BOOKS 32: EMILY DICKINSON: ISOLATION AND INTERVENTION

WITH BRENDA WINEAPPLE

“The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all. ” This is Brenda Wineapple on the friendship of Emily Dickinson, in my view America's greatest poet, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor, writer, abolitionist, activist, and soldier. During this time of a global lockdown, let's listen to Dickinson again. 

I spoke with Brenda Wineapple, author of WHITE HEAT: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, about Dickinson's remarkable assuredness, her confidence, and her decision to spend much of her life largely secluded in her father's home in Amherst, Massachusetts. In this self-elected state of being on her own, Dickinson had intense, passionate and transformative relationships, including one with the editor, writer, abolitionist and soldier Thomas Wentworth Higginson. "Are you too preoccupied to say whether my verse is alive?" was the question Dickinson laid out like a snare in her first letter to him. 

He fell for this brilliant ruse, and Brenda explains how Dickinson's remarkable friendship with a man whom academics like to relegate to the dustbin of history, or at best footnote status, is a major reason Dickinson's poetry is with us today. Brenda also explains how America has always struggled with the choice between separateness and connection, and how to understand Dickinson not as the spinster from Amherst, the victim of the patriarchy, or a forlorn recluse but as a superbly confident and self-assured poet.

"To be alive is power,/ existence in itself,/ Without a further function,/ Omnipotence enough."

Brenda is the author of a number of books, including The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,  Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, and more 

I recorded this conversation while in Covid-19 lockdown.

The poems here are read by Anna Kathryn Kendrick. 

 Many of Dickinson's 1,775 poems are devoted to love, which she expressed from the position of the lover, the beloved, and the poet who marvels at how love transports and transforms us. 

Emily Dickinson, with her few words and spare lines, bestows on us the possibility of a self that has not yet been claimed by others. This, of course, is an impossibility: we are born into a network of relations, and even if as adults we choose solitude and separateness, we could not live without others. But that is what Dickinson's poetry does: it opens up a space where we can imagine new relations for ourselves, although someone else provides the words to do so. It's also transcendent and very funny at once (unlike most other poetry found in anthologies), poignant and powerful.  This perplexing combination of deceptively simple lines conveying the whole of our existence is what makes Dickinson absolutely unique.