"'[A] wholly new and original poetic genius': Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson, and Literary Immortality"

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61
Author(s):  
Harrison Dietzman
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Jonathan Edwards: The First Two Hundred Years

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-197
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Shea
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Important Stage ◽  
Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Occasionally, even the student of American culture grown accustomed to its odd couples — Thomas Morton and lasses in beaver coats, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mark Twain and the Reverend Joseph Twichell — is brought up short. One does not, after all, expect to encounter the language and cadences of Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in a Walt Disney production of Pollyanna, a film in which the heroine's gladness has come to fulfill roughly the function of divine grace. And it is only slighdy less improbable to encounter in the New Yorker for 31 July 1978 the disembodied, dialectical voices of Donald Barthelme's The Leap, agreeing to postpone the leap of faitli to another day, setting aside their awareness that “We hang by a slender thread. — The fire boils below us — the pit. Crawling with roaches and other tilings. — Torture unimaginable.”The use and misuse of Jonathan Edwards, or less moralistically, the observable process of advocacy, condemnation, adaptation, and creative redefinition focussed on his life and work, has a long and instructive history. In October of 1903 an important stage in that process had been reached when bicentennial celebrations of Edwards' birth resulted in a flourishing of tributes to die Edwards legacy and assessments of the permanent and the passing in his diought, as one writer put it. We may now, three quarters of a century later, have reached a stage of comparable significance, with a potential both for summing up and for speculating on what lies ahead.

Spirit and Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
Great Mind ◽  
Amy Lowell ◽  
Thomas Wentworth Higginson ◽  
Black Boy ◽  
Literary Circles

Blake’s religious dissent made him a natural ally for reformers whose works were driven by personal religious quest. This chapter looks at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist reading of Blake, Lydia Maria Child’s reprinting of ‘The Little Black Boy’ in the context of Abolitionism, the appearance of several of the Poetical Sketches, and a commentary on The Little Vagabond in the context of social utopianism. It exposes the irony as well as the importance of the kinship liberal Americans felt with Blake. By the end of the century, Blake was becoming known in literary circles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson drew a comparison between Blake and Emily Dickinson in his introduction to the 1890 edition of the latter’s Poems and Amy Lowell turned to Blake as a master of poetic form, with a brilliant pictorial imagination and a sensitive ear, but most importantly, a great mind.

Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-22
Author(s):  
Brenda Wineapple
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Emily Dickinson's Animal Pedagogies

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 533-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Glenney Boggs
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
The Other ◽  
Agricultural Practice ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Small Sphere ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Thomas Wentworth Higginson

E. DickinsonWould you instruct me now?—Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Johnson 449)In 1866 Emily Dickinson Ended a lapse of eighteen months in her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson by sending him three lines that connect the major concerns of her work: death, subjectivity, and the conditions of knowledge. When Higginson later published these lines in “Emily Dickinson's Letters,” he explained that the poet would on occasion include “an announcement of some event, vast to her small sphere as this,” the death of her dog who had been her companion for sixteen years (450). In measuring Dickinson's loss biographically by the “small sphere” of her life, Higginson sets aside her ability to “wade grief” (Franklin 312) and situates her letter within the sentimental culture of pet keeping, which had transfigured a predominantly agricultural practice (pet initially referred to a lamb) into a staple of genteel domesticity and bourgeois subjectivity (Mason; Grier; Kete; Ritvo; Thomas). Far from participating uncritically in the roles and relations Higginson projects onto her, Dickinson interrogates the formation and gendering of sentimental subjectivity (Dillon; Blackwood) by placing “Carlo died” in relation to the other two lines—the signature and the call for instruction. “E. Dickinson” refers ambiguously to Emily or to her father, Edward Dickinson (Holland 146). The signature pluralizes the subject; it doubles and ultimately obscures “E.”'s gender. This ambiguous subject hinges on the animal's death as a scene of pedagogy: it stands in the liminal space between the announcement of Carlo's death and the request: “Would you instruct me now?”

Semantic and stylistic aspects of using geographical vocabulary in Emily Dickinson’s verse

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
В. В. Колівошко ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Unique Color ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Empirical Methodology ◽  
Qualitative Characteristics ◽  
Individual Style

This article reports a study according to the tenets of empirical methodology in addressing research questions. The project tests the principles of using geographical vocabulary in Emily Dickinson’s verse. It focuses on the study of stylistic and semantic aspects of the usage of geographical vocabulary. The results demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the usage of geographical vocabulary. Emily Dickinson’s poems are full of geographical names, which she uses with both positive and negative connotations. As we can see, the negative connotations prevail. The results point out how Emily Dickinson manipulates geographical names at all levels of the language. In addition, the findings indicate specific color gamma of Emily Dickinson’s poems. The use of colors is different for each geographical object; especially it applies to the names of countries, towns etc. Emily Dickinson associates every continent with its own unique color. These findings demonstrate the individual style of Emily Dickinson, which is distinctive among other poets.

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