yesterday and at the start of this post.

(Suddenly I’m singing, “It’s the circle / The circle of life.”)

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First Person Singular

5/12/2025

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I can’t remember when I found the online copy (linked later in this post) of Sharon Leiter’s “Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson, A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work.” I’m sure it was related to some past Dickinson post of mine, but which one? Who knows! However, I saved the link with a note to myself to check out the opening to the Foreword of the book by Gregory Orr – who, coincidentally, is from Charlottesville, Virginia, the city where I live.

Sooo…before proceeding with today’s post, I had to search “Gregory Orr,” and I found this, HERE, and this, HERE.

From a page at the Poetry Foundation, I discovered that “After 44 years in the University of Virginia’s English department, Orr retired in 2019.”

Okay, so on with today’s post: What captured my attention in Orr’s Foreword to Leiter’s “Critical Companion” was his opening statement: “More of Emily Dickinson’s poems begin with ‘I’ than any other word.”

TBH, I’m surprised – with the various and random posts I’ve done in the past about how often Dickinson used various and random words – that I never looked into that. I’m not at home now to check exactly how many poems Dickinson wrote beginning with “I,” so I accessed the Wikipedia list of Dickinson’s poems (HERE), and the number is 143.

Of course, Orr’s Foreword is not just about the objective count of Dickinson’s poems that begin with “I,” but it really focuses on how a reader identifies with a poem’s speaker when the pronoun “I” is used.

Orr said, “Paradoxically, in the lyric this pronoun of self functions inclusively, rather than exclusively. The reader is invited to identify with the poem’s speaker for the brief, intensified moment of the poem’s unfolding,” and later he mentioned Dickinson’s letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson where she stipulated, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.”

Just FYI: I discussed that very missive in a recent post dealing with internal rhyme, HERE.

With the use of the first person singular pronoun, Orr notes that “The reader is invited to identify with the poem’s speaker for the brief, intensified moment of the poem’s unfolding,” and he continues with examples from other poets, most notably Walt Whitman:

“Although in most poems this lyric invitation is implicit, Walt Whitman states it outright and with typical confidence in the opening lines of ‘Song of Myself,’ recognizing that all the deeper emotional and spiritual transactions of his sequence derive from it:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume, you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

This invocation called to mine a site I discovered several years ago, “Whitman Alabama,” “an experiment in using documentary and poetry to reveal the threads that tie us together—as people, as states, and as a nation”:

“For two years, filmmaker Jennifer Crandall has crisscrossed this deep Southern state, inviting people to look into a camera and share a part of themselves through the words of Walt Whitman. The 19th century poet’s ‘Song of Myself’ is a quintessential reflection of our American identities.”

Check it out here (IT IS WONDERFUL), HERE.

Leiter’s “Critical Companion” is HERE – and Orr’s Foreword begins on page 6 of the 465 pages.

More on all of this tomorrow – including another odd little coincidence involving the quote from Stanley Kunitz with which Orr opens his Foreword.

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A poetry log for the Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum (above the coin-op Laundromat on Dickinson Boulevard in historic Washerst, Pennsylvania).

Born To Be Wild

The Circle of Life

First Person Singular

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