Category: Thomas Johnson

From Rags to Riches

6/16/2025

A couple of days ago I shared Dickinson’s poem “A Bird came down the Walk.” Dickinson scholar and editor R. W. Franklin said about this poem, “Three (one lost), variant, about summer 1862. The lost manuscript was sent to T. W. Higginson, probably in the fifth letter to him, written about August 1862. Higginson listed it for Mabel Todd on 13 May 1891 as one of the poems he had received (Bingham, AB, 129) and he published it in the October 1891 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.”

Dickinson did, indeed, enclose the poem in a letter to Higginson, but there is confusion as to which one. Franklin (above) said, “probably…the fifth,” Higginson said “the second,” but even scholar/editor Thomas Johnson refutes that:

“Higginson says in his Atlantic Monthly article introducing the letter…that the enclosed poems were two: "Your riches taught me poverty," and "A bird came down the walk." But the evidence after study of the folds in the letters and poems suggest that he was in error."

Higginson made his claim – about receiving the letter with the second letter – in an October 1891 article in “The Atlantic” entitled, “Emily Dickinson’s Letter,” and in that edition, he also printed “A Bird came down the Walk.” He also printed “Your riches taught me poverty,” and with that poem he made a very telling observation about the final line of the poem:

“Here was already manifest that defiance of form, never through carelessness, and never precisely from whim, which so marked her. The slightest change in the order of words — thus, 'While yet at school, a girl' — would have given her a rhyme for this last line; but no; she was intent upon her thought, and it would not have satisfied her to make the change.”

The poem, sent to her sister-in-law Susan in the form of a letter, is described as “an evocation of what Sue meant to the poet.” Paula Bennett, author of Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet as well other books on the poet, wrote that this was “the only poem in which Dickinson ever felt totally free to express in direct and undisguised form the love she felt for this extraordinary and very much underrated woman.”

For more information, click HERE.

Return To The Fold

6/13/2025

“You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em”
~Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler”

When last we met (yesterday), I shared “A Bird came down the Walk,” and noted that Dickinson scholar and editor R. W. Franklin reported the following: “Three (one lost), variant, about summer 1862. The lost manuscript was sent to T. W. Higginson, probably in the fifth letter to him, written about August 1862. Higginson listed it for Mabel Todd on 13 May 1891 as one of the poems he had received (Bingham, AB, 129) and he published it in the October 1891 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.”

Sooo…I checked page 129 of Millicent Todd Bingham’s book “Ancestors’ Brocades” – and actually on page 128 she wrote, “The selection of poems for the second volume (of Dickinson’s work) was nearing completion. Meanwhile, Mr. Higginson was again going over those that Emily had sent to him. He mailed a list of them to my mother.”

Higginson’s letter, transcribed at the bottom of page 128 and top of 129 said the following:

Dear Friend,

I send the list. Let me know which you want copied for you and I’ll send them. All marked (with a check mark) should go in. One verse I copy for the pleasure of copying it, though you may have it.”

Ever cordially,
T. W. H.

The letter was sent May 13, 1891, and the poem he copied was the following:

Lay this Laurel on the One
Too intrinsic for Renown –
Laurel – vail your deathless Tree –
Him you chasten, that is He!

Higginson also included the list of poems he had received from Dickinson over the years, and it did include “A Bird came down the Walk.”

Back to Franklin’s comments. He said, “The lost manuscript was sent to T. W. Higginson, probably in the fifth letter to him, written about August 1862.”

However, when one checks Thomas Johnson’s notes on that letter, he stated the following:

“With this letter ED enclosed two poems: "Before I got my Eye put out,' and 'I cannot dance upon my Toes.'"

He does not mention “A Bird came down the Walk” at all – even as a possibility as a lost manuscript.

Furthermore, Cristanne Miller does not include “A Bird came down the Walk” in her “Index of Poems” sent with letters (or poems sent as letters) in her volume “The Letters of Emily Dickinson.” However, that poem does indeed show up on Higginson’s “List of Poems” that he had received from Dickinson.

Back to Franklin: He said that Higginson had published the poem in the October 1891 edition of The Atlantic – so I went to take a look.

Sure enough, the poem is there, and it is part of an article by Higginson – written five years after the poet's death – entitled “The Letters of Emily Dickinson.” In the article, he indicates that the poem was included with the SECOND letter he’d received from Dickinson, not the FIFTH (as Franklin stated).

However, when you look up that letter – the second one – and Johnson has this to say:

“Higginson says in his Atlantic Monthly article introducing the letter…that the enclosed poems were two: 'Your riches taught me poverty,' and 'A bird came down the walk.' But the evidence after study of the folds in the letters and poems suggest that he was in error. The enclosures seem to have been: 'There came a Day at Summer's full,' 'Of all the Sounds despatched abroad,' and 'South Winds jostle them.'"

Hence my inclusion of the lines from Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler.” Maybe the poem was included with that fifth letter after all.

We may never know; but I do wonder why Miller didn’t include it in her book of Dickinson’s letters – even with a footnote explaining the confusion over which letter it was included with.

Perhaps one day soon I’ll email her to ask.

Setting the Record Straight

5/24/2025

Yesterday I wrote about a perplexing comment made by Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson about an underscore Dickinson added between the stanzas of a poem the poet sent to her friend Susan Gilbert when she was in New Hampshire visiting relatives:

“Poems (1896), 200, titled "Eternity"; LL 78-79. With Dickinson drawing a line between stanzas (significant for interpreting the identities of stanzas identified with ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’).”

I really have no idea what that line would have to do with interpreting “the identities of stanzas” with “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.”

Anyway, in the latter part of his comments, Johnson also said the following:

“Sent to ‘Susie’ when she was visiting in Manchester, New Hampshire, who made two transcriptions, indicating perhaps that Sue made copies of Emily's work to send out. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, wrote that it was ‘The first verse Aunt Emily sent to Mamma - ‘ and says that it was ‘sent to Susan in 1848 when she was but eighteen. . . .’ but it was written five years later. This is the kind of misdating that Rebecca Patterson critiques as part of an effort to mask Emily's adult desire for Sue (The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, especially the first and fourth chapters).”

My post two days ago (HERE) was about efforts made by Mabel Lewis Todd (and/or Austin Dickinson) to “erase” Susan’s name from Dickinson’s poetry, letters – and reputation – and this comment indicated other efforts, above and beyond those of Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson, to misdate documents, mislead the public, and mask what might have been going on.

The person named in Jonson’s comment, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, was Susan Dickinson’s daughter, Emily’s niece.

The “campaign” to cover-up Dickinson’s desires for Sue (and for others?) is depicted in the 2018 romantic comedy “Wild Nights with Emily” (with Molly Shannon as Dickinson) – I remember a scene showing Mabel Loomis Todd (played by Amy Seimetz) in front of an audience so that she could “set the record straight.” (LOL – pun intended).

The film ends with titles explaining that recent technology revealed Mabel's erasures and that the love letters were indeed written to Susan.

All of this was front and center in the 1998 book Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. However, you’ll notice in Johnson’s comment with which I opened this post, he mentioned Rebecca Patterson’s book, THe Riddle of Emily Dickinson – which proposed that Dickinson's great love was not a man but a woman, Catherine Scott Turner Anthon, the “Katie” of Dickinson's letters and poems – and that book was published in 1951.

More on this tomorrow – or soon. ;-)

Between the Lines

5/23/2025

A couple of days ago I wrote about Emily Dickinson’s letter/poem to Susan Gilbert when she (Susan) was visiting relatives in New Hampshire. The poem, “On this wondrous sea,” includes an appeal at the top of the page: “Write! Comrade, Write!”

Hmm…I s’pose Susan was being a bit stingy with any return correspondence to Emily.

Anyway, in discussing this letter/poem, Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson noted the following:

“Poems (1896), 200, titled "Eternity"; LL 78-79. With Dickinson drawing a line between stanzas (significant for interpreting the identities of stanzas identified with ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’).”

I mention this because – to be honest – I’m perplexed. What in the world does he mean by this, that the line is “significant for interpreting the identities of stanzas identified with ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”?

I wrote about “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” at the end of March, HERE.

However, I’m not sure why an underline on the written page of “On this wondrous sea” would be “significant” for interpreting the stanzas of another poem.

“On this wondrous sea” was the first poem Dickinson sent to Sue via a letter (that we know of). She sent it in 1853 when both were twenty-three years old. “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” was written some six or seven years later.

Johnson’s notes on “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” can be found HERE.

R. W. Franklin’s notes on this poem in his Variorum Edition of Dickinson’s poetry can be found HERE.

Is there anything in either of these two documents that you see that could relate to Thomas’ comment about the line between the stanzas in “On this wondrous sea”?

More on Johnson’s comments on “On this wondrous sea” tomorrow.

So Sue Me!

5/22/2025

In March 1853, Austin Dickinson had traveled to Boston, and Emily Dickinson’s friend Susan Gilbert was in New Hampshire visiting relatives. Before returning to Amherst, Susan stopped by Boston to see Austin, and it was then and there that Austin proposed to her.

Yesterday (HERE) I mentioned a letter dated March 23, 1853, that Emily Dickinson wrote to her brother to congratulate him on his engagement.

That letter (HERE) opens, “Oh my dear ‘Oliver,’ how chipper you must be since any of us have seen you?”and in her book The Letters of Emily Dickinson, editor Cristanne Miller noted, “‘Oliver’ may allude to the young lover in ‘As You Like It,’ suggesting ED’s part as a go-between in Austin and Susan’s courtship” (and I spoke about that yesterday too).

Interestingly, five days earlier, before Austin Dickinson proposed to Susan at the Revere House Hotel in Boston, Emily Dickinson sent another letter to her brother, HERE, and Dickinson scholar and editor of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Johnson, made this note, “An attempt has been made at some time to erase the words ‘and Sue’ in the first paragraph.” The full sentence with the erasure reads, “Your letters are very funny indeed - about the only jokes we have, now you and Sue are gone, and I hope you will send us one as often as you can.”

Who was it that tried to erase “Sue”?

Most current research points the finger at Mabel Loomis Todd, the first editor of Dickinson’s posthumous publication of Poems.

From 1882 until Austin's death in 1895, Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson had an extramarital affair, and most believe that Todd made efforts to suppress Susan Gilbert Dickinson's name from Dickinson's letters and poetry, particularly in the context of romantic or passionate references.

Todd was involved with the affair and in conflict with Austin’s wife, Susan, at the time of her editing work of Dickinson’s poetry and letters. However, some believe that Austin, too, might have had a hand in some of the erasures as well.

Some scholars argue that Todd's editing aimed to create a specific image of Dickinson as a solitary, perhaps asexual poet, rather than a woman with intimate, potentially romantic relationships with another woman (which certainly wasn't considered marketable in the 1890s).

Of course, that might be so – but why an erasure like the one in a sentence to her brother that reads, “Your letters are very funny indeed - about the only jokes we have, now you and Sue are gone"? An erasure like this sounds a bit more bitter and vengeful.

What do you think?

Called Back

5/14/2025

Tomorrow, May 15, 2025, marks the 139th anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death. She died on May 15, 1886 at the age of 55.

She wrote her final letter to her cousins Frances and Louise Norcross a few days before her death, and it consisted of just two words, “Called back.”

Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson wrote this about her 1886 letter (and mentions an earlier letter from 1885):

“It was in a letter written to the Norcrosses in January 1885 (no. 962) that ED spoke of having read Hugh Conway's Called Back. During the second week in May (1886) she probably came to know that she had but a short time to live. This letter was evidently her last. On the thirteenth she went into a coma. Vinnie sent for Austin and for Dr. Bigelow, who remained with her much of the day. She never regained consciousness, and died about six in the evening, Saturday, 15 May 1886.”

Concerning the novel she mentioned in her 1885 letter, Wikipedia provides this information: "Called Back is an 1883 mystery/romance novel written by Englishman Frederick John Fargus under the pseudonym Hugh Conway."

In the letter to her cousins in 1885, Dickinson said, “Loo asked ‘what books’ we were wooing now - watching like a vulture for Walter Cross's life of his wife. A friend sent me Called Back,. It is a haunting story, and as loved Mr. Bowles used to say, ‘greatly impressive to me.’”

LOL – when I read that letter in full (as well as many others), I wondered if Dickinson had (undiagnosed) ADD. The letter opens with this, “Had we less to say to those we love, perhaps we should say it oftener, but the attempt comes, then the inundation, then it is all over, as is said of the dead.”

Then she moves to the discussion of the books, to information about an acquaintance who has died, to some information about someone’s move to Cambridge (with a religious reference), and then on to a call…to work? (i.e. housework?) to end the day?

She then closes the letter with another Dickinsonian pearl of wisdom: “That we are permanent temporarily, it is warm to know, though we know no more."

The complete letter from 1885 is HERE. Johnson’s notes on the 1885 letter are HERE.

Of course, her 1886 letter to her cousins consisted of just the two words, Called Back, taken from the title of Conway’s novel, and the two words also appear on the poet’s grave stone.

These Are Her Letters to the World

3/18/2025

Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell have edited a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letter. The New Yorker published an article about their book this week, HERE.

“A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,” wrote Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869 – and in her lifetime she wrote hundreds of letters.

However, following Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia destroyed much of Emily’s correspondences as per “Emily’s direction.”

In 1930, Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poems, wrote this in an article about “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut” for Harper’s Monthly Magazine:

“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.”

In 1958, Thomas H. Johnson published an edition of Dickinson’s letters where, in his introduction, he stated that – due to the poet’s reclusiveness – Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it.”

Fast forward to the New Yorker’s article. Its writer Kamran Javadizadeh points out that “Writing letters could…be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.”

In addition, “The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters.”

One topic not covered in the article is Dickinson’s “Master Letters,” a set of three emotionally laden notes addressed to a figure whom Dickinson calls “Master,” but never names.

Are the Master letters included in the updated edition “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”?

Yes.

Here’s info from an appendix of the book:

“Dickinson referred to various people in letters and poems as ‘Master,’ including *Leonard Humphrey; *Thomas Wentworth Higginson (multiple times); and (once humorously) Austin. She also uses ‘Master’ to refer to God or Christ. Whether ED was writing a person, a fictitious character, or experimenting with language of desire and devotion in these drafts remains in debate.”

The letters are numbered 192 (on page 268), 282 (on page 324), and 299 (on page 332).

Rain Gauge

2/5/2025

Millicent Todd Bingham’s observation on Dickinson’s regard for nature in her book “Ancestors’ Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson”: “Snakes and flies, grass and stones, as well as wind and rain and the rising of the moon over the Pelham hills, all were of the essence of miracle.”

In regard to that quote, I am addressing those specific seven subjects in Dickinson’s poetry: snakes, flies, grass, stones, wind, rain, and the moon.

Today’s focus: Rain

The online Dickinson archive offers up 27 entries for the word “rain,” and those entries represent eleven different poems.

One of my favorites is “The wind began to knead the grass,” which I posted earlier in the week when I discussed “grass” – and of course, the first line includes the word “wind,” so of the seven natural elements noted in Bingham’s quote at the start of this post, this poem includes three of them – wind, grass, and rain.

Emily Dickinson sent a version of this poem to Elizabeth Holland, whom she had met nearly ten years before through Josiah Holland, Elizabeth’s husband and an editor at the Springfield Republican—the newspaper that printed five of Dickinson’s poems during her lifetime (all anonymously).

There are at least two versions of this poem (see below), and one interesting detail occurs in line 14. In one version, the cattle FLED to barns; in the other, the cattle FLUNG to the barns – and the online Dickinson lexicon confirms that the verb “fling” was used by Dickinson to mean “driven by violence; forced away.”

Research from Thomas Johnson as he prepared his edition of “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson” states, “This poem survives in five fair copies, three of the first version, two of the second.” He also discusses a sixth copy (a third copy of the second version) in his notes, HERE.

In addition to the opening image, I love lines 5 & 6 – “The leaves unhooked / themselves from Trees” – the image of the dust throwing the road away (lines 8 & 9), the low, gossiping Thunder, and the birds shuttering their nests (though I prefer the image of the lightning’s “livid claw” in the second version).

Are there lines or images that stand out to you?

From Beginning to End

4/16/2024

Yesterday (HERE) I mentioned that I’d received a new volume of “complete poems” of Emily Dickinson – this one edited by Cristanne Miller.

The first “complete edition” came out in 1955, edited by Thomas Johnson. The next “complete edition” was published in 1998, edited by R. W. Franklin. Now this new edition edited by Miller came out in 2016.

What are the differences between them?

Here’s what Johnson stated about the order of the poems in his compilation:

“The order of the poems is that of the Harvard (variorum) edition. There, where all copies of poems are reproduced, fair copies to recipients are chosen for principal representation. Thus, in this volume, for instance, the poems sent to T. W. Higginson in 1862 (nos. 318-327) range in date from 1858 to 1862. This seeming irregularity is necessary to preserve the numerical order of the poems.”

Here’s what Franklin said about the ordering in his collection:

“About three fourths of the poems exist in a signal source. For the rest, with from two to seven sources, the policy has been to choose the latest version of the entire poem, thereby giving to the poet, rather than the editor, the ownership of change.”

Cristanne Miller’s collection is called “Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them” – so the poems are grouped in five different categories. First and foremost are the poems Dickinson herself placed in bound booklets (i.e., fascicles) and then the others are categorized as follows: Unbound Sheets, Loose Poems, Poems Trasncribed by Others, and Poems Not Retained.

As a result, what are the first and last poems in each edition?

The first poem in both the Johnson & Franklin editions is “Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine.” In Miller’s edition, this is the first poem in the section called “Poems Not Retained.”

The first poem in Miller’s collection is the first poem from the first booklet (fasicle) bound by Dickinson herself, “The Gentian weaves her fringes.” The next two poems are “A brief, but patient illness” and “In the name of the Bee” – and these three poems together are shown as a single poem in Johnson, number 18. In Franklin, these three poems are displayed as three separate poems, numbers 21, 22, and 23.

And what are the final poems in each collection? I'll get to those tomorrow! ;-)

From Beginning to End, Part 2:

Yesterday I discussed the first poems that appear in each of the three different “complete editions” of Dickinson’s poetry, those edited by Thomas Johnson, R. W. Franklin, and Cristanne Miller.

So what are the final poems in each edition?

The last poem in the Johnson edition, #1775, is “The earth has many keys,” and interestingly, this poem does not appear in the 1998 Franklin edition of “complete” poems.

Oddly enough, there are at least four extant versions of Dickinson’s poem “Further in summer than the birds,” and ONE of those versions includes these lines as the final two stanzas of that poem. However, both the Johnson and Franklin editions include other, shorter versions of that poem without these lines.

I do not see “The earth has many keys” listed in the index of the Miller edition either. I checked Miller’s version of “Further in summer than the birds,” and it did not include the lines from “The earth has many keys.”

The final poem in Franklin, #1789, is “The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,” which is listed as #1764 (out of 1775) in Johnson. In Miller’s edition, “The saddest noise, the sweetest noise” is the final poem of the fourth section of the book, “Poems Transcribed by Others” – and it’s the same version that appears in Franklin.

While the versions of “Further in summer than the birds” in Johnson, Franklin, and Miller are basicallyl the same – EXCEPT for the punctuation – I’ve shown other variations below, and one includes the lines to “The earth has many keys” – which again is the final poem in Johnson (shown above).

Hmm...the pic below isn't great -- I was trying to fit it all on one page. Apologies! ; - )

LOL – is all of this as clear as mud? I’ll move on tomorrow! ; )