 | Perhaps the most important letter in all of American literature is Emily Dickinson’s dispatch to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in April1862 to ask, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself-it cannot see, distinctly-and I have none to ask-” Higginson had published an article in The Atlantic entitled “Letter to a Young Contributor” in which he offered advice to aspiring writers. Higginson advised, “Be noble both in the affluence and the economy of your diction; spare no wealth that you can put in, and tolerate no superfluity that can be struck out.” |
| Dickinson read the article, responded with her query, enclosed four poems, and added, “I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?” Flash forward to September 2026. I was deep into the 800 non-fiction shelves at my local library in my quest to discover what Dickinson books they had on hand when, in the 808 section, “Rhetoric and Collections of Literature,” I spied the volume Great World Letters. “Shirley it must be in there,” I explained to my invisible companion, Shirley. |  |
I pulled the book from the shelf, flipped to the back pages, and scanned the index for what I knew must be there – and BINGO! Pages 365 – 367, Emily Dickinson!
I turned to the pages and… WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?
 |  |  |
The letter was NOT there. There was a bizarre article about Dickinson with an odd take on her correspondence with Higginson, stating “she began her correspondence with Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson through a ‘stray note of admiration’ she sent him for an article in The Atlantic Monthly.”
Then, completely out of left field in the third paragraph comes this: “Various scholars have guessed at the identity of the one great romance in Emily’s life.” What the hell???
On the next page, a “letter” from August 1870 from the poet to Higginson is included, but it is not THE letter, the most important letter in American literary history. As a matter of fact, it is not even a letter Dickinson wrote to Higginson. Here’s the story:
Dickinson did, indeed, write to Higginson in August 1870, and she said this:
16 August 1870
Dear friend
I will be at Home and glad.
I think you said the 15th. The incredible never surprises us because it is the incredible.
E. Dickinson
She mentions “the 15th” because Higginson to visit Dickinson at her home on August 15, 1870, and following his visit, he wrote to his wife and provided details and quotes from his time with Dickinson.
Higginson opens his letter with this:
“I shan't sit up tonight to write you all about E.D. dearest but if you had read Mrs. Stoddard’s novels you could understand a house where each member runs his or her own selves. Yet I only saw her."
He later quoted Dickinson as saying, "Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it” – the opening line to the “letter” printed in Great World Letters. Additionally, all of the other lines in that same “letter” depicted on page 366 were quotes Higginson wrote to his wife in reporting what Dickinson had said to him.
Oddly enough, the book got Dickinson’s age wrong, too, on the next page when they said, “she lived to the age of fifty-six.” Dickinson died when she was fifty-five.
As you can well imagine, I was completely floored by this volume’s deficient if not laughable reporting on the most famous and important letter in all of American literature. Then, to top it off, I turned to the front of the book and found quotes “In Praise of Letters.”
Then, completely out of left field in the third paragraph comes this: “Various scholars have guessed at the identity of the one great romance in Emily’s life.” What the hell???
On the next page, a “letter” from August 1870 from the poet to Higginson is included, but it is not THE letter, the most important letter in American literary history. As a matter of fact, it is not even a letter Dickinson wrote to Higginson. Here’s the story:
Dickinson did, indeed, write to Higginson in August 1870, and she said this:
16 August 1870
Dear friend
I will be at Home and glad.
I think you said the 15th. The incredible never surprises us because it is the incredible.
E. Dickinson
She mentions “the 15th” because Higginson to visit Dickinson at her home on August 15, 1870, and following his visit, he wrote to his wife and provided details and quotes from his time with Dickinson.
Higginson opens his letter with this:
“I shan't sit up tonight to write you all about E.D. dearest but if you had read Mrs. Stoddard’s novels you could understand a house where each member runs his or her own selves. Yet I only saw her."
He later quoted Dickinson as saying, "Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it” – the opening line to the “letter” printed in Great World Letters. Additionally, all of the other lines in that same “letter” depicted on page 366 were quotes Higginson wrote to his wife in reporting what Dickinson had said to him.
Oddly enough, the book got Dickinson’s age wrong, too, on the next page when they said, “she lived to the age of fifty-six.” Dickinson died when she was fifty-five.
As you can well imagine, I was completely floored by this volume’s deficient if not laughable reporting on the most famous and important letter in all of American literature. Then, to top it off, I turned to the front of the book and found quotes “In Praise of Letters.”
 | Again, the editors missed the mark, for there is quite a well-known quote from Dickinson about letters that should have been included. In a letter from June 1869, Dickinson opened a letter to Higginson with this: “A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” And what did the editors of Great World Letters chose to include instead? Well, for one, “The earth has nothing like a she epistle.” Seriously? I mean – seriously? |
Now, if you’ve been following along these past few days as I’ve been chronicling my glorious, curious, so strange, very odd day, then you might recall that in my first entry last Friday, “The Lady Appeared,” HERE, the very last thing I said was “stash this quote away in a mental filing cabinet as I'll mention it again soon in another episode of my weirdly odd, oddly strange, and strangely weird day.” And what quote was that? Why, it was this very quote by Dickinson about letters, as it was used by Thomas Johnson as the title for Section VII in Volume 2 of Emily Dickinson’s Letters, his three-volume set offered for three hundred twenty-five dollars at the bookstore with the oh-so-pleasant store clerks. Wink, wink.
Plus, if you check back to yesterday’s installment, “Two Scenes from ‘James and the Very Odd Day,’” HERE, I reported this, “As I thumbed through the book (Poetry Will Save Your Life) – an unexpected twist! THERE on page 81 was the letter, the letter from Dickinson to Higginson, the very letter that was absent earlier in the day when. . . . Well, I'll get to that part of the tale tomorrow.”
Well, here we are “tomorrow,” and yes – a book about poets and their poems that I found in a used book story DID include the most famous letter in all of American literature – but a book entitled Great World Letters DID NOT. What else could I do but laugh?
Tomorrow: The BIGGEST SHOCK of my glorious, curious, so strange very odd day!
Well, here we are “tomorrow,” and yes – a book about poets and their poems that I found in a used book story DID include the most famous letter in all of American literature – but a book entitled Great World Letters DID NOT. What else could I do but laugh?
Tomorrow: The BIGGEST SHOCK of my glorious, curious, so strange very odd day!
BY THE WAY . . .
I looked into that quote by Byron, “The earth has nothing like a she epistle," and once again, I got bogus information from Google's AI overview. I'd say it's wrong a good 80% of the time -- or more. Does anyone else find that to be true?
I plugged the quote into the search field and this is what came up:
I plugged the quote into the search field and this is what came up:
Wallace Stevens? But I thought the quote was from Byron? Well, it is from Byron, from Canto 13, Stanza 105 of Don Juan:
And the Wallace Stevens poem, "The Death of a Soldier" -- does it include a line similar to "the earth has nothing like a she epistle"? Not at all.
 | So then where'd the poem come from in the AI Overview? I plugged the first three lines into the Google search field and got this:  |
Google's AI asked me "Are those lines your own original poetry" -- the very lines it gave to me earlier as a poem by Wallace Stevens with a quote straight out of Byron. I can't make this stuff up, folks!
Hee hee...I plugged Byron's quote into Google one more time and got this:
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