Emily Dickinson died in 1886. Her sister discovered her poems, and she enlisted the help of Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson to get them published. The first book of selected poems came out in December 1890.
The first British review of Dickinson’s work to reach Amherst from the London Daily News arrived in early January 1891.
Are you ready for this? Grab a strong cup of coffee and sit down.
Here is some of what reviewer Andrew Lang said:
“Mr. (William Dean) Howells has been captivated by a minstrel who subdues grammar to rhyme, and puts even grammar before sense…Of course the idea occurs that Mr. Howells is only bantering; that he cannot really mean to praise this farrago of illiterate and uneducated sentiment…. There are no words that can say how bad poetry may be when it is divorced from meaning, from music, from grammar, from rhyme; in brief, from articulate and intelligible speech. And Mr. Howells solemnly avers that this drivel is characteristic of American life! …If poetry exists it is by virtue of original, or at least of agreeable thought, musically and magically expressed…The verses adored by Mr. Howell’s are conspicuously in the worst possible words, and the thought, as far as any thought can be detected, is usually either commonplace or absurd…It is, in itself, a touching thing that a lady of extremely solitary habits should have solaced herself by writing a kind of verses; but to proclaim that such verses as we have quoted are poetry, and good poetry, is to be guilty of ‘the patetic fallacy’ in an original manner, and is to encourage many impossible poets.”
Pictured below: Writer, poet, journalist, scholar and critic, Andrew Lang:
The first British review of Dickinson’s work to reach Amherst from the London Daily News arrived in early January 1891.
Are you ready for this? Grab a strong cup of coffee and sit down.
Here is some of what reviewer Andrew Lang said:
“Mr. (William Dean) Howells has been captivated by a minstrel who subdues grammar to rhyme, and puts even grammar before sense…Of course the idea occurs that Mr. Howells is only bantering; that he cannot really mean to praise this farrago of illiterate and uneducated sentiment…. There are no words that can say how bad poetry may be when it is divorced from meaning, from music, from grammar, from rhyme; in brief, from articulate and intelligible speech. And Mr. Howells solemnly avers that this drivel is characteristic of American life! …If poetry exists it is by virtue of original, or at least of agreeable thought, musically and magically expressed…The verses adored by Mr. Howell’s are conspicuously in the worst possible words, and the thought, as far as any thought can be detected, is usually either commonplace or absurd…It is, in itself, a touching thing that a lady of extremely solitary habits should have solaced herself by writing a kind of verses; but to proclaim that such verses as we have quoted are poetry, and good poetry, is to be guilty of ‘the patetic fallacy’ in an original manner, and is to encourage many impossible poets.”
Pictured below: Writer, poet, journalist, scholar and critic, Andrew Lang:
NOTE: I attempted to contact the paper to see if they’d ever retracted this statement or if they ever wrote a statement of apology. Alas, the paper went out of business in the late 1980s, so I do not know if they ever rescinded their statement.
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