For Your Review

I plan to stop by UVA’s Shannon library again this afternoon to see whatever happened to that first edition 1894 book I found on the shelves the other day – the one signed by Dickinson’s sister Lavinia (Info HERE and HERE) – so I’ll update you tomorrow (or soon).

In the meantime . . .

When I was at UVA that day, I did check-out one book, The Recognition of Emily Dickinson, edited by Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells (published in 1964). The book includes some of the early reviews when Dickinson’s poetry was first published.

For today, I’ve extracted a line or two or three from some of the earliest reviews included in the first section of the book, those from 1890 to 1900. There are two other sections with later reviews (which I have not read through yet), “1901–1930” and “1931–Present” (i.e, the early 1960s).

Here are excerpts from those early reviews (and keep in mind, these critics were reading the “cleaned up” version of Dickinson, her poetry as modified by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson to make the works fit the conventional literary tastes and expectations of the day):

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON in an article in The Atlantic two months before the appearance of Dickinson's Poems in 1890, concerning the poem “I died for Beauty, but was scarce”:

“The conception is weird enough for William Blake, and one can no more criticize a faulty rhyme here and there than a defect of drawing in one of Blake’s pictures.  When a thought takes one’s breath away, who cares to count the syllables?”

As an aside, it is interesting to note that in her second letter to Higginson, Dickinson wrote, “Thank you for the surgery (i.e., his critique of her poetry) - it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others-as you ask-though they might not differ-” and in her third letter she reported, “You think my gait ‘spasmodic’ - I am in danger-Sir-” and “You think me ‘uncontrolled’ - I have no Tribunal” – so based on his comments above, did Higginson have a change of heart about Dickinson’s spasmodic rhythms?  Or was he merely attempting to smooth the way for the reading public by preparing them for what they were about to read?

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON in the Preface to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (1890): 

“It is believed that the thoughtful reader will find…words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame.  They are here published as they were written, with very few and superficial changes.”

Hmm…again, Higginson seemed to be setting the stage for the reader.  Also, the “few and superficial changes” were perhaps more substantial and greater in number then he was letting on.  LOL. 

ARLO BATES in the Boston Courier, November 23,1890:

“The work which it (the 1890 volume) contains has to be treated as so far outside of the ordinary groove, it is so wholly without the pale of conventional criticism, that it is necessary at the start to declare the grounds upon which it is to be judged as if it were a new species of art.” 

Bates’ take on a “new species of art” made me wonder about the early reception of works by Pablo Picasso, so I ran a quick search.  As you can imagine, some of his paintings were dismissed as “humbug” and others as nothing more than cold, meaningless exercises in “misunderstood geometry”; there were even medical protests by conservative groups and medical professionals who launched public campaigns urging museums to stop displaying his work, arguing it was not true art but a new rendering of reality and an assault on good taste and sound mind.
​
Bates did point out that Dickinson was “unlearned” on the “technical side” of poetry composition; however, he said “there is hardly a line of her work…which fails to throw out some gleam of genuine original power, of imagination, and of real emotional thought.”

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1891, in a review entitled “The Strange Poems of Emily Dickinson”:  

“Occasionally, the outside of the poem, so to speak, is left so rough, so rude, that the art seems to have faltered.  But there is apparent to reflection the fact that the artist meant just this harsh exterior to remain, and that no grace of smoothness could have imparted her intention as it does.  It is the soul of an abrupt, exalted New England woman that speaks in such brokenness. The range of all the poems is of the loftiest; and sometimes there is a kind of swelling lift, an almost boastful rise of feeling which is really the spring of faith in them.”  

ANONYMOUS REVIEW OF HOWELLS’ REMARKS in the London Daily News, January 2, 1891:

“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!”

The anonymous critic continued:  “Many uneducated and incompetent persons get pleasure out of scribbling incoherences.  These vaguely correspond to vague sentiments and vague emotions.  There is no harm in the exercise, but there is a good deal of harm in publicly praising as excellent and typical poetry, the trash which every editor of a magazine receives in bales.” 

MAURICE THOMPSON, in America, January 8, 1891

“Her vision was clear and surprisingly accurate, but her touch was erratic and at frequent intervals nerveless, while her sense of completeness was singularly dull."

ANONYMOUS, in Scribner’s Magazine, March 1891:

“Having one’s breath taken away is a very agreeable sensation, but it is not the finest sensation of which we are susceptible; and instead of being grateful for it one is very apt to suffer annoyance at the perversity which is implied in a poet who, though capable of taking one’s breath away, nevertheless prefers to do so in arbitrary rather than in artistic fashion.” 

ANDREW LANG, in Illustrated London News, March 7, 1891:

“This is certainly a very curious little book.  It has already reached its fourth edition, partly, no doubt, because Mr. Howells praised it very highly.  I cannot go nearly so far as Mr. Howells, because , if poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to rhyme."

ANONYMOUS, in Saturday Review, Sept 5, 1891:

“We continually see the thoughts of prose put into verse, but, while some of the poems in the present volume can scarcely be described as in verse at all, they almost all contain a genuinely poetical thought, or image, or feeling.  Mis Dickinson’s chief characteristics are, first, a faculty for seizing the impression or feelings of the moment, and fixing them with rare force and accuracy; secondly, a vividness of imagery, which impresses the reader as thoroughly unconventional, and shows considerable imaginative power.”

ANONYMOUS (concerning the Second Series of Poems) in the Chicago Tribune, Dec 12, 1891:

“She revealed an arch and playful humor, together with a critical insight of the most thorough-going frankness.  To a shyness that shrank at times from the gaze of a flower she united an audacity that assumed to treat with deity on equal terms.  A childlike simplicity and directness added a final charm to this most unworldly of souls.”

The anonymous writer continued, “Her imperfections, then, are the price of her charm, and a price we are only too ready to pay….Artless, imperfect as they are, these verses have a freshness that is only too rare in our self-conscious age.”

ANONYMOUS, in The Critic, December 19, 1891:

“A thought may be striking, but the stroke should not be fatal.  After reading two volumes of Miss Dickinson’s poems one gets exhausted, and a healthy mind begins to fear paralysis. There is too much of the same thing in them – morbid feeling, jerky and disjointed writing, and occasional faults of grammar….It is their lack of grammatical correctness and their absolute formlessness which keeps them almost outside the pale of poetry.”

FRANCIS STODDARD, in response to above comments in The Critic, January 9, 1892:

For Miss Dickinson’s poems may be formless, or they may be worded to so fine and subtle a device that they seem formless, just as the spectrum of a far-off star may seem blankness until examined with a lens of especial power. 

MARY AUGUSTA JORDAN, in Nation, December 13, 1894, a review of the 1894 two-volume collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters:

“These letters cannot fail to arouse sharp differences of opinion, but also they cannot fail to arouse interest.  They are an important contribution to our collection of human documents.  Valued at their lowest as literature, they are suggestive studies in applied Lombroso.  At their best, they are brilliant expressions of an unusual and original personality.”

BLISS CARMAN, in Nation, October 8, 1896, following the release of the Third Series of Poems:

“There can be no doubt of the genuineness of this writer.  Such work is fresh from the mint; not immediately current without some scrutiny; yet stamped plainly enough with the hall-mark of genius.  We could but give unqualified assent; put the new book on the old shelf at once, with its peers, the acknowledged classics of American literature.”