
Arlo Bates was an American author, educator and newspaperman. An 1876 graduate of Bowdoin College, Bates became the editor of the Boston Sunday Courier in 1880. Later he taught English at the MIT.
In 1889, the prospective publisher of Dickinson’s poems sent the selected poems to Bates for an appraisal. Here is some of what Bates said about his first look at Dickinson’s poetry:
“There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent.”
Like Higginson and others, though, Bates fretted about the format: “there is hardly one of them which is not marked by an extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”
Dang, those Victorians were hung up on rigid formats and convention.
Bates continued, though, with “The author was a person or power which came very near to that indefinable quality which we call genius.”
Hmm…”very near”?
I’ll continue with more of Bates’ report tomorrow.
Yesterday I shared comments from a letter by Arlo Bates, a late-19th century author, newspaper editor, and poet, where he shared with publishers and editors his appraisal of the first poems by Emily Dickinson to be published four years after her death.
One the one hand he gushed, “There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent.” On the other hand, like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others, he fretted over the poems’ ‘extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”
In the same letter, he continued to both praise (strikingly) and criticize (pedantically):
“Had she published, and been forced by ambition and perhaps by need into learning the technical part of her art, she would have stood at the head of American singers. As it is she has put upon paper what reminded her of a mood or an emotion, and n nine cases out of ten she has not got enough down to convey the intelligence of her mood to any but the most sympathetic & poetical. There are some poems in the book, however, that are so royally good, & so many that to the poetical will be immensely suggestive, that it seems a pity not to have at least a small edition.”
Interesting, huh.
Today, Dickinson does stand “at the head of American singers” – and who’s heard of Arlo Bates? #justsaying
As an aside, all this talk about content v. form reminded me of info I’d read recently about some of the initial reviews of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Many music critics criticized Gershwin's piece as “essentially formless and asserted that the composer had haphazardly glued melodic segments together.” One review in the New York Tribune criticized the work as “derivative,” “stale,” an “Inexpressive.”
Go figure.