Gettin' Dithyrambic

This past July, I spent time at the New York Public Library perusing Genevieve Taggard’s copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924). 

​Taggard was herself a poet as well as a biographer of Dickinson, and she had written many comments and notations in the margins of her book.  To the left of the poem “Mine enemy is growing old,” Taggard wrote a single word, a name, followed by a question mark:  “Heathcliffe?”

​Okay, it's time for a pop quiz.  Put away your notes.  The quiz consists of one question:

NAME A FAMOUS HEATHCLIFF.

I should clarify:  Name a famous “Heathcliff" Genevieve Taggard would have been aware of in 1924 – so that negates “Heathcliff the Cat” and Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable from the past sit-com “The Cosby Show.”

​TBH,  when I ran a Google-search on “famous Heathcliffs,” I did not receive a record of famous individuals named “Heathcliff”; instead, I received a list of famous actors who played “Heathcliff” in movie versions of Wuthering Heights:  Sir Lawrence Olivier,  Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes, and others. 

However, Emily Brontë's “Heathcliff” from her novel Wuthering Heights must be whom Taggard referenced in her  comment – I mean, who else could it have been?  Plus, the poem’s focus on revenge fits the notion. 

Of course, I have absolutely no idea if Dickinson had “Heathcliff” in mind when she wrote “Mine enemy is growing old” in 1880, but I did wonder if she ever read Wuthering Heights.

At the right:  A movie poster for Brontë's sequel, Furthering Fights 

**sigh**  Once again, I received what proved to be incorrect information from Google.  When I first started looking into this, Google offered this:

There is no definitive record or surviving evidence that Emily Dickinson owned a personal copy of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Scholars have cataloged the remaining volumes from the Emily Dickinson Collection preserved at Harvard University's Houghton Library. Wuthering Heights is not documented as part of her household's permanent collection. 

However, I decided to check the Dickinson family library collection at Harvard, and lo and behold…

By the way, Ellis Bell is the male pen name used by Emily Brontë to publish Wuthering Heights.

Also, as I explored the Dickinson-Wuthering Heights connection, I did find other conversations about Dickinson's poem; however, more often than not, readers were reminded not of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights, but of William Blake’s “A Poison Tree”:

Below:  Here are some screenshots from one such discussion I found online. 

NOTE:  In one of the pics in the slideshow above, one commenter provides a link to a post from a blogger who has "strong opinions" about Helen Vendler's interpretation of the poem; that blog post is HERE.

In addition to checking the Harvard site about the Dickinson family library, I also checked Taggard’s biography on Dickinson, The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, to see if she mentioned this particular poem and/or if she made any sort of Dickinson-Heathcliff connection in her volume.  Nope, she did not; however, she did mention Brontë and Wuthering Heights.

Below:  Pages from Taggard's biography of Emily Dickinson.  Her mention of Wuthering Heights appears on page 235 -- at the far fight.  I have also included a couple of pages leading up to that discussion  Click the images to enlarge.

Now stick with me as I go off track a bit:  As I read this section of Taggard’s biography, I continued reading her take on Emerson’s view of Whitman – shown in the pages below (plus I provide the text of the marked passage below the pics) – and I came across a word I’d never heard before:​

Here's the passage indicated on page 236 above:

“So long as Emerson dreamily confiscated the stamps enclosed in letters requesting his autograph, he made no literary mistakes.  But in 1855 he wrote Whitman:
 
‘I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass.  I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced. . . . ’
 
‘Wit and wisdom’ are hardly the words for Leaves of Grass. The book has no wit whatsoever; wisdom is too quiet a word for a dithyramb.  Certainly it was an aberration for Emerson to champion Whitman’s mind….”

Did you catch the word “dithyramb”?  Are you familiar with that term?  I was not -- so of course, I checked the OED; check out entry "c" below:  "a speech of writing in vehement or inflated style."

Speaking of dithyrambic, let me veer off course a bit more:  Are you familiar with Walt's brother Wink?  Walt Whitman always said that it was his brother Wink who inspired him to become a poet -- and Wink Whitman said that it was Emmett Lee Dickinson (Emily Dickinson's third cousin, twice removed -- at her request) who inspired him.

At the right:  Published in 1853, Wink Whitman's collection of poems in Mows the Grass is widely recognized as a seminal work in American poetry.  

​Read more about Wink HERE.