This Might Just Crack You Up

I don’t remember what I was searching for at the time, but a few days ago I landed on a paper entitled, “The Names of Sickness: Writing Disability and Revising Diagnosis in Nineteenth-Century America, A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English” by UCLA graduate student Vivian Delchamps (HERE). 

The paper included this statement:

“When Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote the preface to the first edition of Dickinson’s poetry, he remarked upon her reclusion, and elsewhere referred to her as a woman “partially cracked” (L570).”

I’ll share what followed next with that statement as well as a footnote related to it; however, first let me pause here to say that I searched for Higginson’s letter “570” but I could not find it.  I did find other references to this description of Dickinson as “partially cracked”; for example, in this article by Brenda Wineapple entitled, “Thomas Wentworth Higginson visits Emily Dickinson, ‘my partially cracked poetess at Amherst,’ for the first time,” HERE. 

Through further research I discovered an online copy of “Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906,” edited by Mary Thacher Higginson (HERE), and I found this statement:

“This extract, written in 1873, refers to the author’s first meeting with that strange genius, Emily Dickinson: ‘…I saw my eccentric poetess, Miss Emily Dickinson, who never goes outside her father’s grounds and sees only me and a few others.’”

In that passage, Higginson said, “eccentric poetess,” not “cracked poetess.”  I ran a word-search in the book for “cracked,” and the term showed up once – though not in reference to Emily Dickinson.

Back to the quote with which I opened this post; the author, Ms. Delchamps, included this footnote: 

“After reading Higginson’s preface, one anonymous critic hypothesized that Dickinson had a ‘morbid mental condition or a latent mental disease’ (Buckingham 161); yet another asserted that in Dickinson’s poetry, we can find a ‘hardly human dumbness’ and that ‘one pities deeply the suffering of such an incommunicative spirit’ (276).”

Also, Delchamps' paper continued past the indication of the footnote with this statement:

“In 1925, critic Harold Monro then claimed that Dickinson ‘is intellectually blind, partially deaf, and mostly dumb to the art of poetry…Her tiny lyrics appear to be no more than the jottings of a half-idiotic school-girl.” 

Wow!  Such a restrained statement makes one wonder why Monro held back and didn’t say what he was really thinking.  LOL.  #j/k
 
I found Monro’s complete review, “Emily Dickinson – Overrated,” in a text entitled “The Recognition of Emily Dickinson,” edited by Caesar R. Blake and Carton F. Wells:

Here is the full opening paragraph:

“At a first impression Emily Dickinson’s tiny lyrics appear more like the jottings of a half-idiotic schoolgirl than the grave musings of a fully educated woman.  This kind of verse, I thought to myself, may go down in America, but, when imported to England, we inevitably apply to it the test of comparison with the poems of Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Mary Coleridge, Michael Field.  Her poems are splendid blunders.  How much better they could have been if she had specialized in her craft.  She was intellectually blind, partially deaf, mostly dumb, to the act of poetry.  Consequently seven out of ten of her lyrical jottings are plainly failures.”

So here is Harold Monro, and info on his life on Wikipedia (HERE): 

Two lines from the article jumped out at me.  First, there was this in the section called “Disappointment”: 

“He was remembered as being liberal-minded and without literary prejudices. ‘Perhaps no one did more for the advancement of twentieth-century poetry.’”
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Huh?  Is this about the same Harold Monro who praised traditional English poets and trashed the “tiny lyrics” of the “intellectually blind” Emily Dickinson?  Annnnddd…no one did more than he to advance modern poetry?

​Another statement that made me chuckle was this one:

“In March 1913 Monro met Alida Klemantaski, 17 years his junior, from Hampstead, who also had a passion for poetry and had set herself goals of becoming a doctor or rescuing prostitutes from their predicament. Monro instead persuaded her that by working in the Poetry Bookshop, she would be achieving just as much for society.”
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LOL – what do you make of that? Talk about a cracked poet, amirite?
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I suppose I should just move on, though I'm curious – do any of you, dear readers, work in a poetry bookshop? If so – I thank you for your contributions to society!  ;-)